An outspoken and articulate artist in a turbulent, passionate time, Wakefield Poole didn’t think of himself as a pornographer. He was a filmmaker who used his dance and theater background to create beautiful, erotic art films that challenged the mind. Many agreed. To others, though, Poole just made dirty movies.

I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole tells the story of this sometimes overlooked gay liberation and independent film making pioneer. In an era when anyone making, promoting, or appearing in what the US government considered “pornography” could be liable for prosecution and jail time, Wakefield Poole was a remarkably closed and honest gay filmmaker. He also became internationally famous and his movies screened for years as examples of films that could be artistic as well as sexually explicit.

Filled with gorgeous archival footage, excerpts from Poole’s lushly photographed films, and entertaining and illuminating interviews with Poole’s contemporaries and colleagues, I Always Said Yes is a story of artistic integrity and disappointment, self-destruction, love, sex, fortitude, and musical comedy.

Screening proceeded by a talk by Jeffrey Escoffier, author of Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore

Presented by MIX NYC

Jeffrey Escoffier is the author of Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Running Press/Perseus Book Group, 2009) and American Homo: Community and Perversity (University of California Press, 1998) and he edited Sexual Revolution (Thunder’s Mouth, 2003), a compilation of the most important writing on sex published in the 1960s and 70s. He has taught LGBT studies and sexuality at the University of California in Berkeley, at Rutgers University, the New School University and Barnard College. From 2007-2009 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality of New York University, and served on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, at The City University of New York from 2009-2014.