Drifting, cruising, leaving: the ecological intimacies of Boys in the Sand (1971)

Abstract

ABSTRACTWakefield Poole’s 1971 pornographic arthouse film Boys in the Sand stages a lavish cruising encounter in Fire Island’s Meat Rack, a globally rare ecosystem now threatened by rising sea levels and erosion. Shadowing Glyn Davis – who maps the erotic convergences between the Situationist dérive and practices of homosexual cruising – I locate the Meat Rack’s sexual and cinematic appeal in its knotted spatiality as both passage and destination. This article glances back and forth between the verdant gay Brigadoon mythologized in Poole’s film and the erosive terrain of the Island’s precarious future, in order to test Sarah Ensor’s theorization of cruising as ‘an unexpected model for a new ecological ethic’. Ultimately, this article underscores the ambivalence of Boys in the Sand as a pornographic requiem for an Island at risk, and a nature trampled by the steps we take to satiate our ‘natural’ desires. Touching the material and metaphoric textures of the Island’s leaves and sand, I consider the potential of ‘cruising’ pornography as both an erotic and an ecological archive.KEYWORDS: Fire Islandeco-criticismcruisingpornoethnography Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.