Joe Gage Put the Art into ‘Art Film’
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As the last film in the trio that Gage began in 1976 with Kansas City Trucking Co. and followed in 1978 by El Paso Wrecking Corp., L.A. Tool & Die stands on its own as the most fully realized of the three. It was followed in 1982 by the even more daring, if somewhat more linear, Heatstroke, with which Gage thought he had said farewell to that phase of his career.

Joe Gage emerged from the milieus of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and hustler cum novelist John Rechy, the experimental underground films of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, the turbulence of the late 60’s, the subsequent “Sexual Revolution,” and the emergence of “porn chic” (exemplified by Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door). He is arguably the most sophisticated of the pioneering gay porn filmmakers of the 70’s that also included Wakefield Poole and Fred Halsted. His films do not have the distinction, as do Halsted’s, of being archived in the Museum of Modern Art film collection. However, as gay film festivals have emerged and evolved in recent decades, Gage’s early films are getting the serious attention they deserve.

Working technologically and cinematically by the seat of his pants—intuitively and without affectation—the young Gage drew upon his eclectic knowledge of movies from Hollywood classics to the French New Wave. He also tapped deeply into the potent anger of men living in the heartland of mid-century America but forced to live on the margins as “sexual outlaws.”

Like the filmmaker himself, Gage’s players—who were not “models,” as he insisted—were “real men” in every sense of the word, melting boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity while challenging rigid sex roles and the oppressive stereotypes of a moralistic, heterosexual society that defined homosexuals as effeminate, perverse, or dangerously deviant. Never exploitative, violent, or abusive, Gage’s men are equals. Whatever role-playing takes place is there not simply to titillate but to enhance the film’s exploration of sexual mores, desire and power.

Women appear too, fleetingly, not as caricatures but in sexualized roles that broaden the films’ thematic territory. In El Paso Wrecking Co., for example, the so-called “heterosexual gaze” is reversed as a woman watches her husband and another man get it on in the basement of a roadside honky-tonk (which may or may not be a gay hang-out). These scenes makes the provocative point (for 1978) that homo- and heterosexuals may share more beneath the surface than society allows them to acknowledge.

Politically subversive, Gage’s films are never overtly didactic, preachy, or self-conscious. Possessing the anthropological authenticity of a director who lived the era, the films work mostly on the subliminal level. Shot in 16 mm and fully scripted, they are economical in content and produced in a cinéma vérité style. One of their hallmarks is the use of complex soundtracks, emerging mostly from car radios—local advertisements, news reports, sports fans cheering, right-wing Christian talk radio, jazz, and especially lively country and western music. These are juxtaposed unobtrusively with deft, evocative imagery and the unfolding narrative, enhanced by loosely interwoven, telling vignettes.

The final ingredient in these movies is Gage’s trademark building of tension, as men young and old, forced to convey their desire in unspoken looks and coded language, experience the risk and thrill of approaching the forbidden—and then crossing over. Although L.A. Tool & Die cannot be reduced to a strictly linear narrative, here is its basic thrust: When the El Paso Wrecking Corp. shuts down, Hank—a lanky, forty-something drifter (played with wry, laid-back masculinity by Richard Locke)—has nearly had enough. Fate intervenes when he spots the younger Wylie (Will Seagers), an elusive veteran still haunted by his lover’s death in Vietnam. Despite their instant connection, Wylie sets off for a West Coast welding job, with Hank in determined pursuit (but always ready for some thrills along the way). Hank also has his mind on a homestead that he’s bought, sight unseen, with its dream-come-true guarantee of a flourishing orange grove. Wylie finally gives in to Hank’s now romantic desires and joins him at the homestead, only to discover that it’s an abandoned shack at the edge of a dry field. Fed up, Hank drives a “”For Sale” sign into the ground—which bursts into a geyser of water from a precious aquifer just below the surface. Thus Hank, Wylie, and the “Working Man’s Trilogy” finally come together in a dénouement that is at once tender and exuberant, as the parched American landscape itself shudders in an unexpected gift of god-sent orgasmic release.

Joe Gage’s films do not attempt to cover the range of gay and bisexual men living in the U.S. from the 1950’s to the late 70’s. His focus is mostly on rugged and assertive working-class men. The places homosexuals of the day were forced into were an underground world of abandoned shacks, seamy backrooms, public bathhouses and restrooms, dangerous by-ways in parks, and mafia-controlled bars regularly raided by police. The “Gage Men” take full advantage of these places. They insist too on inhabiting (and will not be driven from) mechanic shops, the gymnasium, ranches, small towns, cities, the cabs of Mack trucks, and the great American highway itself, running the whole length of Route 66, and from sea to shining sea. Sometimes disturbing in their obsessive sexuality, often brazenly exuberant, Gage’s films are ultimately liberating works that proclaim the humanity of “regular” men who were determined to live their lives in any way they could, despite the hostility of a society that would not even let them breathe.

Gage promoted his work with newspaper ads and cheerfully defiant tongue-in-cheek trailers that acknowledged their playful intersection at the border of mainstream films and hard-core porn. Assertions of his works’ legitimacy as well as insider jokes between his colleagues and his gay audiences, these trailers may have signaled that Gage was not taking himself too seriously. Such were the times that Gage, however transcendent his work, may have felt that he wasn’t allowed to think of his films as serious art. They were, after all, movies whose ostensible intent was to get gay men off sexually.

A gap of nearly two decades followed Gage’s 1982 Heatstroke. Meanwhile, the gay adult film business to which he helped give birth had become a full-fledged industry. While he was off making horror films and straight sexploitation films under other pseudonyms, having entered into an avowedly monogamous marriage and raised a family, his legend had grown among gay viewers. In 2001, he was summoned back by Titan Media to make gay porn again, now on video. The offer clearly struck a long dormant chord. The kids growing up and the marriage having run its course, he took the bait, separated from his wife, and returned to shaping the sexual imaginations of gay porn consumers.

Gage endeavored in the resulting videos to maintain his edge while satisfying the commercial demands of those eager to exploit the “Gage brand.” Meanwhile, seeking to escape some of Titan’s restrictions—the requisite number of sex scenes and the minimal dialogue—he also started producing his own films. Although still a cut above the market, none of these can match the power of his early œuvre. And with the broadening mainstream acceptance of gays and the assimilation of many gay lifestyles to heterosexual conventions, it looks like the time has passed for Gage to make truly subversive, cutting-edge films such as those of the 1970’s.

Still, one wonders what a neo-Joe Gage film for the 21st century might look like in today’s more permissive  but “politically correct” sexual climate. What implicit, subversive social critique could it convey, what ethnographic reality depict, while still maintaining the capacity to arouse? The question raises intriguing possibilities.  Perhaps Joe Gage—or some other filmmaker—may yet come up with an artistic response.

Conrad Brewster is a writer based in Kansas City, Missouri.