Pink Angels

thornyc thoughtfully sent me a very special DVD, a copy of The Pink Angels, which was a cheaply made '71 comedy / exploitation film about a gay outlaw bike gang. Finally got around to watching it last night, and it was highly amusing. Thor had mentioned the ending was kind of dark, but the whole film was such a crazy screwball comedy that I could only see it as hilarious. The film made no sense at all until the last 30 seconds, which are so gratuitously shocking (in that quaint 70s way) that you can't help but laugh. I think it would be a great addition to the next VKMC run!

The filming and editing was pretty spotty, but dang, they did their homework. It was uncanny - the characters in the film could have been taken straight from the early RMC, though the club would not form until a year after its release. Surely there must have been some influence there. They had a poet, a cook, a huge hairy guy, a groovy black guy, and a mysterious source of funding that was never really explained. There were picnics and pranks and drag. Curiously missing was any explicit gay sex beyond a quick kiss - I suppose that hairy guys in dresses was shocking enough for the time! Anyway, it was all strangely familiar. The producers apparently knew a lot about the subject!

I was especially surprised to see the patch on this character's lapel:



Why? Because I'd only ever seen it once before - on my own vest:



Oooh, some sort of deep cosmic connection? I finally figured out just where it came from. It turns out that it's the California national guard patch:



Not especially rare in retrospect, but it tickled me to see it. Cultural continuity and all that. Gives me a woody.