[Pride 2021] I, Berdine: Psycho Beach Party and My First Queer Role Model

I love camp.  I’ve loved camp since I was a kid, even before I knew what camp was – or before I knew I was bisexual.  If it’s glommed in glitter and ridiculousness, I will be there in the front row indulging.  Of this you can be sure.

So when I was introduced to Charles Busch’s work as a kid barely out of highschool while I was flipping through the cable one day, I sat up and at attention. I was a barely out of the closet bisexual person in my early 20s with a taste for Karo Syrup blood, and Busch might as well have written me a love letter. Busch got his start in off-Broadway self-produced plays, and Psycho Beach Party is the first of two big-screen adaptions of his work (The other, Die Mommie Die features Stark Sands and Natasha Lyonne).  Busch mainly performs in drag.  In the original version he played the lead role of sixteen-year-old Florence “Chicklet” Forest.  The original title of the film was Gidget Goes Psycho.  Now you probably have a feeling for where this film is headed.  

And yet you don’t. 

This is a flick filled with little surprises and double-twist endings.  You see, Florence Forrest is a typical sixteen-year-old tomboy who wants to do more than just sit on the beach flirting with surfers – she wants to be a surfer herself.  Oh, and she also has multiple personality disorder triggered whenever she sees a swirling pattern, which may or may not track back to her seemingly perfect mother’s hooker past, her dead younger brother, and caused her to become a serial killer.  As I said, camp. Thus does Psycho Beach Party splits the difference between parodying thrillers, so-called “women’s pictures” of the 40s’ (think: high gloss, high camp melodramas featuring Crawford and Davis) , and beach films.  

It plays with b-movie tropes and has a lot of fun with the utter squareness of a good 60 percent of 60’s media.  Many of its characters fall on the queer end of the sexual spectrum.  There is a gloriously barely restrained secondary attraction between the amazingly well-named surfer dudes Provaloney and Yo-Yo, who not only manage to figure out their attraction, but fall in love and start dating by the end of the flick.  They and most of the other dudes in the movie are delightfully dumb, in a sleazy but generally good-hearted way.

And most of the women in the movie are strong, smart women, even the terrible ones.  When I saw Psycho Beach Party for the first time, I didn’t relate to Chicklet’s capable mom, though I was surrounded by women like her.  It wasn’t smart police captain Monica Stark, cheerful Chicklet, kind artiste and runaway Bettina Barnes, or even bitchy Marvelette (a super young Amy Adams, a few years before her first Oscar nom).  

Oh yes, I knew who I was. I was Berdine. 

Poor Berdine, Chicklet’s best friend, who has a desperate crush on both Bettina Barnes, whom she ends up working as a personal assistant, and her own best friend, who is tragically, resolutely heterosexual.  I saw myself in her reactions, her yearning, her neurotic desperation.  I remembered my attraction to my own deskmate when I was in highschool, and lacking the words and ability to ask her up the street for a milkshake.   It was an all-girl Catholic school.  The deck was firmly stacked against me ever kissing a girl until I graduated.  But Berdine was an access point for my own emotions about women, a way to understand my own longing and process how I felt about it.  “Oh, I’m not alone in feeling this way.”

It’s funny how a good horror movie can be cathartic in the best of ways.  Berdine doesn’t get the girl, but she gets the career; love will come later, when she’s grown-up.  Chicklet isn’t the end of her rainbow but the beginning.

There are a few elements of Psycho Beach Party have not aged well and make me cringe when I rewatch it, but Bernadette is eternal – just as gawky and desperate as I was.  Just as every single queer person must experience Rocky Horror Picture Show at least once in their lives, so should they experience Psycho Beach Party.