Words by Roxy Bourdillon
In our brand new series, LGBTease: Queeroes Of Burlesque, we celebrate groundbreaking performers from our glittering past. This week, writer, showgirl historian and managing editor of DIVA magazine, Roxy Bourdillon, takes a deep dive into the fascinating world of a sapphic stripping superstar.
A femme fatale with a cascading mane of tousled curls prowls onstage. Sparkling under the spotlight, her luxurious costume is jewelled for the gods. In one deft move, with rock star confidence, she drops her gown to the floor. At 73, the lady has most definitely still got the it factor. She gives zero fucks and the audience adores her for it. She bumps, she grinds; the crowd loses their collective mind. They whoop and holler as she gets to work with her extravagant boa, twirling, caressing and slapping it against her crotch. Who is this force of nature who has everyone eating out of the palm of her hand? None other than Satan’s Angel, The Devil’s Own Mistress, Queen Of The Fire Tassels. This will be one of the last performances of her wild and extraordinary life.
Hers is a classic tale of Catholic schoolgirl turned ecdysiast. Born in San Francisco in 1944, Angel studied dancing, modelling and fencing at charm school, before turning to the art of the tease. One chilly winter evening in ’61, wearing her mother’s old chiffon cocktail frock, her hair backcombed to within an inch of its life, armed with a fake ID and a megawatt smile, she snuck out to an amateur stripping contest. Sipping sloe gin fizzes as she took in the show, she thought to herself, “I can do that”. Back at home, she dug out her sexiest dress and practiced taking it off seductively over and over again until she had perfected her routine. The next day, she returned to the bar and won first prize.
The rest of the swinging sixties were spent mostly in San Fran, playing bass in topless girl band, The Hummingbirds, and honing her craft at hotspots like Esquire and the Condor Club.
A powerhouse performer, she took inspiration from all the greats and infused her onstage persona with Gypsy Rose Lee’s gutsiness, Mae West’s glamour, Carrie Finnell’s comedy and Lili St Cyr’s sensuality.
Initially she was keen to go by the stage name Hell’s Angel, but that was way too controversial to be plastered on marquees, printed in newspapers or announced on the radio, so instead she settled on the slightly less scandalous, but still decidedly devilish, Satan’s Angel. Early on in her career, she was in a serious motorcycle crash with her girlfriend at the time, leaving her with 32 broken bones. But ever the survivor, with grit and determination she committed to physical therapy and kept on dancing for those dollars. In the ‘70s, she relocated to Las Vegas and enjoyed a heady decade mingling with the Rat Pack and strutting her stuff at legendary venues like Minsky, The Aladdin, Silver Slipper and Palomino Club.
Remember that scene in Gypsy when three jaded burly dancers declare, “You gotta get a gimmick”? Well, a similar, serendipitous backstage encounter with a seasoned peeler led to the creation of Angel’s very own signature stunt. When the older dancer asked exactly what her act entailed, Angel replied proudly that she twirled five tassels at once: two on her tits, two on her bum cheeks, one on her belly button, but the “old broad” remained unimpressed. A little ruffled, Angel demanded, “What? You want me to set fire to them? Is that good enough for you?” The woman’s eyes lit up: “Now there’s a gimmick!” And so Angel came up with perhaps the most iconic gimmick of all time. Behold, the most smouldering, smoking hot, tassel-twirling extravaganza in exotic dance! Goodness, gracious, great boobs on fire! Or as Angel called it, “ta-ta flambé”. After some unsuccessful experiments involving soggy teabags and tampons, Angel visited costumier Bebe Hughes, who constructed a set of bespoke fire tassels. This was more like it. Angel became so skilled, she was able to extinguish the flames at will by spinning her boobs so rapidly they blew out on their own. Talk about expert mammary manipulation.
In addition to being burly royalty, Angel is remarkable for being openly queer in an industry that was, at the time, centred around the male gaze.
After experiencing early sapphic stirrings as a teenager, she spoke freely about her romances with women, as well as some men, saying they all knew she was gay. A master of the hilarious, husky-voiced anecdote, she loved to share juicy stories about erotic encounters with some of the biggest celebrities of the day. She told tales of crazy, horny nights with Hedy Lamarr, Clint Eastwood and Janis Joplin, who she said felt her up at a Redd Foxx concert before taking her back to the Fairmont hotel to get down and dirty.
In interviews with the press, Angel talked candidly about her struggles as a gay woman in showbiz and the 2012 documentary about her life, Satan’s Angel: Queen Of The Fire Tassels, featured her long term life partner, Vic. Throughout her career, Angel encountered significant prejudice, lost many jobs because of her sexuality and had to fight her way to become a featured performer. On the Blabbin’ Bout Burlesque chat show she recalled,
“If they found out that I was a lesbian, they either immediately threw me out, or beat me up first and then threw me out, or dragged all my wardrobe and threw it in the street and then beat me up and cancelled my contract… I fought all my life until it was ok to be gay onstage.”
Despite the rampant homophobia, Angel still managed to carve out an incredible career. In her glory days she performed across the globe, entertained the troops in Vietnam and shimmied for sold out 5000-seater theatres in Tokyo. Speaking to The Phoenix New Times she explained, "I never wanted to wind up staying home and changing crappy diapers, when I could be jet-setting around the world and dating movie stars. Why would I ever want anything as plain-Jane as that? Once I left home, boy, it was one big party for 30 years straight."
She finally packed away her pasties in 1985. The next chapter of her life included a tough battle with cocaine addiction and a stint running a dinner-theatre show set in an 1890s bordello called Whisky Lil’s. But her passion for burlesque was revived in the early noughties, when she became the inspiration for Terry Earp’s play, Have Tassels Will Travel. Sample line: “Hold on to your eyeballs or whatever, because tonight you’re going to get a peepshow into this stripper’s scrapbook.” The following year she came out of retirement and wowed the crowds once more at events including Tease-O-Rama and Miss Exotic World. She even taught a select few lucky performers the secrets of the ta-ta flambé. Sadly, in 2019 burlesque lost one of its most glorious stars as Angel passed away, aged 74, after contracting pneumonia.
Not only was Satan’s Angel a spectacular pioneer in exotic dance, she was also completely game-changing for queer representation. It’s thanks to badass trailblazers like her that so much of the modern burlesque scene embraces diversity. She paved the rhinestone-studded path for the many LGBTQI performers we now cherish.