Wakefield Poole is DEAD TO ME

Was is the COVID?

Speaking terrifying to look at Mesopotamic eldergays in the process of petrification, is Tom Bianchi still with us?

[quote]The queer pioneer filmmaker

He was a [italic]gay[/italic] pioneer filmmaker, OP. Not once does the word "queer" appear in the article to which you linked.

R3, update your ancient vernacular. Queer is an umbrella terms for all LGBTQ+'s. You're welcome.

I am not an L, a B, a T, or a Q+, r4. I'll keep saying "gay," thank you very much.

R5, evolve or die

What films did this film-maker make?

On a personal note, he was a close friend and very talented man. If anyone is interested, he wrote a wonderfully wild autobiography, Dirty Poole. End of an era when Tim Kincaid has passed.

This person was very relevant half a century ago.

He made dirty movies.

Boys In the Sand, among others

R9 Yes, Mr Warhol, your stuff was naive.

Your stuff has been superseded because we can get erotica at the press of a button.

Mr. Warhol can't hear you.

I too take offense to the tacky use of "queer" to categorize a dad gay icon.

a DEAD gay icon. DEAD.

R5 your rhetoric is hardly ominous to a group of (elder)GAYS who were told simply to just die because they were gay. There was no alternative presented. Just. Die.

And it is upon their backs and because of their strength to demand respect that you can presently spin off whatever letters of the alphabet strike your fancy and weave new colors and shapes into the pride flag.

An outspoken and articulate artist in a turbulent, passionate time, Wakefield Poole didn't think of himself as a pornographer. He was a filmmaker who used his dance and theater background to create beautiful, erotic art films that challenged the mind. Many agreed. To others, though, Poole just made dirty movies. I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole tells the story of this sometimes overlooked gay liberation and independent film making pioneer. In an era when anyone making, promoting, or appearing in what the US government considered "pornography" could be liable for prosecution and jail time, Wakefield Poole was a remarkably open and honest gay filmmaker. He also became internationally famous and his movies screened for years as examples of films that could be artistic as well as sexually explicit. Filled with gorgeous archival footage, excerpts from Poole's lushly photographed films, and entertaining and illuminating interviews with Poole's contemporaries and colleagues, I Always Said Yes is a story of artistic integrity and disappointment, self-destruction, love, sex, fortitude, and musical comedy.—Jim Tushinski / imdb

Wakefield Poole, a Broadway dancer who worked alongside Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers, then became a pioneering gay porn director, has passed away at age 85. Wakefield's landmark 1971 film Boys in the Sand — a clever riff on Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, shot on Fire Island and starring the beautiful Casey Donovan — helped usher in gay liberation and opened theatre doors for Deep Throat early in the Golden Age of Porn. Boys in the Sand opened at the 55th Street Playhouse in midtown Manhattan in December 1971, just 18 months after Stonewall, and in a subversive stroke of genius, Poole even took out an ad for his film in the New York Times, which ran next to ads for James Bond and Dirty Harry. . RIP

[quote]I too take offense to the tacky use of "queer" to categorize a dad gay icon.

Me too!

[quote]The queer pioneer filmmaker has shuffled off at age 85.

Why did he go to Buffalo?

What’s amazing is that he lived that long. In those days, “mainstream” America would just as soon as see us dead.

Yet he persisted. Survived the plagues that killed and the dead minds that did what they could to silence him. His films have a poetic aura that blends the physical with fantasy.

He remained a free spirit, right to the end.

I salute him.

Rip Wakefield Poole films at the Adonis and the Bijou were part of my early gay journey. Thank you.

I LOVE MY DEAD GAY ICON!!!!

New York had pioneers then.

[quote]update your ancient vernacular. Queer is an umbrella terms for all LGBTQ+'s. You're welcome.

This is so beyond stupid.

Yes, it's an umbrella term[s], but you don't always have to speak in general terms.

If you are writing about a gay man or a lesbian, write "gay" or "lesbian" to make it more specific and accurate.

Please take your gayqueer harangue outside. It is disrespectful to the memory of Wakefield Poole.

Queer patently isn't an umbrella term these days (if it ever was). Most who identify as queer are heterosexual.

The ole queen outlived his BF/protégé by 35 years.

[quote]It is disrespectful to the memory of Wakefield Poole.

Nah.

Wakefield Poole interview on The Rialto Report

R28 I found his performances rather wooden.

Shame.

IBDB

I saw Boys in the Sand and Bijou at the Nob Hill circa '74.

Was it the sensation people say it was? Even HBO had an episode about it.

yes, it was a sensation

Emerald City TV #47 Wakefield Poole Cal Culver

[quote]Was it the sensation people say it was? Even HBO had an episode about it.

HBO's "The Duece", sorry.

Any relation to the furniture?

