Kansas City Trucking Company was the first of Joe Gage's ancient "Working Man" trilogy which continued with El Paso Wrecking Corporation and concluded with L.A. Tool and Die. This first instalment introduces Hank (Richard Locke), a gangly truckie with a taste for cock. Steve Boyd plays his travelling buddy, a handsome young guy lulled off to mini-sleeps along the journey, naps that are filled with dreams of men. It's increasingly difficult to figure out which couplings are real and which are imagined, as Gage's oblique movie only becomes more Mobius-like as it goes along.

Kansas City Trucking Company is an interesting film, a key text, really, for anyone interested in gay visual histories. Though I was a four-year-old Australian at the time this film was released, watching it on DVD today I felt like I was in a Times Square porno theatre with a colored paisley hanky tucked into the back pocket of my Levi's 501s. The film's images drip with Seventies blue-collar sexiness, replete with a greasy-overalled "mechanic" beating off with one hand and gripping a lit cigarette with the other.

But while the artistry of the Kansas City experience is unquestionable as a porn film it just doesn't really work at all, for me. The film's sex scenes are too fragmented and impressionistic to have any masturbation value and I found myself lost in the abstract narrative. Overdubbed dialogue and dream-like sequences that pop in and out with no logical flow are hypnotising, but I don't settle into a porn movie with the desire to be hypnotised. Perhaps it's a generational thing, but I believe the dreamlike beauty of the movie works against the creation of sexual tension, and this is what makes for confusion in appraising the film. I'm used to expecting far more obvious porn films, cum-shot-on-cue, and I struggled to find any real arousal here.

So I don't know whether to blame my spoon-fed porn tastes and say that I'm too used to obvious, wham-bam porn to appreciate this poetic classic as anything more than a museum piece, or whether gay porn from this nascently-gay era now belongs more in the museum rather than the private DVD player.


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bjland.ws (extensive blog and excellent pornology, concentrating on vintage porn)