Gaysploitation.

Unlike the Blaxploitation and Kung Fu crazes of the early and mid 70s, the Gay Exploitation genre never really arrived. Outside of underground films and odd shorts and loops, gay characters just didn’t bust out on drive-in screens and urban adult-only theaters. Where was our vigilante Pam Grier, our abtacular Bruce Lee?

Only the peerless Tura Satana (top right) as Varla in Russ Meyer’s 1965 classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has the balls to assume the mantle of all-time Super Queer.

The joy of Faster, Pussycat! is that Ms. Satana is in many ways playing herself. She was trained in karate, did a stint in reform school, married at thirteen, joined an all-girl gang, was a popular burlesque dancer, dated Elvis and garnered bit parts in a Hollywood studio system that couldn’t accommodate her exoticism.

We know her Varla is bad because she’s got a face like a kabuki mask of disdain, a repetoire of judo death blows, and cleavage that runs deeper than a California fault line. Add her two sociopathic go-go dancer cohorts Rosie, the enigmatic Haji (supine below) and Billie, the bodacious Lori Williams (below right), into the mix and the movie spills deliriously over the top.

The triad is such an stunning camp spectacle that they’re almost impossible to define as fully man or woman. Are they buxom, cat-fighting male fantasies? Brawling bull daggers behind the wheel? She-male outlaws or tranny terrors on a desert death trip into oblivion?

With lines like “My motor never runs down. Would you like to look under my hood?”, “We don’t do nothin’ soft! Everything we do is hard!” and “I never try anything — I just do it!” it doesn’t matter which way you swing. These three will have you revved-up and ready to pounce.

In a decade when the Stonewall Rebellion would have police retreating from rioting gays, Faster, Pussycat! was a countercultural lightning strike. The plot’s central conflict is between a snarling redneck family of woman-haters and a mini-mob of kickass dykes; isolated, backward men go head-to-head with Clydeless Bonnies on the rampage.

The great thing about gay identification is that it never has been fussy about crossing the gender line. Lesbians have James Dean and Johnny Cash, just as gay male cults develop around non-conformist female stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

Attitude is more vital than what’s between the legs, and these tigresses redefine chutzpah. The she-devils of Faster, Pussycat! can really be taken as fascinating hermaphrodites in body and in spirit. Their breasts are big and the hips shimmy, yet the shoulders are broad and the jaws are square. They speak to ruggedness and glamour as they pummel or seduce men who would play heroes in any other movie.

If Faster Pussycat’s vixens are hip perverts, then the family of men with a secret stash of dough they target are portrayed as real sickos. The father, known only as “The Old Man,” is a wheelchair-bound sexual predator. His younger son — a bodybuilding manchild affectionately referred to by his pa as “The Vegetable” — is his surrogate dick.

The Vegetable — the bulging Dennis Busch — is like Of Mice & Men’s Lenny if he were a monosyllabic Abercrombie & Fitch model. As the movie’s sex object, he’s either stripped to the waist (right) or he’s poured into vacuum-fit T-shirts. That leaves the intellectual elder son to be emasculated and responsible for the womanly acts of housework. He’s the purposefully unconvincing male hero and compared to the ladies, he’s way out of his league.

The women are not just physically intimidating with their acres of midriff and necklines plunging down to their navels, but also quick-witted and sharp-tongued. Upon meeting Varla, the shotgun-wielding patriarch sums up his disdain for such types: “They let ‘em vote, smoke, and drive — even put ‘em in pants! So whattaya get? A Democrat for President! Lotta smoke up your chimney! You can’t even tell brother from sister!”

He’s a Nixon Era paranoiac waxing nostalgic about a time when social undesirables knew their place. Varla’s his Bizarro World equal and nemesis. Not only does her cabal bare their bodies for money, they also drive hot rods, chug beer, wear jeans in a time when that was considered low class even for a man and mock everything wholesome. She emasculates wussy race car driver Tommy before breaking his spine like a breadstick as his girl looks on in terror.

If you’ve ever secretly longed to see cloying Frankie swatted down while ditzy Annette gets sold as a sex slave, you’ll be reveling in this. Like rabid leopards in heat, these wanton hellions would rob Wally and the Beaver for their lunch money and pocket their tighty whities as trophies, bitch slap Gidget and lay waste to Mayberry in a single drunken spree. They’re the Middle American nightmare of Alpha Gays run amuck.

Varla is the wish fulfillment of the Anti-Establishment militant gay in all of us. The character has been embraced by virtually every subculture over the years — from Punk and S&M to Feminist and Goth. Her image has been emblazoned on T-shirts, lunchboxes and comic books. It’s in Gay Culture that she’s found her lasting devotion. Androgynous and brazen, she’s the great Gay Badass, the most fiendishly cunning and daringly confident queer to ever to grace the screen. As the father knowingly smirks, “She’s a cold one all right — more stallion than mare.”

Rosie and Varla are clearly girlfriends, passive femme to active butch, and Varla reigns over her bitches like a prison warden/dominatrix. We may fear her, but we want to become her. She’s a witch’s brew of competing selves with dashes of Goldfinger’s Pussy Galore, a Scorpio Rising biker, the Asian Dragon Lady cliche, Catwoman, Emma Peel, Vampira and Shaft thrown into the cocktail.

It’s the Pussycat’s queerness that at once unites and divides them. Billie is the wild card because she’s the most obviously heterosexual. “I can turn myself on a dozen different ways! But you — you only got one channel! You really should be AM & FM. You one band broads are a drag!”

Forever led astray by her desire to chase men and booze it up, Billie proves too flaky and gets a switchblade in the back, courtesy of Varla. Good time girl Billie may be expendable, but the loyal Rosie isn’t. It’s notable that the only moment wherein Varla loses her cool and shows any vulnerability is when she spies Rosie lying dead at the foot of the Vegetable, causing her to put the pedal to the metal and mow him down.

Gay characters had turned up in A and B pictures during the 60s in films like The Detective and The Killing of Sister George, but not with this amount of power and danger and never permitted to run this mercilessly roughshod. Faster Pussycat’s last section is a full-tilt free for all, with the weak fleeing for their lives, the dying gasping their last breaths, the crazy going out with a vengeance, and the maniacal grasping for all they can get, Satana sinking her teeth deep into the ass of Pop Culture and never letting go.

©2007 Nightcharm