Watching a man get fucked up the ass with a knife held against his throat wasn’t Wakefield Poole’s idea of an erotic movie – so he made his own and fathered gay film as we know it today.
Now, following his death at the age of 85, Treasure Island Media pays tribute to a true pioneer of man-on-man sex on screen.
In the early 1970s, not long after the Stonewall Riots, respected Broadway theatre director Wakefield Poole found himself in a seedy movie theatre close to New York’s Times Square.
Just being there was risky. In the early 1970s, pornography was still taboo and across the United States, police raids occurred frequently. The danger of being arrested was ever-present.
On the screen was a gay porn flick. The star of the movie is picked up and taken to a motel before being fucked with a knife held against his throat. Poole and his friends were bored and totally turned off.
“Why can’t someone make a good porno film that’s not degrading?” Poole asked himself as he left the movie. And shortly after, he resolved to pick up a camera and do it himself.
Before long, Boys in the Sand – a porn film with an artistic plot – was filmed, edited, and ready to be screened in a theatre. Poole had no idea how drastically the movie would change his life.
Boys in the Sand became the first gay porn film advertised in the New York Times. The advert proudly carried Poole’s full name as its director – his major ‘coming out’ moment, itself a dramatic risk in 1971.
“We could have gone to jail for what we were doing,” Poole recalled decades later in his autobiography, Dirty Poole. But with no interference from the law, he nabbed a spot at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York for the film to open to the public.
It became the first hardcore movie ever reviewed in Variety magazine, and the crowds came thick and fast. Poole set out to promote the film like any other movie, inviting all the press critics to its screening. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive among both gay and straight crowds.
Boys in the Sand made $26,000 in its opening week, the equivalent of almost $200,000 today.
Poole was a well-known figure in the world of Broadway. Before long, word had spread that this respected choreographer and director was making dirty movies. But the money rolled in, and his fate was set.
He delivered another successful movie. Bijou, a psychedelic, dark and artistic porn film in which the protagonist undergoes a mystical rite of passage.
By 1974, Poole had moved to San Francisco and became fast friends with the likes of Harvey Milk, who would himself go on to lead a gay rights revolution. Milk’s life and political career were cruelly cut short when he was murdered by a colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978.
Having broken up with his long-term lover Peter Fisk, Poole became addicted to cocaine and met the man he would call his soulmate, Paul Hatlestad.
Despite financial difficulties and drug addiction, he continued making money by filming artistic gay porn. He convinced two brothers to fuck each other for the first time on camera for one flick named Take One.
What I loved doing, they said, was nasty, degenerate, and a crime against nature. I knew I was different, but anything that felt so good couldn’t be that bad.
Wakefield Poole
By the early 1980s, as AIDS was taking hold in gay communities worldwide, Poole continued to make porn.
He shot another film, One, Two, Three, in 1984 intending to donate profits to AIDS research. The style of the movie was the antithesis of everything Poole had done before. All three scenes were shot on a stark, empty set. The atmosphere was dire and bleak throughout.
A week before the movie was set to premiere, one of the stars killed himself. Dave Connors learned he was HIV positive, having just fucked a young man for Poole’s film. Three days after receiving the diagnosis, he took an overdose of sleeping pills.
It’s thought that Connors couldn’t live with the fact he had likely pozzed the naïve young man he’d fucked, and wanted to avoid the suffering that a death from AIDS would likely bring.
After this, Poole never made another movie.
“Like so many of my generation, my friendships have been devastated by AIDS,” Poole recalled in his memoir. His soulmate, Paul, also lost his life.
Poole credits his cocaine addiction for helping him avoid becoming HIV positive himself.
“I’m still alive because I was a drug addict at the right time,” he said. “I took so many drugs that I got to the point where I didn’t think about sex.”
Ultimately, Poole’s addiction to drugs brought with it a side effect of a permanent negative association with sex. As a result, he remained celibate from 1980 onwards.
Turning his back on the world of pornography, Poole retrained in another form of art – the culinary arts – going on to hold down a career in food services until his retirement.
Filmmaker Jim Tushinski created the documentary I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole to tell Poole’s life story.
Tushinski said: “Without Poole’s work and its influence on other LGBT filmmakers, there would be no gay film, no big LGBT film festivals, and no accurate depictions of gay male sex on screen. For LGBT people, Poole is a key figure in their culture and art.
“There is an effort among LGBT cultural gatekeepers to de-sexualize our history. They want our pioneers to be G or PG-rated because they want LGBT people to be seen as just like everyone else – parents, husbands, wives, and respectable members of society. The sexual parts of LGBT history make most heterosexuals uncomfortable. They even make many LGBT people uncomfortable.”
Poole and his films are today perhaps known only to die-hard film fans and vintage porn collectors. But any man who watches gay film or pornography, in any country, benefits from his work whether they realize it or not.
Wakefield Poole
24 February 1936 – 27 October 2021
My entry into the world of porn as viewer was probably in 1985, I was 19 and fresh out of basic training here in San Diego. In those days, the Gaslamp district downtown San Diego had quite a few adult book stores, abd being onlt 18-19 at the time, It was the onlyway I could connect with other guys for sex, as I was not old enough to patronize a bar off-base. It formed the basis of what I continue to look for in a partner to this day. Facial hair, especially a HUGE moustache, is a requirement, swimmer or constwruction-worker physique. It’s so nice to see facial hair come back into porn!
While the politics are a little fuzzy, Harvey Milk wasn’t explicitly assassinated due to his stance on gay rights. He was assassinated along side the mayor of San Francisco (who wasn’t as out spoken as Milk) by a former Supervisor after the mayor refused to reappoint him.
Other than that, great story! More people need to know about Poole and everything he did.
An important point well made, Lukas. I’ve amended the story to avoid any ambiguity.