The director of THAT MAN: PETER BERLIN takes an appreciative look at another figure who is synonymous with the cinematic depiction of frank gay male sexuality in the immediate post-Stonewall era.
Director Jim Tushinski’s previous film (which premiered in Berlin in 2005 and had a theatrical release after its run on the LGBT film festival circuit) served as both a tribute to a gay erotic icon and an introduction to younger generations of gay men who were not familiar with Peter Berlin. His new film, DIRTY POOLE, seems likely to do the same for Wakefield Poole. Poole directed features from the early 1970s until the mid 1980s, most famously the sexually-explicit gay adult films BOYS IN THE SAND and its sequel and BIJOU (available on DVD packaged together as THE WAKEFIELD POOLE COLLECTION – note: NSFW link). Taking advantage of the post-sixties era new openness and newly identifiable out audience, Poole’s films celebrated gay male sexuality and brought these images to theatrical release in major urban centers. Tushinski film explores these contributions to gay cinema while providing more of a context for the filmmaker, who he notes didn’t see himself as a pornographer despite the graphic content of his work – before filmmaking, in fact, Poole was a ballet dancer and a Broadway choreographer, so filmmaking was as much an artistic expression as those endeavors. DIRTY POOLE aims to capture the fullness of Poole’s life and legacy and its specific impact on gay male culture.
Currently in post-production, Tushinski is about a week away from the end of an indieGoGo campaign seeking $5,000 for licensing fees for the numerous performance clips and archival material from Poole’s pre-filmmaking performance background. At the time of this writing, the campaign is past its halfway point, so there’s still time to help if you’re so inclined. Additional information about the project and the filmmaker may be found on the doc’s website.
Like other LGBT focused works I’ve featured here, my interest in DIRTY POOLE is primarily due to its goal of exploring history that otherwise might go unrecorded. The LGBT community lost much of its collective memory of this era due to the AIDS epidemic – the accumulated history and knowledge of the generation of gay men who fell to the disease. Films like Poole’s, and the recollections of these times through his personal biography, are important records for the gay men that have come of age in the shadow of AIDS, providing a direct link between LGBT culture and history of the post-Stonewall period (and how it related to the absence of such visibility before Stonewall) and today. Beyond this, Poole’s background is distinctive and intriguing, so I look forward to seeing Tushinski’s finished documentary.
what (not) to doc 