Adam Baran Talks Incest Porn With Legendary Director Joe Gage

It’s impossible to overstate the impact Joe Gage has had on the world we fags live in. His iconic Working Man porn trilogy (Kansas City Trucking Company, El Paso Wrecking Corp, and L.A. Tool & Die) depicted blue collar men with undefined sexuality exploring sex with other men — which famously inspired generations of gay men to embrace their masculine side, and take on what eventually became the “clone” look — mustache, blue jeans, sunglasses — that has resurfaced in every decade since the 1970s. Joe followed those films up with Closed Set, still the most brilliant all-sex gay porno ever made.

After Joe took a 16-year break from porn — which coincided with a legit career directing indie movies in Hollywood, the AIDS epidemic, his marriage to a woman and the birth of his two sons (he openly admits he enjoys sleeping with men and women) he returned to porn in 2001 to direct a series of epic films like Arcade on Route 9, Men’s Room: Bakersfield Station, and Slow Heat in A Texas Town. He followed that up with a line of films for his label with Ray Dragon, and hit it big with his incest-themed films Dad Takes A Fishing Trip, Dad Goes to College, and Dad Gets In Trouble, which unleashed a flood of copycat films at Men.com, Icon Male, and more. He’s currently the only gay porn director who made films in the 1970’s who is still directing and blogs daily at JoeGage.com about the things that turn him on. What do we have to do to get him the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Yesterday marked the release of the fourth film in the Dad series, Dad Out West, which adds another generation to the saga of this relentlessly incestuous family: the grandfather, played by fresh-faced senior Scott Reynolds. Why shouldn’t guys of a certain age see themselves in mainstream porn? I sat down with Joe to talk about his new film, his storied career, and what he thinks of people who want him to go bareback.

Adam: So I thought Dad Gets Into Trouble was going to be the final film, making it a trilogy.

Joe: I was going to stop after three because I just didn’t want to be known as “Joe Gage, Mr. Incest”. So I went on to other stuff and people kept contacting me and saying, “Come on, do another Dad movie. Do something with relatives.” And it was pretty fuckin’ sick a lot of the stuff they wanted. But when I was making one of the first movies in my working man trilogy, El Paso Wrecking Corp, I added a scene with two guys and a girl. The press asked why I did that. I said now that ‘Gay Is OK’ which was a late seventies slogan, and homosexuality is becoming more acceptable, if I’m going to push the envelope what could be more radical than a gay guy or two gay guys and a girl? A straight guy, a gay guy, and a girl. For this movie I was thinking, how could I make that formula work for this — for another Dad movie. I thought, I know, I’ll do a son, a father, and a grandfather.

Who plays the grandfather?

His name is Scott Reynolds. He’s really good. I used him on a college picture I was doing for Joe Gage Sex Files. He had done two or three movies at that point, and he was real terrific, easy to work with. Gung ho, versatile, in good shape, and not a spring chicken. White hair and white walrus mustache. Really interesting man. I used him in the college picture, and then he gave me the idea to go with this. Scott could play the grandfather, Allen Silver could play the dad, and one of the sons, the one we like best, Conor Habib, could play the grandson. I rustled it all up and wrote a script about it.

When you and I first met, it was at the Ace Hotel, where we were throwing the Butt Magazine pride event to celebrate the gay porn pay-per-view which I curated for the hotel. We brought you in and did a Q&A and I remember at that point you had flirted with incest in Chainsaw, with Allen Silver and the two sons jerking off together. I remember very specifically you saying, “I don’t want to encourage that so I’ll never have a son and father actually fucking each other or touching.” There was some hesitancy on your part, because we all know that there’s a thin line between presenting incest as a fantasy and the actual reality which is not a very thrilling experience to say the least. 

Totally true.

What changed that led you to be able to say, okay I’m going to do this? And do you still feel qualms about doing it?

