Keep on Truckin'

Keep on Truckin’

KANSAS CITY TRUCKING COMPANY

USA, 1976
Director: Joe Gage
Stars: Jack Wrangler, Steve Boyd, Richard Locke

Available on DVD - order here

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 of Steve’s 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’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 the artistry of the Kansas City experience doesn’t translate to hot porn, at least not for me. The film’s sex scenes are too hypnotic and impressionistic to have any masturbation value and I found myself lost in the abstract narrative.

A key text for anyone interested in gay visual histories, but perhaps too much of a museum piece for anyone weaned on anything from Jeff Stryker through to Dawson, and everything in between.