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

The motorcycle is obviously a sexual symbol. It’s what’s called a phallic loco-motor symbol. It’s an extension of one’s body, a power between one’s legs.

— Dr. Bernard Diamond, University of California criminologist, 1965

The best-known public link between outlaw cyclists and homo­sexuality is a film titled Scorpio Rising. It is an underground classic of sorts, created in the early 1960s by a young San Francisco film-maker named Kenneth Anger. He never claimed that Scorpio had anything to do with the Hell’s Angels, and most of it was filmed in Brooklyn, with the co-operation of a group of motorcycle buffs so loosely organized that they hadn’t even both­ered to name themselves. Unlike The Wild One, Anger’s creation had no journalistic or documentary intent. It was an art film with a rock-‘n’-roll score, a bizarre little comment on twentieth cen­tury America, using motorcycles, swastikas and aggressive homo­sexuality as a new culture trilogy. By the time the Hell’s Angels joined the cultural mainstream Anger had made several other films with a strongely homosexual bias, and he seemed offended at the notion that he might be so far behind the times as to turn out anything so banal as a topical documentary.

Nevertheless, Scorpio Rising played in San Francisco in 1964 at a North Beach theater called The Movie, where Anger was living at the time, upstairs, which advertised the film with a side­walk montage of Hell’s Angels newspaper clippings. The impli­cation was so obvious that even the San Francisco Angels made a pilgrimage to check it out. It didn’t groove them at all. They weren’t angry, but genuinely offended. Their name, they felt, had been put to fraudulent commercial use. Hell, I liked the film, said Frenchy. But it didn’t have anything to do with us. We all enjoyed it. But then we came outside and saw all those clippings about us, pasted up like advertisements. Man, it was a bummer, it wasn’t right. A lot of people got conned, and now we have to listen to all this crap about us being queers. Shit, did you see the way those punks were dressed? And those silly goddamn junkwagon bikes? Man, don’t tell me that has any connection with us. You know it doesn’t.

Anger seemed to agree, but quietly. There was no need to spoil a new boom for the film. . . and besides, one of the keenest tal­ents in the homosexual repertoire is the ability to recognize homosexuality in others, very nearly without exception. So the phenomenon emerged: the Angels provided the realism that Scorpio lacked. The secret-queer factor gave the press an element of strange whimsy to mix in with the rape reports, and the out­laws themselves were relegated to new nadirs of sordid fascina­tion. More than ever before, they were wreathed in an aura of violent and erotic mystery. . . brawling satyrs, ready to attempt congress with any living thing, and in any orifice.

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These punks with their cycles and their Nazi trappings have it in for the world — and for everyone in it. They’re a menace, a damned serious menace that’s growing bigger every year.

— Florida police official quoted in Man’s Peril (February 1966)

They worship their motorcycles. They take them inside their homes at night. They sleep on grease-caked beds, but their bikes are spotless.

— Los Angeles cop, 1965

The farther the Angels roam from their own turf, the more likely they are to cause panic. A group of them seen on a highway for the first time is offensive to every normal notion of what is supposed to be happening in this country; it is bizarre to the point of seeming like a bad hallucination. . . and this is the context in which the term outlaw makes real sense. To see a lone Angel screaming through traffic — defying all rules, limits and pat­terns — is to understand the motorcycle as an instrument of anarchy, a tool of defiance and even a weapon. A Hell’s Angel on foot can look pretty foolish. Their sloppy histrionics and inane conversations can be interesting for a few hours, but beyond the initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for demented children. There is something pathetic about a bunch of men gathering every night in the same bar, taking themselves very seriously in their ratty uniforms, with nothing to look forward to but the chance of a fight or a round of head jobs from some drunken charwoman.