I feel no qualms about doing it because I approached it in a very specific way. I like to say it’s an ethical way. I did the first one — Dad Takes A Fishing Trip — and in that one the father and the son had no contact with each other. They’re in scenes together while things are going on, but they did not touch each other. I did that specifically the way I did it in Chainsaw. But then people called me and told me these deep unspoken fantasies and they wanted me to take it to the next level. But I said if I was going to do it then I would have to do it not as a porno, but as a real movie. And this one that’s coming out today is a real movie! A gosh darn movie. It’s got openings and closings and b-roll and complicated dialogue scenes, as long as the sex scenes. It’s shot like a movie!

That’s the last taboo in this day and age of porn, right?

Exactly. I guess it was the last one where I really went far out and totally did a father and son. But we did it in a dramatic way. It was written. It had motivation and there were reasons to do. It wasn’t just let’s get a younger and older guy together and say they’re father and son. It made a big difference to approach it as a movie and not as a porno. Although god knows it’s 85% pornographic material. But I really tried to give it some ethics. This one has an ending — which I cannot divulge — which really ties it all together. I’ve never ever done anything with an older man seducing a younger person whether they were relatives or not. I don’t do that. I don’t do people tricking people. I never would because it’s not ethical or moral. There was a book that came out like 15 years ago, called The Kiss, written by a woman who was a best-selling writer, about an affair she had with her father. I thought, that’s the kind of way I want to approach this. Nobody is raping anybody, nobody is manipulating anybody. The younger person is manipulating the older person to get what they want.

Incest survivors say “All incest is rape,” but a lot of gay people talk about desiring their fathers, and all my friends have stories about sleeping with older men when they were underage. Going to bathrooms and getting fucked at 15, 16, etc. They were the aggressors, desperate for daddy cock. The thing that still makes it controversial is that there are these lines that get drawn that we can’t cross. You’re in a curious position because you have a family yourself. When you’re doing these movies do you put that aside completely and think of what you’re doing as total fantasy, or does the knowledge of a family’s psychology from your own experience get put into the scripts?

No it doesn’t. My family is totally separate from all of this. It’s just my work at this point. Both of my kids are young adults now. One of them just got married a couple of weeks ago. They’re both straight. When my wife first got pregnant with our first kid, I thought, how weird is this gonna be. I’m gonna be a guy who has sex with men and women, what’s it going to be to have a boy around? Can I trust myself if a situation arises down the road? But as soon as you have a kid, for me, and I would say for 99% of the people in the world, you realize that’s not even a consideration, it’s a totally different thing. There’s no chance anything like that could happen.

You were hesitant to do the incest films when I first met you, then you got into doing these films and they’re great, and you’ve branched out — the Doctors and Dads series, and then in Runaway Sons you have a dad and son. Now Men.com has their Stepfather’s Secret and Son Swap series and other people are doing incest stuff much more openly. Do you feel like the pioneer, and do you think you’re doing it better?

I am the pioneer. But I think I’m doing it differently. Those guys are doing straight-up porn. A total fantasy, and it’s just a different approach really. I think what happened was the first Dad films were so successful that everyone said we have to make one too, and I understand that because that’s the way everything works in show-business, movies, books, TV, whatever. I mean look at Jurassic World. People copy other people and things that have gone before and try to get a piece of the pie for themselves. That’s what it’s all about, basically. I shouldn’t say it, but I don’t think any of them do it as well as me. My stuff is different.

I think the way some of those sites do it, they’re structured differently. 20-minute loop scenes and they give the briefest plot. You have, since the beginning of your career, been giving us full movies. You can’t imagine a 20-minute loop by Joe Gage. 

I have a couple of gonzo franchises like Afternoon Milking Club, and the Bukakke films. I’m going to do another one of those soon. Those are just balls out porno sex. But when I make a movie at this point, I want to make a movie, tell a story. We shot on a GoPro this time around because I said to Ray Dragon, come on, let’s try to do something adventurous filming-wise. He’s always jumped at the opportunity to try something new.

The next step is drones!!

We’ve been talking about that actually! Ray wants to do a vacation picture with drones and GoPros. He may do that. That’s one of his things he’s talking about doing.

