I Always Said Yes
The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole
Director & Producer: Jim Tushinski
Released (USA) October 3, 2013
Running Time: 1hr 38 min
I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole, Jim Tushinski’s 2013 documentary, portrays the pioneering filmmaker whose careers as dancer, choreographer, and director spanned the golden years of Broadway, television, porno chic, and gay liberation. Poole’s 1971 debut feature, Boys in the Sand — shot on Fire Island for under $10,000 and starring Casey Donovan — became the first gay pornographic film to carry director’s credits, the first reviewed by Variety, and one of the earliest adult films to cross into mainstream cultural conversation, arriving nearly a year before Deep Throat and helping ignite the “porno chic” era. His 1972 follow-up, Bijou, pushed further into abstraction and psychological narrative, its explicit imagery framed with an art-film sensibility that drew comparisons few pornographic films of the era earned. Poole would go on to make Wakefield Poole’s Bible (1973) and Take One (1976), cementing a body of work that treated hardcore gay sex as a subject for genuine cinematic craft rather than the anonymous loops that preceded it. Jack Fritscher interviewed Poole directly for Drummer magazine in 1979, in a feature titled “Dirty Poole” — a connection that places this documentary’s subject within Fritscher’s own firsthand reporting on the era’s gay cultural pioneers.
Wakefield Poole