We wouldn't have had 'Do I Hear A Waltz?' without him...

Any truth to the rumor that he decorated Sondheim's basement?

[quote]HBO's "The Duece", sorry.

Oh, dear.

Any relation to the furniture?

yes, both of the Wooden Wakefields

Imagine being a well regarded Broadway dancer and choreographer, even if not a famous one. Then imagine on a lark directing a porno on the side to put a few extra bucks in your pocket. Then becoming known for the rest of your life and for eternity as a famous pornographer.

There are so few famous pornographers that in a weird way it’s quite an honor and distinguished sobriquet.

so who are we casting in the Wakefield Poole biopic? I'll start with Seth Green in the title role...

[quote] Any truth to the rumor that he decorated Sondheim's basement?

Sondheim's East 49th Street townhouse doesn't have a basement. None of the townhouses on that block do.

Maybe we should talk about the attic.

Maybe you mean he “decorated” Sondheim’s headboard.

[quote]R28 I found his performances rather wooden.

As long as his cock was wooden . . .

When my husband and I moved to SF in72, "The Boys in the Sand" was making tons of money at 'The Nob Hill Cinema". I sold tickets and "memberships" and popcorn. Wakefield Poole was indeed a pioneer.

Wakefield Poole's real name was Wakefield Pool.

R16, you accuse "woke" people of being offended but get offended by the word "queer"

Go back to the Republican convention, Milo

R6 misuses science to bully posters as if there is any "gender" but cunt in her end of the rainbow spectrum. One wishes it were meant to be funny. Alas.

Poole was not queer. He was gay. Arguing against his preferred expression of his truth, which takes from no one, is fascistic Puritanism. It's also racist and homophobic, because not even twats such as R6 would hector an older black man who states the expression by which he would be considered.

Me? I'm a queer man. So shoo.

The NYT finally got around to publishing an obit

Excerpts: Thus, armed with a 16-millimeter Bolex camera, Mr. Poole decided to do something about it. He headed to Fire Island Pines, the secluded summer Eden for gay men just off Long Island, and there began filming experimental movies with his friends, capturing them making love on beaches and in shady groves.

And he did so with an auteur’s touch, as if he were some very horny version of D.A. Pennebaker, striving to portray artful realism in the male intimacy he was documenting. Mr. Poole soon made a feature-length, surrealistic movie called “Boys in the Sand” (the title a spoof on “The Boys in the Band,” the groundbreaking 1968 play and 1970 film adaptation about gay men in New York), and its release in 1971 proved revelatory. He was hailed as a pioneer of gay porn, and the film became a crossover hit that changed attitudes about pornography among both the gay and straight audiences that lined up to see it.

The movie, with the adult film star Casey Donovan, was composed of three steamy vignettes: First, Mr. Donovan materializes from the ocean Venus-like to ravage a young man lying on the sand; then, at a beach house, he tosses a dissolving magic pill into a swimming pool, causing a hunk to emerge from the water; lastly, he pleasures himself while admiring a telephone line repairman working outside his window.

When “Boys in the Sand” opened at the now gone 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan, it became the talk of the town. The sex it portrayed between Adonic men frolicking in the Pines came across to viewers as blissful and guilt-free. Soon, celebrities like Liza Minnelli, Rudolf Nureyev and Halston were also lining up to see it.

“Wakefield was determined to elevate the gay porn genre,” Michael Musto, the longtime Village Voice writer, said in a phone interview. “This was a time when you had to leave your home to see pornography. It was a communal experience by necessity, and you had to be seen in your seat. He removed the shame of it.

He added: “When I first came to Fire Island, I felt free for the first time in my life. I didn’t feel like a minority and I wanted everybody to suddenly feel that. So I said, ‘I can make a movie that no one will be ashamed to watch.’”

I wonder if his parents had an affection for the vicar.

Died in a nursing home in Jacksonville FL. Dear God, if even the most exciting of lives end up there, is there any hope?

there's always the possibility of a very long nap after thanksgiving dinner in bucolic Litchfield with a husband 50 years younger

Clone on clone action.

I used to... design sets for him.

[quote] What’s amazing is that he lived that long. In those days, “mainstream” America would just as soon as see us dead.

Yet he persisted. Survived the plagues that killed

The secret of his survival was........

“The reason I stopped making films was the AIDS situation,” Mr. Poole told an interviewer. “I lost my fan base to AIDS. I saw them all die. It’s a miracle I’m not dead. Cocaine saved my life. I did so much coke, I couldn’t have sex.”

R51 is the racist "cut white f*** in the throat" lunatic.

She thinks that people who note that someone considered himself gay is wrong.

Lunatic.

"We're here. We're queer. Get used to it" was chanted in the streets by people braver than the prisspots here.

...sigh...

Another reminder that the days of gay porn making an attempt at a storyline or theme are long gone...