The Pink Angels (1971)

In the strange world of sixties and seventies exploitation there are many films which the makers clearly thought were well-meaning and  ground-breaking, ye today just seem offensive on multiple layers.  The latest example of this I've stumbled across is The Pink Angels (1971), a gay biker comedy.  I'll say that again: a gay biker comedy.  In 1971.  It concerns half a dozen California bikers (who ride in motorbike-sidecar combinations) who are on a road trip to a drag ball in San Francisco - because that's what leather clad gay guys were doing in the early seventies.  Apparently.  Which is where we encounter the film's first problem: it can't differentiate homosexuality and transvestism.  They are two completely different things - the majority of gay guys aren't transvestites or drag queens.  In my (admittedly limited) experience, most transvestites are heterosexual - the just like dressing in women's clothes.  Now, I'm sure that the makers of The Pink Angels thought that, by presenting these gay bikers as the heroes of the film, they were being incredibly progressive.   The problem, though, was that they seemed to know very little about actual homosexuals, (which, as they were working in the movie industry, seems very surprising), taking the attitude that gays, transvestites, transsexuals etc were all the same things - they were just a bunch of crazy 'queers'.

It doesn't help that in their portrayal of homosexuality, they succeed in embracing just about every negative gay stereotype in existence.  But hey, they were obviously equal opportunities offenders as their portrayal of biker culture is equally stereotyped.  The bikers in the film, whether gay or straight, all wear black leather, all exhibit extreme anti-social behaviour, and sport Nazi memorabilia.  The latter is obviously problematic with regard to the gay bikers, one of whom wears a coal scuttle helmet and another has swastikas on his helmet.  Still, the makers intent was obviously to produce a 'zany' road trip comedy, so the film meanders along, stumbling from one surreal situation to another, as the gay bikers encounter various characters along their way.  Their number also includes what appears to be a homage to Laurel and Hardy in the shape of one couple consisting of a large pompous and domineering biker and his skinny hapless companion who writes bad poetry and speaks with a bad Liverpool accent.  They indulge in some mild slapstick during the course of the film.  The road trip is interspersed with scenes of some crazy right-wing general who is - for reasons unexplained (other than that he is clearly a reactionary nut) - trying to stop the 'Pink Angels'.  Which leads us to the film's mind-boggling conclusion, which sees our heroes lynched by the aforementioned general.  One can only assume the makers were trying to emulate the downbeat ending of other biker movies, in particular Easy Rider.  

The film is a mess and, as I have said, offensive on multiple levels.  Yet it remains an intriguing oddity which exerts a strange fascination while it is playing - you just have to keep watching to see how much weirder it is going to get.  It is the kind of film that could only have been made in the early seventies and offers a unique perspective on the whole sub-genre of biker movies, even if its attempts to highlight the innate homoeroticism of the genre is crude.  The Pink Angels might be a terrible film that ultimately doesn't have the courage of its convictions when it comes to exposing the gay sub-text of the biker movie, but it is entertaining in its bizarre and ramshackle way.