How long have you guys been working together and how did that happen? 

He did a film for me at Titan, and I knew who he was from his Colt stuff. I knew he did other things. He left the business to go into fashion design, which he’s now starting to do again. When I was first starting to get back into the business, I wrote him a note and said, “I see that you have your own site and I’m considering doing that stuff yourself, can we get together and have a talk and let me pick your brain?” He said sure. Within half a year he ended up coming up on the casting list for a Titan shoot I was doing. I put him in and we bonded and became friends. He worked as an actor for me on two different projects. Then we just kept communicating back and forth. Finally we got together for the super-site. That was six years ago, or so.

What makes it a successful working relationship?

The fact that we’re in two different counties helps.

You’re not right on top of each other.

Exactly. When we need to deal with each other we do, and when we don’t we have our separate lives, although they’re oddly similar. We live in the sticks. We both have animals, although I don’t have chickens liker he does. We both have lives that are different than just porn. But he is a tech guy. He’s a terrific photographer, and he knows all the internet stuff. He is much more scientifically oriented. He likes that. It’s what he’s good at. When people used to ask me about Sam Gage, who was my first partner in the beginning. I would say, “I’m the dreamer and he’s the schemer.” Ray doesn’t scheme but he does handle all those complicated scientific gizmos. The scheme connects with thinking up new ways to shoot and the intricacies of everything. We’re constantly thinking of new things. We know that digital and internet is the future of all of this. In the last two years all the video on demand stuff is where all our revenue is coming from. The majority of it anyway. It’s good and it just keeps growing and growing. But at the same time, every six months or so, there’s a new thing that you have to learn and master and Ray is very good at that, figuring out how to use that stuff to our advantage.

One of the things I’ve always been interested in with you, is that you are among the most film literate porn directors ever. 

Just before I called you I had been watching Horror Express on Turner Classic Movies.

With Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

And Helga Liné! Immediately after it ended, I ran onto IMDB to find out what I could about it. I remember seeing when it played on 42nd Street in 1972, but I think I was stoned out of my mind at the time. I remember the red eyeballs and not much else. I saw the last half hour of it and thought, wow, this is really interesting stuff. I love kitschy European stuff.

I know a lot of your films have titles borrowed from other films. Cop Shack on 101 which is based on Shack Out on 101, right? A notorious anti-communist b-movie. 

Right. A Terry Moore movie.

Is that your way of staying interested in what you’re doing? Putting little connections to favorite films in your work? Or is it something that you think will connect with your audience base?

It’s funny. Those movies were out and those titles were out, and they were advertised in the movie section in the newspapers every day. Titles like that would just grab me. I was a child. I thought, wow, this is really interesting. I did something at UCLA with Vito Russo over 20 years ago, talking about film to a group of people. They asked what my influences were. One of the things I said was, to me, movie stars are basically equal and in those days, to me the biggest movie stars in the world were probably Rhonda Fleming and Fernando Lamas. They were bigger than life, gorgeous, Technicolor people, beautiful to look and they did interesting stories. To me that’s what movies are. No matter who is in them, a movie is a movie.

Why haven’t you written your autobiography yet?

Well people keep asking me and I think maybe I will. I’m a huge record keeper. I have notes about everything I’ve ever done. I wrote two novels and they were each like 700 typewritten pages. 500 published pages. It was probably the hardest fucking work I’ve ever done in my life. I could do it, but then, I think, do I want to do that and sell 3,000 copies or something? There’s a cut off in terms of the public interest. I think about it and keep making notes and think maybe I should do what Hugh Hefner used to do in the sixties. He did the Playboy manifesto, a collection of pieces he would write in magazine. Eventually they were published as a book. They were his philosophical musings. Not really autobiography. I don’t know. I keep telling people I will, and then I look at that work and the work that it would take to do that and it’s very daunting. It really is. That’s not to say that I don’t continue making notes about it, because I do.

