“Everything is more fun in groups, and it was good to have the girl power thing.”
In the early ’80s, a tough-as-nails, all-female skateboard gang calling themselves “the Hags” became legendary on the streets of West L.A.By the time she was in her late teens, Sevie Bates had already been living away from her mother’s Santa Monica home for years. Her life revolved around three things: partying, punk music, and skateboarding. She’d roll up on her board to rock clubs in L.A.
The Hags was a longtime dream for Bates. She’d bought her first board in the early ’70s at a Thrifty’s discount store at age 9. It was just a little wooden skateboard called “The Black Knight,” with clay wheels and loose ball bearings. But by her late teens, Bates was an aggressive and talented street skater who frequently got into scuffles in then-crime-ridden Venice Beach, and says she was always pushing back against what was expected of her as a girl.
Claire first met Bates in high school, and became one of the gang’s first members. “We’d skateboard around, go to shows, and be our own little posse of Hag girls. There was camaraderie with that. If one of us just skated around with a vest on, it was different than seeing a handful of us together. When you have a group like that, there’s a level of untouchability that comes with it. Your power seems to multiply.
The Hags mostly skated for transportation, but Sacks also recalls skating for fun. “We would go at, like, two in the morning to parking structures in Santa Monica and luge skate down,” she recalls of their breakneck adventures speeding down parking ramps. She once shattered her ankle street skating during a visit to San Francisco with Bates and had to spend two months on crutches.
The Hags didn’t go unnoticed, and for a brief period in the summer of ’84, they had their unsolicited 15 minutes of fame, though you’d be hard-pressed to find anything about them online today. There were multiple articles about them in LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, and they were featured on a news program called 330. They were also briefly featured in the video for Pat Benatar’s “Ooh Ooh Song.” “We were a novelty,” says Miller.
“Get with it or get the fuck out of here. No crybabies,” says Bates definitively. “It came from a punk rock kind of thing; it was a street movement.”
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