from Huffingtonpost.com
Felice Picano
posted: 07/17/2014
If that early biographer and arch-gossip, Plutarch, were alive in 2014 and writing an updated version of his Lives, he'd do far worse than include in his gallery of contemporaries the singer, dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and entrepreneur, Wakefield Poole. At least, according to Jim Tuskhinksy's sweeping new documentary movie, I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Pole that premiered at Los Angeles' Outfest film festival this past weekend.
If Poole's name isn't familiar, perhaps you may know one of the films he made, which in 1971 and 1972 helped to alter everyone's view of what a gay man was and could be -- most famously Boys in the Sand. Poole is to gay film and especially gay porn what D.W. Griffith is to the film medium in America: the originator and first master. And unlike Griffith, Poole's movies can be watched without flinching some 40 odd years later. To my mind Bijou is a classic.
I was at the Poole movie premiere because I'm in the film, one of the "talking heads" who contextualize what we see on screen. Also, because Wakefield Poole touched my life through his art, almost through a career choice -- about which later -- but mostly through the unique and beautiful men on the scene we knew, now gone, among them the famous Casey Donovan.
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