Gay arts are profusely celebrated during Pride Week, and that includes porn. Reaching way back to the beginning of it all is a re-issue of Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand. It's a movie to be proud of, alright, the Pioneering Porno, which rated high in sexual content, and had a profound effect on all the porn that followed, both in content and in the business model of the industry it spawned.
The current release, from historically minded Vinegar Syndrome (www.VinegarSyndrome.com), isn't really a re-issue. Yes, there was a two disc set released in 2002 by Mercury Releasing. It's sorta irreplaceable, with its six hours of goodies�"both Boys and its 1986 sequel, Boys in the Sand II (the only film appearance of much photographed model Paul Irish), plus the classic Bijou, three filmmaker commentaries, and five of Wake's short films (including Roger, a highly conceptualized loop of the heavy hung and handsome early superstar, of which Gary Morris wrote in an essay posted at the Bright Lights Film Journal site, "Self-worship never looked so good."). But the good remastering accomplished for that set can't compare with the quality of the new disc. This version of Boys has been completely re-scanned at 2K resolution from the original elements, making it, for all purposes, not a re- but a new issue. And at Vinegar Syndrome's low price, you can afford to duplicate the old set for this single title.
Extreme gratitude goes to the indefatigable Jim Tushinki, director of the must-see Gorilla Factory documentaries That Man: Peter Berlin, and I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole, who produced and created all the extras for this new Vinegar Syndrome DVD. They get the same high quality re-masterings as the feature. One is a tour of the art in a seminal Andy Warhol gallery exhibition, which was subsequently shown before each screening of Boys during its original run.
Audiences of the day were open, it seems, to the mix of high and low art on one bill. The purposefully weird (some may say eclectic) and, frankly, assaultive soundtrack of Andy reflects the period's Beatle's influenced embracing of esoteric and ethnic music. It's a swell souvenir of the 1960s explosion of experimental films, but not too re-watchable today.
What will encourage repeat viewings is the fifteen-minute hardcore loop, Dino. Shot in 1969, it was intended to be the original opening scene of Boys. Yet "Dino" balked at the idea of his face being seen in theatres, and not only refused to sign a release, but asked for an $8,000 fee.
Fortunately, Dino was out and Cal Culver�"renamed Casey Donovan�"was in, when Wake met Casey and a star was born. Dino�"rough-looking, swarthy, darkly furred and hugely mustached�" is the opposite of the smooth-bodied, blondish glam that was Casey Donovan, but the scenario's the same for both boys (although Casey relishes gulping Peter Fisk's cum, which Dino forgoes).
Why could Dino be exhibited? Mr. Tushinski told me that Poole assumes the guy is dead, since the scene was first re-issued in 2002 on the Mercury set, and not a peep from the guy has been heard in the subsequent decade-plus years.
And now, a rather lengthy quote that's a bit of a digression, but that's just too entertaining to edit. It's novelist and "fabulist of distinction," James McCourt, interviewing Richard Rouilard, from McCourt's book, Queer Street. Rouilard, who cofounded National Gay Rights Advocates, was an editor of The Advocate as well as a deeply knowledgeable advocate of porn.
"We were overwhelmed by Jack Deveau and Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, all the art-film pornographers, so I suppose I sound pretentious. When I first arrived I used to go to these meetings... where some gnome the color of the sand on Santa Monica Beach would lecture on subjects like Existential Metaphysics and the Reverse Angle in Jack Deveau's Left Handed, Dialectical Montage in Arthur Bressan's Pleasure Beach, how Bressan's Forbidden Letters, starring the Prince of Tides, Richard Locke, was intended to enforce the idea of predestination, whereas mise-en-scene in the Joe Gage Hank trilogy and especially later in the second and definitive triad of Heatstroke, Closed Set and Handsome, which, with its infernal-erotic night scenic, highway neon, dark trees/steaming manhole aesthetic, was the real masterpiece, was intended to enforce the idea of the free will."
Rouillard makes fun of academic's efforts to assert that porn was art, even an auteur's endeavor. But he's right-on in calling Poole an art-film pornographer, since Poole has said he approached Boys with the mindset of an experimental filmmaker, not as a pornographer (a title he assumed only later).
Poole's claim is born out by his use of many artful techniques that you just don't see these days, like in-camera effects, the chiaroscuro of lighting, and the use of symphonic music. Although it was probably not intentional, Poole, writes Jeffrey Escoffier in his history of gay porn, Bigger Than Life, "documented the new gay sexual culture that had emerged in the Sixties." The hedonism and sexual freedom celebrated in Boys in the Sand, with witty touches and moments of fantasy spelling the sweaty sex, set a high standard.
View the film's trailer on YouTube (age-restricted) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SnRRUxW9oU