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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 21, 2002)
46 JM * M t » lune 21. 2002 F IL È I S mm M m M m ▼ American Sign Language loo j*oou tor urn world: 1 he Cockette* drove drag to new levels and performance to new low is the Third Most Used Language in the United States! If you ever wanted to learn how to sign, here's a great place to start! You Can Sign! Learn ASL at your own pace with this seven-time award-winning videotape series. You Can Sign Package Only $85! You Can Sign Vols. One — Three $ 2 9 .9 5 each To Order: Call 1-800-767-4461 TTY 1-888-283-5097 www.SignEnhancers.com T he J apanese garden 611 5W KINGSTON AVE. W ASHIN GTO N PARK by G ary 5O3.223.I32I W W W .M P A N E S E G A R D E N .C O M B r in g in t h is a d $1 OFF G E N E R A L t o r e c e iv e A D M ISSIO N . ONE COl/PON PER VISITOR. NOT VALID WITH ANY OTHER DISCOUNTS. EXP. 12/01/02 Will Rogers Follies June 28 - July 14 Razzle Dazzle Musical Flaming Idiots July 18 August 4 - An Outrageous Comedy Forever Plaid August 8 - 1 8 ‘50s Musical Revue Sensation proudly presented by PLATT IV ( THE !nr 4 $ 503 620-5262 - www.broadwayrose.com Dca F ennell A uditorium • 9 0 0 0 SW D urham R oad • T igard he legendary Cockettes are reborn in David Weissman and Bill Weber’s I appropriately wild new documentary 11 The Cockettes, which plays June 28 to July 4 at Cinem a 21. Witnessing the volatile group, it’s more than a little surprising they’re hack at all. In existence for a mere 30 months from the • late ’60s into the early 70s, the Cockettes were the essence of the marginal and the ephemer al— in a sense too innocent and, really, just too good for this world. Started by hunky George Harris, who redubbed himself Hibiscus and became a Total Mad Queen, the group lived hand to mouth in free-love communes, supported mostly by wel fare— not always eating hut always looking scintillating in thrift store rags, towering wigs and glitter-drenched dresses fabricated from anything at hand. The Cockettes’ brand of drag, seen to splen did advantage in nonstop period clips, would he barely recognizable to the smart tranny of today. Their increasingly bizarre getups were both an artistic and a political statement— a kind of Pied Piper masquerade to lure as many of the self-styled ‘‘freaks and pervs’’ into their web as possible. And who could resist? The Cockettes had it all: glamour, frivolity, orgies and no pesky day jobs to get in the way. Much more open than some of the more insular queer groups then and now, they were welcoming to women, who were inte gral to the troupe’s existence and shows. Women rubbed elbows and sometimes more with the queens. (A few had kids by their male “sisters.”) What brought the Cockettes out of the commune and onto the stage were a series of theatrical events— mostly unrehearsed vignettes of song and carry-on, often little more than an impromptu display of sex ’n’ drug culture abandon. These brief hits at San Francisco’s freaky Palace Theater were expanded eventually into a three-hour tableaux of decadence, under such titles as Gone teit/i the Showboat to Oklahoma and Tropical Heatwave/Hot Voodoo. They were equal opportunity offenders, ter ribly un-P.C., with blackface characters and loads of nudity. In a typical effort, Fairytale Extravaganza, a Cockette explains, "All the fairy tale characters came together for the first time— on acid.” M o r r is O f course, it wasn’t all wonderful. The anar chic Cockettes were perpetually at war with their more “Beat” counterparts in another com mune who believed in more organization and overt political action. (They did, however, share a penchant for highly theatrical drag and a rather limited cuisine.) D irectors Weissman and Weber managed to get access to hundreds of hours of taped interviews and contemporary footage of the Cockettes in their glory, giving viewers a remarkable insider view of what the performers’ daily lives and haphazard careers were like. Instead of merely hearing about Hibiscus, for instance, we get to see him, twirling in moun tains of gossamer through the streets of San Francisco, his eyes festooned with glitter and bleary with acid. T he C ockettes weren’t destined to remain a local phenom enon (though they were fundamentally S an Francisco), becom ing deified when Rolling Stone covered a C ockette wedding. T h e in-your-face attitude and scads of public nudity, nicely sampled in the film, helped liberate many a Midwestern queen and various eccentrics puzzling over that first piece o f chintz or furtively eyeing that push-up bra. By the time the troupe was invited to New York, they were the toast of the town, carrying with them the praise of such luminaries of the time as Truman Capote, Rex Reed and Gore Vidal. But while their image was one of liberat ed sophisticates, East Coast audiences found the production Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma ama teurish, indeed unbearable. Fayette, one of the female Cockettes, recalls the stampede out the theater. The brittle hau teur of the Big Apple hip crowd gelled not at all with this unabashed libertinage. The troupe was happy to leave after what sounds— and looks, in the you-are-there clips— like a miser able three weeks. This also spelled the end of the Cockettes. There were always internal rifts— some of the queens wanted to become more professional, others insisted on spontaneity and fun. Some were junkies and acid heads, others tried to steer clear of such indulgences. And many died, victims of overdoses in the early days and AIDS later. With the world a wretched mess, the resurrection of these merry pranksters, if only in this documentary, is timely and, of course, fabulous. i n
