A Look Into Glittering Faces of the ‘60s

“The Cockettes” confounds the cliche that if you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t really there. An irresistible documentary look at the ensemble of the moment in the hippie kingdom of San Francisco, this comprehensive and charming film not only recalls those days exactly, it also manages the wonderful trick of taking us back there along with it.

Directors David Weissman and Bill Weber have used excellent interviews and remarkable vintage footage (some of it compiled by former Cockette Martin Worman for a doctoral dissertation) to illuminate a corner of half-forgotten countercultural history.

By doing so, they’ve also managed to capture the feeling of an era now dealt with largely in terms of bromides about license and free love. If you want to not only see what the ‘60s looked like but experience what it was like to be in them, it’s hard to improve on what’s here.

The Cockettes were a performing troupe best defined (by director and early fan John Waters) as a bunch of “hippie acid freak drag queens.” Men and women, some straight but mostly gay, they were united by a passion for LSD, by a belief in “complete sexual anarchy, always a good thing” (Waters again), and by something else, something that can best be described as an unlikely, almost heroic naivete.

As much as the drugs and the blurring of sexual lines, the Cockettes were characterized by a belief that they were part of a revolutionary movement that was going to change the world into something better. It’s hard not to be charmed by their messianic good cheer, their enthusiastic guilelessness and sense of play. These were people who built their own reality, who were, as someone vividly says, “allowed to live at the end of their imagination.”

“Cockettes” begins with a moment--a November 1971 appearance at a New York theater thick with celebrities--that seemed to mark a collective high point for the group but, as we come to see, actually finds them already on a downward slide.

In the early days, the dozen or so former Cockettes interviewed for the film just seemed to find each other in the spaced-out melting pot of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. What united them was a passion for dressing up like you wouldn’t believe; it was, someone says, as if they communicated through drag.

The leader of this pack was New York transplant George Harris, now known as Hibiscus, accurately described as looking like “Jesus Christ with lipstick.”

Still intensely charismatic in vintage videos, Hibiscus was the group’s acknowledged visionary inspiration, and it was his idea that what the company (named for Radio City’s Rockettes) needed was to be on stage.

As chance would have, North Beach’s Palace Theater was running a midnight film series called the Nocturnal Dream Shows.

Agreeing to appear in exchange for free tickets, the Cockettes’ can-can dancing combination of anarchy, nudity, glitter, drugs and lace became an instant success, and a San Francisco institution was born.

Filmmakers Weissman and Weber have done a heroic job of getting the surviving Cockettes on film, from the guileless Sweet Pam and the waspish Goldie Glitters to token male heterosexual Marshall and self-described bad girl Fayette, whose life ambition was to be an adventuress.

The group put on a series of loosely constructed shows with names like “Gone With the Showboat to Oklahoma” that, remembers Sweet Pam, “were so untraditional, so far from the mainstream, they were almost illegal.” Film was also dabbled in, from “Elevator Girls in Bondage” to the mock “Tricia’s Wedding,” which debuted at the Palace on the same day as the actual event in the Nixon White House.

As show followed show, the big question with the Cockettes became, one member put it, “can mediocrity stand success?” Celebrity led to ego problems, and a split developed between Hibiscus and his allies, who believed in the purity of free performance, and those who believed in professionalism and felt money should be changing hands.

But the truth was that what the Cockettes did was always more the public expression of a lifestyle than a stage event that could be planned or transplanted, hence the group’s celebrated flop in New York. In addition to personality clashes, the ensemble was also done in by early deaths, first from drug addiction and later from AIDS.

Still, it’s possible to see in their idiosyncratic work a prefiguring of everything from gay liberation to glam rock. As journalist Lillian Roxon predicted back then, “Every time you see too much glitter, or a rhinestone out of place, you [will] know it’s because of the Cockettes.”

*

Unrated. Times guidelines: some nudity and strong language.

‘The Cockettes’

Released by Strand Releasing. Directors Bill Weber and David Weissman. Producer David Weissman. Cinematographer Marsha Kahm. Editor Bill Weber. Music Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

In limited release.