S4E23: Joe Gage / Kansas City Trucking Co. / Richard Locke

[00:00:00] The late 1970s were a representational awakening for homosexual men. They began to embrace a new vision of themselves as hyper-masculine, a look known as the clone look. Soldier, cop, construction worker, these were all new gay images rather than a dancer, decorator, or ribbon clerk.

[00:00:18] The rise of the clone look and the bars that catered to them helped push forward this new gay masculinity. But porn took it to the rest of the country. And the man who bridged the old world of closeted straight men and the new gay

[00:00:33] masculine sexuality was filmmaker Joe Gage. The road movie as a cinematic genre emerged after World War II and reflected both the advent of the automobile as a fundamental expression of individualism and the emergence of a mobile young suburban population looking for adventure.

[00:00:51] The combination of these elements, plus the exploration of male sexual desire among working class and rural men were brought together by Joe Gage and his Working Man Trilogy. Is this the perfect daddy? Yeah, he's good, but can we get him? Maybe. Lives in California in the desert.

[00:01:08] He works for $500 a day if he likes the story. Plus we'll have to send him a round trip ticket. I think he's what you're looking for. The original daddy of gay porn, Richard Locke, burst onto the gay erotic film

[00:01:20] scene in 1974 and quickly became a fixture among gay men who were into the rugged and sexy male look that differed from the films that were coming out of California. But Richard Locke was more of a renaissance man all rolled into one human.

[00:01:35] In this episode, we're going to celebrate Joe Gage, aka Tim Kincade, a director who allowed homoeroticism to slip out of the closet and into the grounds of America. We will also look at Joe Gage's Kansas City Trucking Company, a gay porn film

[00:01:50] that when released was viewed as more than just a gay porn film and would help viewers imagine a world of gay men outside of coastal cities. And finally, we're going to celebrate Richard Locke, the macho gay porn star

[00:02:01] regarded as having been an integral part of a highly developed star system in gay adult films with a filmography and a physique that would help shape and define the parameters of gay men. This is Demystifying Gay Porn.

[00:02:13] My name is Ike Grande, and if you watch gay porn, I've definitely helped to get off. Before we continue, I want to remind you that you can help this channel and its original yet risque content by liking, clicking the subscribe button or selecting

[00:02:37] the bell icon for notifications to see more content like this. And for all you podcast listeners, leave a review or rate it if you can. Thank you. Tim Kincade, a director who allowed homoeroticism to slip out of the closet and thank you.

[00:02:57] Tim Kincade, Joe Gage was born on July 2nd, 1944 in Santa Barbara, California to a Mexican father and Irish and Scottish mother. Gage grew up on Catalina Island just off the coast of Los Angeles, watching science fiction movies and reading authors like Evan Hunter.

[00:03:14] Gage began his career in the late 1960s after reading an article in The New York Times about people making underground films that had a lot of nudity in them. They were spending little money to make them and were reaping in huge profits.

[00:03:28] Gage, who was working as an actor at the time, became very interested. Working in TV and commercial at the time without a background in TV and film, Gage began to follow crew around and learn the filmmaking process.

[00:03:41] Along with his friend, Gage began to raise money and made their first soft core film, which did pretty well. From there, they made their second one, inevitably making their first hardcore film, Girl in a Penthouse.

[00:03:54] It was made in a day and a half and was Gage's introduction to hardcore cinema. Gage was not a stranger of being in front of the camera of gay adult films. Wanting to see what it was like to be in a film, Nick Elliott, the director behind

[00:04:13] Morning, Noon and Night, hired Gage. You know, I'd give up anything for you, Jim. I'd even die for you. Wouldn't you do the same for me? No. No. You love me, don't you? I love you sometimes. Sometimes? You love somebody else? I didn't say that. Oh, man.

[00:04:39] I mean, all day long, I do nothing but think about you. I cook for you. I wait on you. Of the experience, Gage has gone on to say, you can't tell an actor what to do unless you have the experience.

