Bad Bis Go to Hell: Bisexuality as Transgressive and Lucrative in Doris Wishman’s Roughies

This chapter examines the presence of bisexuality in the content and marketing of Wishman’s roughies of the 1960s and frames Wishman’s engagement with bisexuality though tracing the cultural history of bisexuality within the historical context of the American sexual revolution. Reviewing gay and bisexual histories to show that queer audiences and urban spaces of sexual media consumption formed a significant and overlooked social context for the sexploitation film, Wishman’s earlier roughies, The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965) and Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), are examined for formal and narrative techniques that centralized bisexual female protagonists. Wishman’s later roughie Too Much Too Often! (1967) is argued to reflect a bisexual address in not only its formal and narrative elements, but also its advertising techniques spanning newspaper ads, pressbook details, and the film’s trailer.