Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The Cockettes exuded the optimism, playfulness, sexiness and theatricality of a subculture that slipped away almost as soon as it was born. (With a gallery of photographs by Robert Altman.)
Jun 21, 2002 | It was all about sex. Or was it?
After midnight one evening in the early 1970s, I was standing in the Pagoda Palace Theater on Washington Square in San Francisco. At the time, the theater ran Chinese movies during the day and then, at midnight, the Chinese audience streamed out and in came a multicolored, unruly herd of glitter- and feather-bedecked hippies reeking of pot and patchouli oil. (It's a cliché now, but those were indeed the pervasive aromas.) Onstage, penises and breasts bounced around wantonly. There was dancing, there was singing, everybody was loaded on some sort of mind-altering substance, and unbridled sexual outrageousness spilled out into an audience that could be described as enthusiastic only if you're into extreme understatement.
The glorious Cockettes, the florid and fluorescent LSD-fueled drag review that briefly lit up San Francisco, and excited the media as far away as Paris, 30 some years ago were onstage performing one of their live shows. It might have been "Journey to the Center of Uranus" or "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma" or any number of other wacky, apolitical extravaganzas -- Rodgers & Hammerstein gone terribly, terribly wrong. Whatever it was, it looked like Kabuki collaboratively produced by Busby Berkeley, Dr. Seuss and Federico Fellini, generously seasoned with Carmen Miranda. As John Waters has described the scene, "It was complete sexual anarchy, which is always a wonderful thing."
I had a beat-up Nikon F hanging around my neck when poet Allen Ginsberg, obviously stoned out of his gourd, walked up, pointed at the camera and said, "Delicious! Take many, many, many pictures." I did, too, but I'll be damned if I know what happened to them. I've always regretted losing those photos, but my regret has been mollified by the recent release of "The Cockettes," a new feature documentary. It airs Friday, June 21, on the Sundance channel and has opened, or soon will, in theaters across the country. It's also showing at film festivals around the world.
"The Cockettes" is a curious celluloid time capsule that succeeds in a way that few films have at accurately capturing the spirit and riotous acting-out -- sexual and otherwise -- that typified the most frequently disparaged and caricatured decade of the 20th century: the '60s. But then the Cockettes would be nearly impossible to caricature -- they aspired to cartoonishness and, to their own surprise, reached that sparkling mountaintop, and even stayed there awhile.
The film's directors, David Weissman and Bill Weber, who spent four years putting the documentary together, describe the Cockettes as "the last hurrah of the Haight-Ashbury at its best." It's an interesting distinction because, contrary to so much of what's been written or filmed about those times, there was indeed a "best," though most of the lightheartedness, exhilaration and artistic experimentation had been replaced by hard drugs, hard times and bad vibes before the Cockettes first shimmered into existence in 1969.
That may be one of the reasons they shone so brightly: The Haight and the impossibly naive dream of hippiedom were crumbling, but the Cockettes still exuded the optimism, playfulness, sexiness and theatricality of a subculture that slipped away almost as soon as it was born. It was a time, too, when the dark specter of AIDS was still more than a decade in the future and sexual abandon seemed to be consequence-free.
The Cockettes were certainly into sex, drugs, excess and self-indulgence, as creative communities often are, but Weissman and Weber's film goes behind the glitter and eye shadow and finds that there was something more substantial to the group as well. In addition to being intoxicatingly funny, they succeeded at forming a community of sexual renegades that was focused on new ideas at least as much as it was on sex, maybe more so.
As Weissman put it when we first spoke nearly two years ago while the film was still in production, "This was not about female impersonation. This was what came to be known as 'gender-fuck.' There had never been bearded hippie drag queens before." Underneath the hedonism and circus sideshow frivolity the Cockettes shared an interest in pushing the parameters of sexuality, social acceptance and theater about as far as they could be pushed -- they were aggressively messing with cultural presumptions and having a hell of a good time doing it.
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