[00:04:51] From there, Gage and his friend, who took the stage name Sam Gage, began their director-producer relationship. I'd made a straight sexploitation R-rated movie, and then I'd made a couple of straight hardcore movies. And then I moved to California, and I kept thinking about having seen Void in the

[00:05:13] Sand in New York, what was it theatrically playing in New York? I just thought, you know, I would really like to try to do that. But I want to take a different approach. I want to do like, you know, the all-American blue collar, everyday man

[00:05:25] on the street kind of guy. In order to record the sexual lifestyle that had begun to emerge during the sexual revolution from the 1960s and 1970s, Gage used naturalistic techniques that originated from documentary-style filmmaking to capture the rough and gritty feel.

[00:05:40] His films reveled in the sexual subculture that had emerged in the years immediately preceding Stonewall amid the seedy rundown and unused industrial spaces that supplied many opportunities for uninterrupted sexual activity with multiple and unknown partners. Streets and city landmarks became sexual landscapes.

[00:05:58] Many of Gage's films focused more on manual and oral sex. Anal was not really the focal point. Gage believes that anal is not very cinematic, which to him is the whole idea of making gay pornography.

[00:06:10] His basic belief is that the one focus should be the phallus, the worship of the penis. During his career in hardcore pornography, Gage was often criticized for his lack of face shots. Gage attributed this to how long he had been making films and how many models he

[00:06:26] works with were happy with the anonymity in these films. He would often sign releases for the films guaranteeing models that their faces would not be shown. One particular thing of note in Gage's films is his use of women in gay

[00:06:38] pornography, something the director has been criticized and praised for during his career. Also, the use of women in these films came before the bisexual film niche began. Gage opted to have women in his films because they were a necessary part of our

[00:06:52] world, but included women in a way that would not distract from what a majority of the audience was wanting to see. Gage made a number of films after his trilogy, most notably Closed Set and Heatstroke.

[00:07:10] He went on to make loops for PM productions based out of New York. They were usually set in New York City and had lower production value. Gage reminisces making these seedy films for the wrong reasons, money.

[00:07:23] After making his film Heatstroke, Gage felt like he had said all he needed to say and wanted to move on to other things. And although people approached him with offers, Gage retired from making gay adult films in 1986.

[00:07:42] While working for a movie company in New York, Gage met a producer who would eventually become his wife. Gage, having never identifying himself as a gay man, married and had two sons. Unlike some of the characters in his films, Gage abstained from having sex with

[00:07:56] other men while he was married, saying, I was 100% faithful to my wife during my years as a full-time husband. Gage also spent a good part of the mid to late eighties making low budget science fiction and horror films under his real name, Tim Kincade, Breeders, Mutant Hunt

[00:08:18] and his most famous of the bunch, Robot Holocaust, which was featured in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and was released on Blu-ray by Scorpion Releasing. His 1989 film, She's Back, starred Carrie Fisher. Joe Gage's pornographic films created a unique strain of hardcore pornography

[00:08:58] that stands apart from the work of other hardcore filmmakers from that period. The cinematic worlds that Gage created were uncomplicated fantasy and exaggerated male sensuality. More than just gay pornography, his films were preoccupied with the meaning of and the playing out of masculine codes of behavior.

[00:09:18] In 2001, Gage made his return to the gay adult entertainment world to a different sexual landscape. He has predominantly worked with Titan Media and Ray Dragon Studios. That same year, he was inducted into the GayVN Hall of Fame.

[00:09:31] Gage would later partner with Ray Dragon and Dragon Media to focus on intergenerational films featuring older men with younger guys. His last directorial credit is listed as West Texas Park and Ride in 2017, with collections being released under Dragon Media as recent as last month.

[00:09:50] I have been within two degrees of separation with Joe Gage and used those contacts for an interview. However, Joe Gage, Tim Kincade is living in enjoyed solitude and we should respect that. Fun fact, remember this scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction? Bring out the gimp.

[00:10:14] Keep the gimp sleeping. Well, I guess you just have to go wake him up now, won't you? Well, get this. Tarantino was inspired by Gage's work when doing this scene in Pulp Fiction. It had been almost 10 years since Joe Gage had read an article by Vincent Canby, the

[00:10:53] Daily Film Critic from The New York Times that had started him thinking about making sex films. Canby's article was about the proliferation of theater showing sexploitation movies, low budget, sensationalistic feature length movies made with plenty of violence, sex and nudity. The article stressed the movie's profitability.

