“Use/Abuse/Everyone/Everything”: A Dialogue on LA Plays Itself

This critical dialogue addresses the pioneering queer pornographic film LA Plays Itself from a variety of vantage points. The dialogue initially considers the film in relation to comparable works of pornography around the era of the Summer of Love and argues for the need to consider the work as emblematic of a “queer-normative” time and sensibility, before engaging in close textual analysis and discussion. The film is found to be self-consciously “difficult” in relation to a narrative that is not typical of genre tropes of pornography as they would develop, and its presentation of and reading of challenging sexual practices associated with BDSM. In these respects, the authors argue, the film’s forgotten and unseen status speaks both of the way in which the film does not anticipate the forms of gay or queer pornography that were to come, and of the way in which the film seems to continue to resist the commodified and aestheticised nature of this gay or queer pornography. In the latter respect, they conclude, the film can be read as representing a radical sexual-philosophical position. : Halsted, pornography, hardcore, gay, queer, queer-normative, leathersex, outdoors sex, BDSM, fisting, Los Angeles, jouissance.