You probably have thousands and thousands of stories and names to drop.

I really do. I was around a bunch of people because of my personal relationships at the time. I knew a lot of the creme de la creme. Both in front of the camera and behind.

Who would be the most famous or notable?

I really can’t talk about it all, but I would say Warren Beatty. He was a close friend of a close friend of mine. I was around him for a period of time. He was a fascinating man. Still is, I’m sure. But people of that caliber floated through my life considerably.

Do you watch other people’s porn? Do you get off on any of it? What do you like?

I like very much the work of Vinnie Russo at str8boyzseduced.com. He just blows these straight guys and they come back and he takes them through these steps of sexuality. He sets up the camera and it’s total reality. He’s very into sex. It’s hard to explain. It’s dramatic in a way that nobody else really does. But I watch everything. All of the American stuff, some of the Euro stuff. It’s gotten really tiresome to me. Who is the guy who makes only one or two a year? He’s an American but he’s lived in Europe a long time. Not William Higgins.

Kristen Bjorn?

Yes. I was fascinated by his stuff when I first saw it 15 years ago or so. There’s an event in Laguna Beach, once a year, where hundreds of people in the community pose in a tableau of a famous painting onstage. The curtains are closed and the audience is in an amphitheater and the curtains open and there is –

The Last Supper or something like that.

Yes. Perfectly realized. Lit, costumed, etc. I always thought of that when I would watch Kristen Bjorn’s work because everything is structured in such an intense way.

Right, those big group scenes are like Hieronymus Bosch or the The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault.

Yeah. I was fascinated by that for a long time. I also like Military Classified.

I know that you haven’t done bareback since the seventies when HIV wasn’t a concern. I’m curious if you watch it now, because it’s just everywhere.

Yeah. I do. We’re constantly asked on our site to go bareback. “Oh everyone wants it. The audience wants it.” Well, fuck the audience if that’s what they want. There’s plenty of places for them to see it elsewhere. I watch it and to me it’s not one iota different then when people are having sex with condoms. So if you had to make a moral choice then the right thing to do is that. People are telling me now about Truvada, which sounds like a kitchen cleaning product or some kind of special thing that’s advertised at 3AM for vitamin enrichment.

Yeah. I’m on it for over a year. For me it’s added protection. If I want to bareback with I can, but I’d prefer it to be with someone I was more closely involved than just anonymous scenes. Though I really haven’t done that yet.

I’ve worked and still work with people who are positive, but they use condoms when they get to the fucking scenes. I don’t have any judgements about that. But I wouldn’t do bareback. You know who Vivienne Westwood is?

Of course.

She has the famous t-shirt with the two naked cowboys facing each other with their dicks facing each other and almost touching. I wanted to do that image and so I was shooting Men’s Room 2. At the end, where the two leading guys were naked, facing each other, head to toe, full frame, dicks just barely touching. It was the end of the movie and one guy was lighting a cigarette for the other guy. Leaning in, cupping the flame. I shot it and Bruce Cam said I really want you to cut that scene. I said why? He said he didn’t approve of showing these guys smoking.

Ha! 

I thought, you know what? I fucking hate you but I’ll do it. Then about a year after I thought, he’s absolutely right. I never have done it since. I have somebody chomping on a cigar once in a while but that’s it. But I thought he was right. Why should you promote something if it looks beautiful visually. The days of Bette Davis smoking are over. It’s not healthy. It kills people. It’s the same kind of thing. Bruce was right. It’s the same thing with barebacking. It’s not my deal.

Do you listen to the criticisms people have about your movies? Do you take them seriously or not?

I take them all seriously because everybody has an opinion. If they’re going to air it, I’m happy to listen to what they’re going to say. Mostly they don’t like me dealing with straight people all the time. “Why don’t you just deal with gay men?” I think I have to re-educate everybody about the basics of drama, which is conflict. I don’t do gay men. I just do men who aren’t saying or expressing or showing in any overt way what kind of men they are. They’re just men. That’s always been my thing from the beginning.

