Hello, my name is Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan, and you're listening

to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about Wakefield Pool, the godfather of the gay

porn genre. This isn't the first time we've ventured into pornography on this podcast. One of the

reasons I find it interesting, in addition to the fact that I just love watching fucking and

suckin, is because it is, you know, the most abject of film genres. And you don't get any more

abject than gay porn, which even the amount of celebration,

the modest amount of celebration and cultural canonization that straight porn has achieved,

has eluded gay porn.

But I think Wakefield Pool is probably the most famous O'Tooer, right?

Oh, definitely.

And you look at his movies, and it's very clear why,

because he approached them not specifically from the get-go as a purely,

all right, let's just do this nuts and bolts.

We're just going to give them what they want.

We can make some money.

You know, the loop way.

But there was an intent of, all right, I'm going to try to be artistic

with these and to find an audience that is even just beyond the people who would be just

jerking off in the cinema. So imagine, folks, a movie comes out in the early 1970s. It's a

hardcore pornographic film. Most of the audience who goes to see it will have never seen a hardcore pornographic film.

It's advertised in the New York Times.

It attracts audiences not just of the Raincoat Brigade, but also of middle class and upper class curiosity seekers.

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