46 JM * M t » lune 21. 2002
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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