Part of the Queer Film Classics series of monographs on films for LGBT audiences, launched in 2009. This title is the first to delve into the newly sexual liberal times of the early 1970s in post-Stonewall America. L.A. Plays Itself and Boys in the Sand were both gay arthouse porn films released within months of each other at a theater in 1972. Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself is an experimental film about hustlers, vagrants, and urban gentrification which reveals the City of Angels’ dark side; Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand is its sunny opposite, about a young man’s sexual adventures at a gay beach resort community. (Boys was the first gay porn film to have any kind of commercial crossover.) Both films are examples of the period’s “porno chic” as a result of the growing liberalization of social attitudes toward sex and homosexuality in which the new sexually liberated climate allowed for experimentation with cinematic morality codes. As polar opposites, Boys represents an assimilationist view view of gay sexuality, while L.A. takes a more outsider approach to its subject.

© 2014 Arsenal Pulp Press (E-kirja): 9781551525631

Julkaisupäivä

E-kirja: 8. joulukuuta 2014