Wakefield Poole may not be a household name, but he changed the world of porn forever.
In 1971, back when porn was something you watched in a movie theater, Poole decided what he was seeing on screen didn’t line up with his own experiences as a gay man in New York City. So he took matters into his own hands, taking a camera to Fire Island Pines and creating a sexy gay fantasia.
The film he created, “Boys In The Sand,” broke into the mainstream. Its fanciful vignettes, which included porn star Casey Donovan rising from the ocean to seduce a boy on the beach and tossing a magic pill into a swimming pool to conjure a man, captured audience attention and made the film a crossover hit. Both gay and straight audiences were lining up to see it, including celebrities like Liza Minnelli, Rudolf Nureyev, and Halston.
“I wanted a film,” Poole said at the time, “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.’”
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“Boys in the Sand” was unabashedly gay, and Poole was unabashedly gay alongside it. His real name was displayed on the marquee, a rare move for the time.
“There weren’t a lot of people who were out,” Mr. Poole told South Florida Gay News in 2014. “Just seeing my name above the title on a theater made its impact. Hundreds of people saw ‘Boys in the Sand’ and came out after seeing the film.”
Poole’s career peaked with “Boys in the Sand,” but he lived a full life outside of its fame, including making more films and working as a ballet dancer and as a chef. Poole died on October 27 at the age of 85 in a nursing home in Jacksonville, Florida, his niece Terry Waters told the New York Times. But his legacy endures, particularly through screenings of “Boys in the Sand.”
“When I first came to Fire Island, I felt free for the first time in my life,” Poole said at one such screening in 2010. “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.’”