Dirty Poole: The Autobiography of a Gay Porn Pioneer
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Performer and filmmaker Wakefield Poole spent most of his youth in dancing schools and public toilets. As a high school boy in the 1950s, he had turned so many tricks with married men that he assumed they all came to the can for an occasional same-sex romp--and that he had to be careful to avoid his own dad on the other side of a glory hole. He soon moved to New York to work in theater, becoming acquainted with many stars, from Andy Warhol to Debbie Reynolds. It was the height of the sexual revolution; Poole was dropping acid, having orgies, and saying yes to everything. One night at the Continental Baths, his conversation with new friends was interrupted by "some broad" doing her club act next to the pool: "Guys were sitting around, in their towels, on the floor, and in straight-back chairs, laughing, clapping, and having a blast." It was Bette Midler's first appearance at the baths, and the unlikely start of her amazing career. Poole's memoir is full of such anecdotes, small but evocative, which capture the excitement of the times, but the book is centered on his role in the well-made hardcore gay porn films that are his principal achievement. Director of Boys in the Sand and Bijou, among lesser efforts, Poole helped inaugurate a new industry and promote an ideal of unashamed sex play and loving experimentation. After a brief period of minor celebrity, though, he discovered cocaine and began to lose everything he had gained, becoming not an artist, as he had always seen himself, but a pornographer and an addict. Poole's book is not especially well written, but it's a clear and unsentimental slice of gay life in the hedonistic pre-AIDS, post-Stonewall period, a voice from an almost lost generation. --Regina Marler
Book Description
From child prodigy to the most notorious director of gay adult films, Wakefield Poole wrote the rules for a living on the edge with no safety line and no apologies. How a former singer and ballet dancer went from the Broadway stage to behind the camera as the world's most beautiful men bared all for him is just part of a fascinating story that takes us on a whirlwind tour of the early days of the sexual revolution when "anything goes" was more than a phrase, it was a religion. While rubbing shoulders with the elite of the day, including Andy Warhol, Bob Fosse, and Stephen Sondheim, Poole created Boys in the Sand, the gay porn film that would revolutionize the industry and serve as the ruler by which adult entertainment is measured to this day. Only in that time and that place would it have been possible, and Poole's memoir serves as a fascinating trip to an era when anything was possible and everything was celebrated as long as it had style.
Dirty Poole: The Autobiography of a Gay Porn Pioneer
Dirty Poole: The Autobiography of a Gay Porn Pioneer,Wakefield Poole,Alyson Publications,1555835619,Biography,Biography & Autobiography,Biography / Autobiography,Biography/Autobiography,Entertainment & Performing Arts - Movie Directors,Film & Video - General,Gay Studies,Gay motion picture producers a,Gay motion picture producers and directors,General,Individual Directors And Producers,Motion picture producers and d,Motion picture producers and directors,Poole, Wakefield,Pornography,Specific Groups - Male Gay Studies,United States
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