The Rise and Fall of the Cockettes

Born this day Hibiscus (George Edgerly Harris III, 1949-1982), founder of The Cockettes, The Angels of Light, et al.

The Cockettes were a kind of anarchist, avant-garde, hippie, gay, San Francisco-based performance troupe that existed from 1969 through 1972. The group’s existence was brief and sprawling and since it was primarily west coast based it is not as well known or remembered in New York, though it is most definitely connected to this city as well.

Hibiscus had grown up in a family that was involved in community theatre and children’s shows in Clearwater Beach, Florida. The Harrises moved back to their hometown of New York in 1964, just as Off-Off Broadway was taking off. Hibiscus was in the 1966 production of John Wolfson’s The Peace Creeps with early career Al Pacino and James Earl Jones. The following year, both he and his his father were inRonald Tavel’sGorilla Queen, a detail which makes The Cockettes arguably an early offshoot of the early, John Vaccaro-era Ridiculous. The films of Jack Smith were another contemporary influence.

Harris is widely believed to be the young man in the center of Bernie Boston’s photo “Flower Power” taken at the Vietnam protest March on the Pentagon organized on October 21, 1967. Harris had moved to San Francisco earlier that year; the march had been conceived and planned there by painter Michael Bowen, poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, acid guru Timothy Leary, and activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

In 1969, Hibiscus began organizing a live performance component to monthly screenings of underground films called The Nocturnal Dream Show. The name “Cockettes” is obviously a vulgar pun on Rockettes (merged with coquettes), an indication that their shows were full of campy tributes to ’30s and ’40s Hollywood and Broadway musicals. They sang and danced (after their own LSD enhanced fashion) and sported elaborate drag costumes, glitter and glam make-up. Unlike the East Coast drag community there was less effort to create a female illusion on the part of most of the performers. Many sported hippie beards, sideburns and/or moustaches, along with skirts, dresses, jewelry, and make-up, making their androgynous gestures possibly even more transgressive for their day. (This “hairy” take on drag has always reminded me of Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias).

The Cockettes’ spectacles rapidly became a citywide attraction. John Waters and Divine moved to San Francisco around this time. Divine performed with the Cockettes in their show Journey to the Center of Uranus. Singer Sylvester, who had a couple of top 40 disco hits a decade later, was also a member.

As The Cockettes began to enjoy greater success, Hibiscus dropped out and founded a similar group called The Angels of Light. The split was due to the fact that Hibiscus was devoted to the Haight-Ashbury/ Diggers philosophy of making all of their performances free, whereas some of the Cockettes wanted to get paid. In 1971 the Cockettes made a film called Tricia’s Wedding, lampooning the marriage of Richard Nixon’s daughter, which was very much in the same spirit as Waters’ films of the time. They began to get national coverage in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Look, Life, the Village Voice and Rex Reed’s syndicated column (his own appearance in Myra Breckinridge is not irrelevant).

The wave crashed in late 1971 when 47 of the remaining Cockettes were booked to play their show Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma in a large New York theatre. Everyone wanted to see what the buzz was about so the audience was full of celebrities, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono,Truman Capote,Gore Vidal,Andy Warhol (with Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling in tow), Liza Minnelli, Anthony Perkins, and Angela Lansbury. And of course it was a disaster. The Cockettes had overshot their mark, big time. The troupe had been conceived in an atmosphere of spontaneous “Happenings”. Their events were appropriate for everything from street protests to parades to social events to acid freak-outs, rock concerts, and pre-shows at underground film screenings. The one thing they were not calibrated for, with their thrift store costumes, cardboard sets, and community theatre chops, was a professional New York stage. The camp scene here was very polished and sophisticated, and was spawning the likes of Charles Ludlam, and later Everett Quinton and Charles Busch. No one had any time for the undisciplined contortions of a bunch of stoned freaks.

The Cockettes did not long survive the debacle. Many of their alum, including Hibiscus, ended up moving to New York, and participating in the Off-Off scene at venues like Caffe Cino and La Mama, which were much more open to free onstage experimentation. And that old divide between free theatre and and a paying audience, professional vs. community theatre, hounds the indie theatre world to this day.

A 2002 documentary by Bill Weber and David Weissman is probably your best one stop source for the Cockettes story. The San Francisco Public Library presented the exhibition The Cockettes: Acid Drag and Sexual Anarchy in 2022. Unfortunately Hibiscus was not around to enjoy the commemorative attention. Like so many concerned with this story, he died of AIDS-related complications in 1982.

(Thanks, Laura LeBleu, for the intel that a new version of the Cockettes will be playing at Joe’s Pub this Saturday, performing the music of original Cockette Scrumbly Koldewyn. Tix and info here).