One New York night in the early 1970s, a dancer and budding filmmaker named Wakefield Poole went to see a gay porn flick called \u201cHighway Hustler\u201d at a run-down theater in Times Square with his friends. As he settled into a tattered seat, he prepared to spend the next 45 minutes or so enjoyably aroused.<\/p>\n
But as the film rolled, he experienced nothing of the kind. He thought that the movie was sleazy, that its sex scenes were unnecessarily degrading. He started laughing out loud, and one of his companions fell asleep.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to my friend, \u2018This is the worst, ugliest movie I\u2019ve ever seen!\u2019\u201d Mr. Poole, who died on Oct. 27 at 85, recalled in 2002. \u201cSomebody ought to be able to do something better.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village had occurred two years earlier, and Mr. Poole, like countless gay men of his generation, was empowered in its aftermath. What he had witnessed onscreen that night didn\u2019t resemble the sexual liberation he was experiencing as a proud gay man in New York.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And he did so with an auteur\u2019s 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.
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<\/center><\/p>\nMr. Poole soon made a feature-length, surrealistic movie called \u201cBoys in the Sand\u201d (the title a spoof on \u201cThe Boys in the Band,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
When \u201cBoys in the Sand\u201d 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.
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\u201cI wanted a film,\u201d Mr. Poole said at the time, \u201cthat gay people could look at and say, \u2018I don\u2019t mind being gay \u2014 it\u2019s beautiful to see those people do what they\u2019re doing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In a memoir, \u201cDirty Poole,\u201d published in 2000, he related how, during the film\u2019s release, its producer sneakily bought an ad for it in The New York Times, leading Mr. Poole to speculate that the paper\u2019s advertising department may not have looked at it too closely. Variety reviewed the movie, a rare instance of critical coverage of hard-core gay pornography by a mainstream publication (though it took a dim view of the film). Even its marquee billing challenged precedent: It displayed Mr. Poole\u2019s real name.<\/p>\n
While \u201cBoys in the Sand\u201d marked Mr. Poole\u2019s official debut as a filmmaker (he had made some experimental short films earlier), his first passion was dance: He had led an impressive career performing in the New York-based company Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and helping with the choreography of Broadway shows involving the likes of Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim and No\u00ebl Coward.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere weren\u2019t a lot of people who were out,\u201d Mr. Poole told South Florida Gay News in 2014. \u201cJust seeing my name above the title on a theater made its impact. Hundreds of people saw \u2018Boys in the Sand\u2019 and came out after seeing the film.\u201d<\/p>\n
The year after \u201cBoys\u201d appeared, the landmark film \u201cDeep Throat\u201d was released, commencing a golden age of American pornography.<\/p>\n
\u201cWakefield was determined to elevate the gay porn genre,\u201d Michael Musto, the longtime Village Voice writer, said in a phone interview. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Poole\u2019s next hit, \u201cBijou,\u201d followed a construction worker who stumbles on an invitation to a private club, where he joins a psychedelic bathhouse-style orgy. Then came \u201cWakefield Poole\u2019s Bible!,\u201d a creatively ambitious soft-porn movie that reimagined tales from the Old Testament, but it flopped.<\/p>\n
Frustrated with its failure, Mr. Poole started afresh in San Francisco, which had become an epicenter of the gay rights movement, although his troubles only worsened there: He broke up with his longtime partner, and he became addicted to freebasing cocaine.<\/p>\n
He soon directed a documentary-like film, \u201cTake One,\u201d in which he interviewed men about their carnal fantasies and had them act them out on camera, engaging two brothers in one notorious moment.<\/p>\n
Mr. Poole eventually moved back to New York, holing himself up in a cold-water flat in Chelsea to break his cocaine addiction. Trying for a comeback, he released \u201cBoys in the Sand II\u201d in 1984, but it didn\u2019t make a splash.<\/p>\n
The AIDS crisis had begun, and the carefree gay paradise depicted in his original movie suddenly felt a world away.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reason I stopped making films was the AIDS situation,\u201d Mr. Poole told an interviewer. \u201cI lost my fan base to AIDS. I saw them all die. It\u2019s a miracle I\u2019m not dead. Cocaine saved my life. I did so much coke, I couldn\u2019t have sex.\u201d<\/p>\n
Walter Wakefield Poole III was born on Feb. 24, 1936, in Salisbury, N.C. His father was a police officer and later a car salesman. His mother, Hazel (Melton) Poole, was a homemaker.<\/p>\n
Growing up, Walter fell in love with a boyhood friend, and they would crawl through each other\u2019s window to be together. But their romance ended when Walter\u2019s family moved to Florida, settling in Jacksonville. Years later, he said, after his friend had married a woman and started a family, they rekindled their passion one night.<\/p>\n
Walter caught the dance bug in Jacksonville and started studying ballet seriously. When he was 18, he headed to New York to pursue dance further and joined the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo when he was 21.<\/p>\n
He turned to moviemaking in the 1960s, captivated by the experimental films of Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n
As he pulled away from pornography in the mid-1980s, Mr. Poole needed to find a new way to make a paycheck in New York, so he studied at the French Culinary Institute and later landed a job in food services for Calvin Klein.<\/p>\n
He retired in his 60s and moved back to Jacksonville, where he died in a nursing home, a niece, Terry Waters, said. He left no immediate survivors.<\/p>\n
As Mr. Poole grew older, enthusiasts of gay history and vintage pornography collectors began revisiting his work. A documentary, \u201cI Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole,\u201d directed by Jim Tushinski, came out in 2016. New York art house theaters like Metrograph and Quad Cinema screened \u201cBoys in the Sand.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2010, Mr. Poole, then 74, was invited to the Pines for a screening of his classic, although some gay residents there weren\u2019t thrilled about it.<\/p>\n
A local film festival, responding to their complaints about the X-rated content, had declined to show the movie, so an opposing faction of residents organized their own event. Their group included a man who lived in a summer house that had been used in the film.<\/p>\n
That night, Mr. Poole was introduced to a packed auditorium as an unsung hero who had helped transform the Pines into an international destination. (\u201cBoys in the Sand\u201d was seen widely overseas.) He took the stage to applause.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat has happened here with the controversy is why I made this film,\u201d he told the crowd. \u201cIt\u2019s the ultimate of what I wanted this film to do, and that\u2019s to not only make controversy, but to overcome controversy.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWhen I first came to Fire Island, I felt free for the first time in my life. I didn\u2019t feel like a minority and I wanted everybody to suddenly feel that. So I said, \u2018I can make a movie that no one will be ashamed to watch.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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