Tim Kincaid (born 2 July 1944) is an American film director, film writer and film producer often credited as Joe Gage or Mac Larson.
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Born in Santa Barbara, California, and raised on Catalina Island, Kincaid directed and wrote an influential trilogy of gay films, collectively referred to as either “The Kansas City Trilogy” or “The Working Man Trilogy” in the late 1970s under the name “Joe Gage.” The films, Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Corp. and L.A. Tool & Die were praised for their consistent portrayals of male/male sex occurring between rugged, masculine men who came from blue-collar and rural backgrounds and who related as “equal partners” - avoiding the frequent stereotypes of such men as effeminate inhabitants of urban gay neighborhoods, or who were caught up in a constraining “you play the woman, I’ll be the man” mindset of dominant/submissive roles.
And while the sex was sometimes rough and occurred in disreputable venues such as truck-station restrooms, the characters in the Gage films often displayed bonds of male camaraderie that went beyond fleeting sexual intercourse, and that more or less entirely ignored the boundaries of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” social identity.
To a perceptive viewer, some of the characters in Gage's films can be clearly understood as “gay identified,” while others are just as clearly intended to represent bisexual men who normally inhabit the heterosexual world and may even be happily married. But many other characters, and perhaps most of them, defy easy categorization. "I never went out of my way to emphasize the butch or straight attributes of my guys -- I always sought to portray them as representatives of the average, ordinary -- for the most part -- working class citizen."[1] The Trilogy films also were praised for their cinematography, editing, music, sound design and use of natural locations to stage scenes in the films.
For all of these reasons, Kincaid’s aesthetic sensibilities had a significant impact not only on his contemporaries in the adult film world, but on gay-male culture as it was developing in the 1970s and 1980s. "He's ... the first artist who dared to suggest that sex between men was more about camaraderie than romance, more about hot action than a lifestyle. While his characters were always working-class Joes, his '70s epics became blueprints of sexual tension-building and were also stylistically innovative."[2] Numerous filmmakers of today cite the Gage films as being highly instrumental in their own development, and at least one gay singer-songwriter has used the phrase "a Joe Gage face" in his lyrics, knowing that for some listeners it would immediately evoke a certain kind of male handsomeness, in much the same way that "Gibson girl" or "Patrick Nagel" bring to mind a specific type of feminine beauty. "The "Gage Men", as they were known during the heyday of the 70s, appeared more sexy Average Joe than Abercrombie & Fitch. They tended toward the hairy and the hunky ..."[1]
In addition to the trilogy, Kincaid directed (also under the name Joe Gage) several notable gay adult films in the early 1980s including Closed Set and Heatstroke. Under the pseudonym "Mac Larson", Kincaid directed several lower budgeted and grittier titles, but these films did not have the same lasting impact as those that he directed under his "Joe Gage" moniker.
Since then, he has written and directed numerous films under contract with the Titan Media Studio, including Back to Barstow, Arcade on Route 9 and the successful Men's Room series which featured a strong emphasis on watersports.
Kincaid has also made a few appearances on screen, notably in Morning, Noon and Night (1975) as an adult performer, and was allegedly one of the "Gage Men" featured in the backgrounds of orgy scenes in the films he directed in the late '70s and early '80s. Since then, he has appeared in non-sexual roles in a few adult films and makes an appearance as a commentator in Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon (2008) a documentary about Jack Wrangler, the first gay adult superstar and the star of Kansas City Trucking Co.
In 2001, Kincaid, as “Joe Gage,” was inducted into the GayVN Awards Hall of Fame. In recent years, Kincaid has implied that he could be working on his memoirs. He daily posts on his blog at [2]
In October of 2008, Joe Gage and adult star/director and fashion designer Ray Dragon announced they were creating a new company, D/G Mutual Media that would produce gay adult erotic content that was edgier and less polished than mainstream gay material. Their first production was Closed Set: Oral Report, which was followed by Dad Takes a Fishing Trip. In early 2010, D/G Mutual Media will release Gage's Jock Park.
| GayVN Awards Hall of Fame[4] 2001 |