<div>A Queer Film Classic on two groundbreaking gay arthouse porn films from 1972, both examples of the growing liberalization of social attitudes toward sex and homosexuality in post-Stonewall America. Where Fred Halsted's <I>Boys in the Sand</I> is a frothy romp at a gay beach resort community, Wakefield Poole's <I>L.A. Plays Itself</I> is a dark treatise on violence and urban squalor. Both films represent particular, polarizing moments in the early history of the gay movement.<BR><BR><B>Cindy Patton</B> is a longtime activist and scholar. She is currently professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.<BR></div>