Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

The Angels are great favorites on the sado-masochism circuit, and although motorcycle hoods as a group are consistently accused of deviate leanings, I suspect the issue was stripped to the bony truth one afternoon by a Frisco Angel who said: Hell yes, I’ll take a blow-job any day for ten bucks. Just the other night in some bar downtown I had a queer come up to me with a big tenner. . . he laid it on me and said what did I want to drink? I said, ‘A double Jack Daniels, baby,’ so he told the bartender, ‘Two of those for me and my friend,’ and then he sat down there on the bar rail and gave me a hell of a blow-job, man, and all I had to do was smile at the bartender and keep cool. He laughed. Hell, and me with four kids and a broad up front dancing the wig or the wag or something like that with some spade. Shit, man, the day they can call me queer is when I let one of these faggots suck on me for less than a tenner. . . Man, I’d go underwater and fuck fish for that kind of money, you just tell me who’s payin.

To whatever extent the Hell’s Angels may or may not be latent sado-masochists or repressed homosexuals is to me — after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists — almost entirely irrelevant.

There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won’t change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemor­rhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors. . . but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best.

For the same reason, the behavior of the Hell’s Angels would not be changed or subdued for a moment if every newspaper in the land denounced them as brutal homosexuals — even if they were. Significantly, I have never heard anyone who had any per­sonal dealings with them endorse the Freudian viewpoint — probably because anyone who spends any time with the Angels knows the difference between outlaw motorcyclists and homo­sexual leather cults. At any bar full of Hell’s Angels there will be a row of sleek bikes lined up on the curb outside. At a leather bar there are surrealistic renderings of motorcycles on the wall and perhaps, but not always, one or two huge, accessory-laden Harleys parked outside — complete with windshields, radios and red plastic saddlebags. The difference is as basic as between a professional football player and a rabid fan. One is a performer in a harsh, unique corner of reality; the other is a cultist, a passive worshiper, and occasionally a sloppy emulator of a style that fas­cinates him because it is so hopelessly remote from the reality he wakes up to every morning.

According to the Lynch report, While homosexuals seem to be attracted to Hell’s Angels, no information received indicates that the Hell’s Angels as a group are homosexuals. They seem primarily concerned with heterosexual contacts. Some hetero­sexual perversions figure in the police reports, but taken in con­text, they appear to be means of attracting attention, ‘being different,’ and performed primarily for the shock impact on others. These and other attention-attracting actions are character­ized by the Angels as ‘showing class.’

Certainly the Lynch report is not the last word on the Angels, but the nature and bias of the document is such that any available evi­dence of their homosexual action would have been prominently mentioned. The report makes so many references to cunnilingus that the word fellatio is conspicuous by its absence. No doubt there are Freudian ramifications even in this omission — but again, I think they are mainly beside the point. Any attempt to explain the Hell’s Angels as an essentially homosexual phenomenon would be a cop-out, a self-satisfied dismissal of a reality that is as complex and potentially malignant as anything in American society.