Dirty Poole: A Sensual Memoir

Performer and filmmaker Wakefield Poole spent most of his youth in dancing schools and public toilets. As a high school boy in the 1950s, he had turned so many tricks with married men that he assumed they all came to the can for an occasional same-sex romp--and that he had to be careful to avoid his own dad on the other side of a glory hole. He soon moved to New York to work in theater, becoming acquainted with many stars, from Andy Warhol to Debbie Reynolds. It was the height of the sexual revolution; Poole was dropping acid, having orgies, and saying yes to everything. One night at the Continental Baths, his conversation with new friends was interrupted by "some broad" doing her club act next to the pool: "Guys were sitting around, in their towels, on the floor, and in straight-back chairs, laughing, clapping, and having a blast." It was Bette Midler's first appearance at the baths, and the unlikely start of her amazing career. Poole's memoir is full of such anecdotes, small but evocative, which capture the excitement of the times, but the book is centered on his role in the well-made hardcore gay porn films that are his principal achievement. Director of Boys in the Sand and Bijou, among lesser efforts, Poole helped inaugurate a new industry and promote an ideal of unashamed sex play and loving experimentation. After a brief period of minor celebrity, though, he discovered cocaine and began to lose everything he had gained, becoming not an artist, as he had always seen himself, but a pornographer and an addict. Poole's book is not especially well written, but it's a clear and unsentimental slice of gay life in the hedonistic pre-AIDS, post-Stonewall period, a voice from an almost lost generation. --Regina Marler