[00:11:12] Kincade was intrigued by the possibility. And whenever he was on set making a TV commercial, he began to pay attention to the production process. He began thinking about making a gay hardcore film and performed in one or movie

[00:11:24] called Morning, Noon and Night in order to see what it was like to have sex in front of a camera. In 1975, Kincade shopped around a script for a gay hardcore road picture called Highway Fantasies.

[00:11:36] Eventually, Kincade and his friend under the names Joe and Sam Gage raised the money to produce it themselves. The movie would be called Kansas City Trucking Company. The film would be a journey filled with travel and sexual episodes. It would also be a journey of self-discovery.

[00:11:52] Gage was an avid fan of B-movies, horror movies and biker flicks like The Wild Angels. At a time when Wakefield Pool brought an artistic visual to these films, Gage was thinking along the lines of a Tom of Finland B-movie. Wakefield was art. It was like museum quality.

[00:12:09] Something could be seen in that kind of a setting. I was doing something that was really had a beginning, a middle and end and arc character arcs the whole nine yards. And it was new. And at a time when the U.S.

[00:12:20] was seen as New York and Los Angeles, Gage wanted a desert filled with cactus, open land and, of course, cowboys. The first person Gage cast in the film was Richard Locke. Gage had seen him in a poster for a hardcore film called Pool Party at the Adonis

[00:12:40] Theater and said, that's Hank. Locating the actor, however, proved very difficult since Locke was out in the desert living in a shack with no running water, a generator for electricity where he was building a geodesic dome. Richard Locke was a essentially a desert rat.

[00:12:57] He lived out in the out in the desert, out in Palm Springs. Gage was surprised to find the clean shaven Locke now had a full thick beard with gray on both sides. Locke offered to shave his beard before starting the movie, but Gage told him not to.

[00:13:11] Gage would then cast Jack Wrangler because the camera loved him. He was an animalistic sexual being. When they set up their interview, Wrangler walked in and told Gage, you're shocked, right? When Gage would ask why, Wrangler said, because I'm so short.

[00:13:25] That didn't bother Gage, who considered Wrangler one of the most professional, courteous and agreeable actors to work with. In casting the part that would go to Steve Boyd, Gage went to San Francisco and interviewed guys at Wakefield Pools Place.

[00:13:39] Steve Boyd was a garbage man, worked for the city pulling garbage. Boyd walked in with a friend who had won credit in the industry to his name. However, he was hesitant to appear in another film since he was under the impression

[00:13:53] that a record executive friend was going to give him a recording contract. When Gage heard that, the part went to Boyd. The truck was rented from a trucking company and they needed a guy with an 18 wheeler license to drive it.

[00:14:06] When they didn't have money to rent the entire truck, they would just rent the cab. The other people besides the, you know, the sort of secondary group of performers were just people we knew or people who knew people who said, you know, can I do

[00:14:18] this? Can I be in this? I just want to do it. A lot of Kansas City Trucking Company was shot in Gage's home out in Laurel Canyon where the crew built sets and downtown L.A. Other shoots were in the desert.

[00:14:34] During production, Gage always had a UCLA student on hand in order to flash their film school card whenever needed and it did come in handy. At one point, one of the scenes footage was lost when a camera jammed up.

[00:14:46] While thinking about what to do, Boyd, who was in the scene, told Gage, just give me 10 minutes and I'll be good to go again. For the direction of the film, Gage has said not one bit of it was improvised. Every line was scripted.

[00:15:05] Kansas City Trucking Company follows a trucker named Hank, played by Richard Locke, on a long haul to Los Angeles with a newly hired man riding shotgun, played by Steve Boyd. Jack Wrangler plays the dispatcher. He and Locke have a quickie before Locke goes on the road.

