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Aspiration for the Gay Universal
Boys in the Sand is a lyrical, joyful celebration of a utopian space- Bayside, Poolside, Inside-where men take pleasure in one another in the face of normative taboos...An idealized, hypersexual male emerges in each episode from the conjuring imagination of a solitary desiring subject. The sex that follows serves to validate and celebrate, while never exactly normalizing, the difference of gay sex.
-Linda Williams, Screening Sex
Joyful and self-absorbed, Boys in the Sand rises and falls on a look that fit well with an aspirational-assimilationist understanding of homosexuality: to be liberated does not mean taking to the streets, but creating a utopian space in which to simply be one's sexual self. Thinking too much about the social and political standing of that sex and sexuality is a drag. One daydreams of hot men, and they should simply materialize.
-Cindy Patton, L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic
Conceived as an almost abstract visual poem, Boys was intended by its maker to reflect the various aspects of the "universal gay experience," moving from discovery to experimentation to first love and the acceptance of life shared with a "significant other," ultimately resulting in self-knowledge and sexual bliss.
-Dries Vermeulen, "In the Beginning ..."
Despite its transgressive subject matter and hardcore action, Wakefield Poole's porn film Boys in the Sand may be described as a dreamlike idyll. The low-budget "porno chic" flick was set and shot in the Fire Island Pines, the gay sexual mecca of the 1960s and 1970s.1 An immediate commercial success upon its premiere at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York City on December 29, 1971, it grossed $44,755 during the first two weeks alone and charted at #46 on Variety's list of 50 Top Grossing Films (Standard Data Corp., NY, 1972). Narratively, the film is composed of three lyrical, nonsequential vignettes entitled "Bayside," "Poolside," and "Inside." It documents the one-on-one sexual encounters of the lead actor Casey Donovan (with Peter Fisk, Danny Di Cioccio, and Tommy Moore) in three disparate yet interlocking spaces in the Pines, as Donovan maneuvers through the wooded landscape of the Meat Rack as well as the constructed space of Fire Island's modernist architecture. As several North American reviewers at the...