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Back at the apartment, after our protagonist has fetishistically and blankly gone through the contents of the bag-orally fixating on the lipstick, picking through the belongings with a kind of curious disinterest-his masturbatory shower fantasy of pin-up girls is soundtracked, with deliberate griminess, to the strained strains of Led Zeppelin, blasted through a fuzzy pocket radio which renders the rockist odes to heterosexuality distorted and disgusted as images of the woman's falling body jump-cut into his reverie, our hero fails to reach climax. This framing might suggests a renunciation, not only of heterosexuality-our nominally straight hero will be straight no longer by the time he's left the club-but of women per se. En route, the film stages a troubling sacrifice of a woman, struck by a car at an intersection: our protagonist picks up her purse and walks off without emotion, the ticket he finds in her purse giving him access to the mysterious sex-club which provides the film's title. As our protagonist walks home from the building site where he works, the combination of pummelling machines and Holstian martial strains providing at atmosphere that suggests, perhaps, the costs of gentrification, the changing face of the city in which sex as labour or performance is placed. Set to the blasting strains of Holst's 'Mars, the Bring of War', this opening winks at the classic porn framing of builder-as-sex-object. The film's opening act might suggest otherwise it is, in a sense, a self-conscious reflection on the absurdity of the narrative incident required to 'justify' the structure of the porn film as more than simply a succession of sex scenes, sex acts. To call the film an 'erotic art film' instead of 'gay porn' is to draw a distinction between the commercial, vulgar and exploitative and the transmutatory erotic incantation that Poole refuses at the same time, the film has a kind of educative function, in the way that its protagonist moves from solitary heterosexual fantasy to the mutual communion of queer fluidity, learning to give as well as take, to experience pleasure as a kind of ecstatic, plateaud network rather than a surge of possession and release.

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Who'd have thought a Hovhaness symphony would form such a deliriously appropriate soundtrack for a gay orgy? Ecstatically rising each time, stopping, starting again, as if the record were being flipped over, to the orangey-yellow glow of skin against a bare backdrop, bodies reclining, fondling, inclining, as if floating in space, the occasional Dan Flavin sculpture or lens-flare light-show the film's bijouterie along with bodies unadorned in unselfconscious communion and display. Wakefield Poole's breakthrough gay porn masterpiece no doubt made it into the mainstream (and across lines of sexuality) because it 'high art' ring made it amenable to straight sexual tourists seeking out the other side, but wishing the work to be clothed in a veil of 'legitimacy'-but of course, its wall-to-wall classical music and its self-consciously 'artiness' are its strength.

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