[00:15:20] The straight man, played by Boyd, is dropped off by his girlfriend and has sexual fantasies of Wrangler as they drive to Los Angeles. Along the way, Locke and Boyd fantasize, experience flashbacks of sexual fantasies or pass by a number of sexual encounters on the side of the road.

[00:15:36] At the end of their journey, they both join in an orgy at the truckers bunkhouse in L.A. The ad agency took one look at the materials, advertised materials and everything. And the lady ran the ad agency said, this is running in the subways.

[00:15:54] And she had they took a full ad campaign that played in the subways. No one had done that gay or straight. No one had ever done an X-rated film before with that kind of campaign. We took ads in the New York Times before it opened.

[00:16:06] It was a big, big thing. And we treated it like a movie. Kansas City Trucking Company was released on Christmas 1976 and was extremely successful with audiences as well as highly profitable for Gage and all of his partners. It's supplanted Boys in the Sand. It became a sensation.

[00:16:23] It broke all kinds of box office records in San Francisco. We opened the same week, that Christmas week that Streisand Star is Born and De Laurentiis King Kong. And by the third week of the run, we were beating them both.

[00:16:36] Gage has said it made him a lot of fast money, giving him the freedom to do what he wanted for a period of time. Since Kansas City Trucking Company was so financially successful, Joe and Sam Gage immediately began to plan a sequel.

[00:16:51] A year later, Gage released El Paso Wrecking Corps. This town's job of getting on my nerves. One more three day layover like this one and I got half of mine to get in that pickup and head out. You got half of mine, period.

[00:17:17] A year after that, a third film, L.A. Tool and Die was released, starring Will Seegers as Locke's love interest as well as Casey Donovan. Hi, where are you going? Not too far. I'm going to the movies. I'm going to the movies. I'm going to the movies.

[00:17:33] Where are you going? Not too far. Can you help me out? Sure thing, hop in. My name is Fred. What's yours? Fred. Mm-hmm. The emergence of gay identity as a political concept and as the focus of political organizing

[00:18:06] was taking shape in large cities with large lesbian and gay communities. Smaller cities and rural areas, however, were still in the closet. Gage pointed his camera in that direction in order to portray the play of homosexual

[00:18:19] desire among men who lived outside of urban gay communities of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Gage's Working Man trilogy are regarded as three of the best gay erotic films ever made to this day. Imaginative framing, creative camera work, and their implicit and explicit radical political

[00:18:39] intentions and frequent seriousness of purpose. It has the dreamy qualities of Poole's work mixed with the sexual hunger of Fred Halstead's while making the hero of the films, the quintessential blue-collar working man.

[00:18:54] The film created much of the macho iconography that we have come to know and love and recycled years after. Richard Haltlock was born on June 11th, 1941 in East Oakland, California and was raised by his parents with his brother, writer Robert Locke.

[00:19:20] Both Locke and his younger brother were gay, and though there was a bit of reluctance from his mother at first, their parents were supportive of their sons. Locke would graduate from Pleasantville High School, join the army, and be stationed in Germany as a tank mechanic.

[00:19:34] Once he finished his tour, Locke would return to California and attend Chico State University majoring in history and aesthetics of film. Locke had contemplated a life in film but realized early on in order to make films in

[00:19:52] Hollywood you had to have money, know somebody, or be in a union. Five years later, while in Hollywood, Locke met somebody that asked him if he wanted to be in a movie. A rather different film where actors would take their clothes off but a film altogether.

[00:20:08] One of Locke's first film roles was in Passing Strangers, directed by Arthur J. Bresson in 1974. Later that year, Locke would be featured in Dreamer, an adult film by director Jim West. Locke would go on to gain a cult following after his recurring role as Hank in Joe Gage's

[00:20:25] Working Man trilogy, Kansas City Trucking Company, El Paso Wrecking Corps, and L.A. To All and Die. Locke developed a working relationship with directors Joe Gage and Arthur J. Bresson. Locke struck up a conversation with Bresson after attending the screening of his short

[00:20:41] film Boys and the two remained friends afterwards. Bresson would go on to write Forbidden Letters with Richard Locke in mind and was shot over a period of five years. Locke would go on to have a prolific career appearing in films throughout the rest of

[00:20:54] the 70s and mid-1980s. Locke's success was contributed to his overt sexual positivity, his age, his body frame, and dark hair. Locke really was tall, dark, and handsome. How long you been here? Two and a half years. You got a lot done in that time.