The guys are fluid in their sexuality. 

Exactly. One of the key themes I always do is someone having sex for the first time with another person of the same sex, because that to me is what conflict and drama is and all that stuff.

Is that preference for not having the guys be explicitly gay-only informed by your own experience sleeping with men and women?

Sure. Other people who criticize my films don’t like the intergenerational stuff. The old guys, the young guys. “Why can’t they just be lovers?” Because I don’t want to just see two beautiful guys falling in love. That’s not my deal. Drama is conflict. You set it up and then resolve it. That’s what telling a story is. That’s what I do.

You are well known for creating an archetype of masculinity with your films that inspired tons of gay guys to take on a more masculine persona and look in the ’70s. Do you ever feel like breaking that mold and putting a feminine guy in one of your scenes?

I’ve used several people – willowy boys – like that, only when I end up shooting them, I try to soft peddle it as much as possible. When I find an interesting one I put them in. They are part of the sexual, masculine landscape. The thing about the masculine men that I started portraying was that I never did ultra-macho. I did the working man. Blue collar men. That’s the world I come from. I grew up in it and know all the archetypes. They never take it to the next step where they’re Tom of Finland guys, although I’ve been heavily influenced by Tom of Finland. But they weren’t there in terms of their ultra-butchness. Although I’ve used a few.

Do you have a favorite actor that you’ve worked with in your career?

I have a bunch of ‘em. Right now I’m loving David Anthony, who I use as much as I can because he’s just an ideal man to my way of thinking. He’s not pretentious, beautiful to look at, big dick, a great sense of humor and he’s a total professional. Comes in and does the work and leaves. He knows how to behave on a set. All the things you want no matter what you’re shooting. I also like Andrew Justice a lot. Both of them don’t take themselves seriously. Life is a bowl of cherries for them and they live their lives accordingly. They’re not trivial guys, they’re just good men. They know how to behave in front of the camera instinctually. The camera loves them and they’re comfortable in front of the lens.

One of the things that I found so interesting when I visited the set of American Bukakke, was how much everyone told me it would be like a German precision thing. Come in 10 minutes before the shooting, take the pill, get into wardrobe and on the set right away, then off in an hour. Was that trial and error or was it always how you worked?

I did a movie once called Bad Girl’s Dormitory. We shot for a couple of weeks and one day of shooting was 20 hours long and at the end of that day I said, this will never ever happen again. It was brutal. There was no need for it if it had been properly planned out. I was very invested in the idea of learning how to run a production board and how to work with a shot list which I always do. Basically we have it down to what we think of as a perfect science, although it’s not because things change every day and we have to flip things around. For a Mexican-American, I’m very Germanic in my approach to work.

What’s next for you? Dad comes out today, but what’s next?

I have another Joe Gage Sex Files in the can and I’ll probably start cutting that soon. Then towards the end of the summer I’ll probably shoot another one of those, and then another big Joe Gage movie. I have a bunch of scripts and stories but I don’t know which I’ll do, because I’m also going to shoot a big 2 part movie for Titan this fall.

That was going to be my last question — whether you would ever go back to Titan?

Yes! It’s got an interesting approach to it which I cannot say because I don’t want to spoil it. So three more things this year, cut a Sex Files, shoot a Sex Files, and a Joe Gage movie for the holiday season.

And then you’ll write your book.

We’ll see!

 

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Adam Baran is a filmmaker, blogger, former online editor of Butt Magazine and co-curator of Queer/Art/Film. His short film JACKPOT, about a porn-hunting gay teen, won Best Short Film at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was recently featured on The Huffington Post, Queerty, and Towleroad, among others. He is a features programmer at Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival and NewFest in New York. In his spare time, he complains about things to his friends. “Fisting for Compliments”, his weekly musings about the intersection of sex, art, porn, and history, will appear every Monday on TheSword. You can contact him at Adam@TheSword.com and follow him on Twitter at @ABaran999. Check out his previous columns in the Fisting For Compliments Archive.