NEW YORK — The New York Times this weekend published an obituary of the late Wakefield Poole, a pioneering director of gay cinema whose 1971 classic, "Boys in the Sand," revolutionized the adult feature genre.
"Boys in the Sand," starring Casey Donovan, was a smash success and achieved mainstream recognition, including A-list celebrity approbation, a review in Variety and a full-blitz publicity campaign that predated even "Deep Throat" by a year.
There were even print advertisements in the Times itself, which the obit describes as having been "sneakily" purchased, though there is no evidence of outright subterfuge. As the obit notes, Poole himself speculated that "the paper’s advertising department may not have looked at it too closely."
In his autobiography, Poole recalled: "To this day, I don't know how we got such good placement. The ad looked classy, so maybe they just didn't read the copy. Or perhaps someone had let it slip by. I'd like to think some gay man in the advertising department had pulled some strings. If that is what happened, I'm forever grateful."
The Times' respectful memorializing of Poole is somewhat unusual, given the paper's recent history of covering adult entertainment and sex workers' rights through a distinctively negative and condemnatory lens.
The obit, by Alex Vadukul, arrives one month after Poole passed at the age of 85 in Jacksonville, Florida. Prior to his revolutionary career in adult entertainment, Poole was a notable Broadway figure and multimedia artist. Profits from "Boys in the Sand" and follow-up feature "Bijou" were used to finance an early workshop production of "A Chorus Line," cementing Poole's unusual place in the history of New York's arts scene.
Find the Times obit here. Read XBIZ's memorial and find an expanded remembrance in the December issue of XBIZ World.