[00:21:16] Well it's been slow because of the money situation but it's coming along. I got my wind generator and it is really doing well. Locke had an insatiable interest in the 21st century, believing that a big problem facing the world was overpopulation and the waste we leave behind.

[00:21:33] He moved to the desert and began to build a 21st century house. As it was, Locke always considered his career as a porn star secondary to his career as a solar house designer and builder.

[00:21:43] I'm going to use some reflectors like that on my solar collector for my hot water heater. Uh huh. Put flaps on both sides of the collector. They'll have aluminum facing it. At night they'll be closed on top of it so the cold won't get into it.

[00:21:58] In the morning you open them up like this and the sun reflects on the one in the morning and the other one in the afternoon so that it gets constant double heat all day long.

[00:22:10] Locke had been fascinated with solar energy and living off the land from an early age. In 1975, he settled on an old soldier settlement property and built a geodesic domed home powered by electricity from his own windmill. You know you can become self-sufficient here.

[00:22:26] You don't have to pay a thing. You're growing your groceries and whatever. So I tax it at $10 a year because I live in the desert. Nobody wants to live in the desert. You know, but for me it's me. The wind is fantastic. I pray for it.

[00:22:33] I like it because the wind generator picks up and you can hear it. It goes puff puff puff puff puff. In 1983, Locke was diagnosed with HIV and retired from adult cinema and became an HIV AIDS activist.

[00:22:57] He received an education from the American Red Cross, Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City and Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz book How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, one of the first reading materials developed for the gay community during the HIV AIDS epidemic.

[00:23:13] Locke would use his celebrity to make appearances at sensible sex seminars to try and influence a younger generation. Around the same time, Locke became a regular visitor to Ward 5B, the first inpatient AIDS ward in the country in San Francisco General Hospital, where he entertained patients, served

[00:23:32] brunch, and gave massages to people with AIDS. Locke would also travel to Mexico routinely for HIV drugs and distribute them in an underground clinic in Sacramento. Locke would also write for the Bay Area Reporter, giving numbers of interviews and writing safe

[00:23:47] sex columns, eventually releasing a book of collected material called In the Heat of Passion, How to Have Hotter, Safer Sex. Locke's last performance in a film was a non-sexual role in Jerry Douglas' The Diamond Stud.

[00:24:18] He moved back to Desert Hot Springs near Palm Springs, but with his health failing, Locke relocated to an apartment in Sacramento to be close to his family and medical facilities.

[00:25:18] On September 25, 1996, Richard Holt Locke died of AIDS-related lymphoma. Richard Locke would begin his career with one word, yes. A word that could have possibly been the title of his autobiography. I said yes. From there, Locke would go on to work with great pioneering directors of gay erotic cinema,

[00:26:18] from Arthur Bresson to Joe Gage to Toby Ross and Wakefield Poole. As a performer, Locke always felt he had an obligation to the men living in small cities far from the major gay centers like New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

[00:26:33] As a futurist, Locke had hopes of building hundreds of solar homes. A truly proud gay man, helping his community as well as he could through one of the darkest periods. As many of these men that came before us, he was gone too soon.

[00:26:49] However, Locke once said, the best thing about film is that he will live a long time, even after he's gone. You've been listening to Demystifying Gay Porn. I am your host, Ike Grande. Demystifying Gay Porn is available wherever you get your podcasts as well as YouTube.

[00:27:18] Demystifying Gay Porn is on X, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram. And if you like what you're watching or listening to and want to be a part of the creative process, head over to Patreon.com backslash Demystifying Gay Porn where you can help support this audiovisual

[00:27:33] podcast and YouTube channel and I can continue making content like you've just enjoyed. Once again, this is Demystifying Gay Porn. My name is Ike Grande and if you watch gay porn, I've definitely helped you get off. Cheers.