Drag Herstory: These 'Acid Freak Artists and Hippies' Started a Queer Theater Revolution
"The greatest legacy of the Cockettes is how they introduced camp into mainstream culture."
By Elyssa Goodman
Fayette Hauser
RuPaul's Drag Race has made drag more popular than ever — but as much as we love the queens on screen, it's important to know the drag legends who paved their way, making the art form what it is today. "Drag Herstory" will focus on iconic drag performers throughout history, providing essential knowledge about the world beyond Drag Race.
In 1967, George Edgerly Harris III was a cherubic, blond 17-year-old from a wealthy Westchester, New York, acting family. He had performed at avant-garde theatres in downtown New York, but that year he made his way to San Francisco alongside poet Peter Orlovsky, the longtime lover of Allen Ginsberg. He had previously spent time doing activism-oriented plays and hanging out with the likes of experimental filmmaker Jack Smith, known for his film Flaming Creatures, an exercise in camp and gender experimentation. Maybe Harris intended to start a drag-oriented genderfuck performance revolution in San Francisco. Maybe he didn't. Either way, in 1969, he founded the Cockettes.
After coming to San Francisco in 1967, Harris started taking LSD, grew out his blond beard, and changed his name to Hibiscus. He ditched his previously preppy garb in favor of skirts plucked from trash cans, floral headdresses, vintage kimonos, and glitter, glitter, glitter — that or plain nudity, sitting in a swath of trees in Golden Gate Park singing show tunes. He was living in Kaliflower, a commune housed in a converted Victorian mansion. It was run by Irving Rosenthal, a Beat writer and former editor of William Burroughs, and the commune provided free food to other communes in the neighborhood. It was run with strict rules, where every member did chores and attended meetings, but these rules were not for Hibiscus and he moved out and into a house full of what former resident and Cockettes member Fayette Hauser called "Acid Freak artists and hippies" living in Haight-Ashbury.
Members of the new house lived far differently than those at Kaliflower. "We were all intent on re-creating ourselves in the way of a New Myth, expressing our deepest Fantasies, Dreams and Desires on our bodies," Hauser writes in her personal history of the Cockettes online. "Dressing as outrageously as possible, we tripped around the city in a large pack, going to concerts at the dance halls." Hibiscus had been inspired by the lifestyle of the house members, who were mostly women and gay men. But he had also been influenced by experimental theatre groups like John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous Theatre and the Living Theatre, the work of Jack Smith, and LSD. Hibiscus shared with the house a dream of creating an avant-garde theatre group. The house members adored the idea instantly. It would be "experimental and experiential theater, real, no bullshit. Absurdist and Surreal, in life and on the stage," Hauser wrote.
Joshua Freiwald
The troupe was originally called the Angels of Light Free Theatre, and soon Hibiscus and house members began filling an old scrapbook with visuals and glitter to inspire their first show. It was filled with images of classic Hollywood, both Eastern and Western deities, and more, and would be what Hibiscus would call "a new theatre for a new decade." Maybe instead of the Angels of Light, they'd call themselves something like the Rockettes? "No, the Cockettes!" a member said, and thus the name was born. They eventually booked their opening night at the Palace Theatre, a movie house that showed midnight underground films in an event called the "Nocturnal Dream Show." Live performances usually opened for the show on the weekends.
On New Year's Eve 1969, the troupe took to the stage for the first time, opening the midnight movie. Having raided the drag room at the Kaliflower commune (because, praise goddess, they had such a thing), they were an explosion of skirts and feathers, glitter and gowns. Putting on a record of Offenbach's "Infernal Galop," aka the French cancan song, the troupe burst into a wild, kicking and shaking and shimmering cancan themselves, all genderfuck and sparkle, and the crowd roared for more. As an encore, they spun and danced and got naked to the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women." It was performance, yes, but perhaps most importantly, it was play — delightful in its rampant, purposeful imperfection and lack of polish, its spontaneity and anarchism.
Bud Lee
The Cockettes' shows at the Palace's "Nocturnal Dream Show" became an underground hit. Shows became regular, every few weeks, and eventually moved from a hodgepodge of ecstatic dancing to themed revues like "Gone With the Showboat to Oklahoma" and later original works written by Cockettes troupe members like "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma" and "Journey to the Center of Uranus." But now forbidden from the drag room at Kaliflower for taking too many costumes, the Cockettes instead went thrifting and began creating their own ensembles. Vibrant soloists also joined in later, like Sylvester, who would go on to become a disco icon, and John Waters's own muse Divine. The shows were known for their raucous energy, beloved by fans as much for their glamour as their sweet awkwardness and unpredictability.
Celebrities became fans, like Truman Capote, who called the troupe "the only true theater," as well as Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper, who used to hang out at the Cockette house in Haight-Ashbury. Even respected film critic Rex Reed called them "a landmark in the history of new, liberated theater" in his nationally syndicated column, and media coverage soon ran rampant, including a spread on a Cockette wedding in Rolling Stone shot by Annie Leibovitz. The Cockettes also caused a national furor when they released a parody film of the wedding of Richard Nixon's daughter Tricia, called "Tricia's Wedding," which featured all manner of dignitaries done over in drag, on acid, drunk, or all of the above. It received nearly as much media attention as the wedding itself.
The positivity of Reed's words also led to a month-long booking of the Cockettes at the Anderson Theatre in New York. It was around this time that the Cockettes split into two factions: those who wanted to get paid for their work, and those who felt the performances should always be free. The latter included Hibiscus, who ultimately separated from the group he had created and returned to his original Angels of Light Free Theatre idea with some of the original members. Poet Allen Ginsberg would later perform with them from time to time. The remaining Cockettes traveled to New York, and their opening night attracted a wealth of uptown and downtown celebrities, from Diana Vreeland to Angela Lansbury and John Lennon to Anthony Perkins. Following the incessant hype from legendary publicist Danny Fields, New Yorkers expected a polished theatrical experience, not realizing that wasn't at all what the Cockettes were about, and the show was panned. Ultimately fans who understood the Cockettes came to see the shows in subsequent weeks and their responses were positive, but the show at the Anderson would be the last time any of the Cockettes appeared in New York. The group returned home to San Francisco, where they were still beloved. They continued with their original performances, some of which are considered the troupe's finest work, like "Hot Greeks." This was the Cockettes' final show, with the group disbanding totally in 1972.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Cockettes is how they introduced camp into mainstream culture. After the Cockettes, glam rock followed soon after, as did Rocky Horror Picture Show's equally rampant genderfuckery, David Bowie and Elton John's glittering personas, and even Bette Midler's musical sassfests. The troupe also had an indelible effect on fashion, still inspiring designers like Marc Jacobs and John Galliano for Christian Dior, as well as costumes so unique and intricate some of them were featured in the Museum of Arts and Design's "Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture" exhibition in 2017. Despite their few years in existence, and their occasionally problematic performances, their impact is indelible. Wherever there's a beardful of glitter or simply unrelenting sexual anarchy, the Cockettes are not far behind.
Photos courtesy David Weissman, who co-directed The Cockettes alongside Bill Weber, a documentary about the group; it will be released on streaming platform Kanopy soon.
Elyssa Goodman is a New York-based writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in VICE, Billboard, Vogue, Vanity Fair, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, ELLE, and now, very happily, them. If you're in New York, feel free to visit her monthly Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series.
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