December 3, 2021 | The Biz

Gay porn pioneer, Wakefield Poole, dies

On October 27, famed gay porn director Wakefield Poole passed away.

Poole launched his career in the 1970s with the release of Boys in the Sand, his response to the gay porn being shown at the time.

Boys in the Sand

One film, Highway Hustler, stood out to him as particularly bad.

“He thought that the movie was sleazy, that its sex scenes were unnecessarily degrading,” the Times revealed in its obituary of the filmmaker. “He started laughing out loud, and one of his companions fell asleep. … What he had witnessed onscreen that night didn’t resemble the sexual liberation he was experiencing as a proud gay man in New York.”

Using a 16-millimeter camera, he shot Casey Donovan (pictured below) in a series of scenes. “The sex it portrayed between Adonic men frolicking in the Pines came across to viewers as blissful and guilt-free,” the Times added.

The film was a much bigger success than anyone would have expected. Gay and straight audiences lined up to see it, including celebrities like Rudolf Nureyev and Liza Minnelli.

“I wanted a film that gay people could look at and say, ‘I don’t mind being gay — it’s beautiful to see those people do what they’re doing,’” Poole once said, refusing to hide behind a pseudonym.

His initial success, though, turned into some very serious struggles, from dealing with film flops, an addiction to cocaine and the AIDS crisis. Eventually, he gave it all up.

“The reason I stopped making films was the AIDS situation,” he said. “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.”

He became a chef, and would later retire to Jacksonville, Florida. In 2000, he released a memoir called Dirty Poole, and was the subject of a 2016 documentary, I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole.

Poole was 85. RIP