04-08-2025
Meet the Cockettes — the gender-bending hippies who inspired David Bowie
Decades before anyone thought up the term nonbinary, back when the word queer was still an insult, a handful of hippies embraced flamboyance, cross-dressing and, in the words of the Cockettes founding member Richard 'Scrumbly' Koldewyn, gender confusion. The Cockettes were a drag troupe formed in late-Sixties San Francisco who, inspired by a heady mix of LSD, communal living and Busby Berkeley musicals, put on wild shows with titles like Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma and Pearls over Shanghai at the Pagoda Palace, a countercultural cinema in the city's North Beach neighbourhood.
Their leader, Hibiscus, aka George Harris III, combined a full beard with vintage dresses, glitter make-up and a treasure chest's worth of costume jewellery. By 1973 the Cockettes were over but not before they had become a key influence on David Bowie, the director John Waters, The Rocky Horror Show and drag queens the world over. On his first trip to San Francisco in 1971 Bowie was asked during a radio interview what he wanted to do while he was in the city. 'I want to see the Cockettes,' came the reply.
Now they're back. Midnight at the Palace, a new play at the Edinburgh Fringe, celebrates the rise and fall of the world's most camp hippy revolutionaries. 'January 1, 1968, I arrived in San Francisco,' says 'Sweet' Pam Tent, 75, author of Midnight at the Palace: My Life as a Fabulous Cockette, the book on which the show is based. 'I was living on air and LSD.'
'And tomatoes from the back of the Safeway,' adds Koldewyn, the Cockettes' musical director. Back then, Koldewyn wore a giant pretzel as a hat. Now he's a sober-looking 79-year-old who, over a video call from New York, explains how the Cockettes emerged from the San Francisco counterculture. Starting it all was Hibiscus, who left a wealthy theatre-loving family in Westchester, New York, to combine the idealism of the Kaliflower Commune, a utopian community he was a part of, with drag — not something the hippies had previously embraced.
'We were an oasis in a desert,' Koldewyn says. 'In '69 I was in Golden Gate Park with my head in a guy's lap when this hippy dude walked by and said, 'What's the matter, can't you find a woman?' We influenced the gay rights movement, but at the same time the Cockettes were never political. We were just having fun.'
'We parodied everything,' adds Tent, who points out that not all the Cockettes were gay. A member of the troupe called Marshall Olds, who went heavier on the glitter than anyone, was straight, while the women embraced drag just as much as the men. 'We took the culture of the street and put it on the stage. Nothing was sacred.'
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This included performing classic show tunes while high on drugs, although Koldewyn, as musical director and designated driver, usually confined himself to the odd joint. 'Remember that time we smoked angel dust with [the blues legend] Johnny Winter?' he asks Pam Tent. 'That was weird.'
'Oh yeah. We were doing Hell's Harlots and Marshall ended up in hospital,' Tent, also now living in New York, recalls. 'Then there was the time Goldie Glitters [aka the Cockette Michael Heesy] took MDA before a show and had an epileptic fit. She was waving from a stretcher like the Queen Mother, screaming, 'They're taking me away!' while dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein. There was a lot going on back then that we wouldn't get away with today.' 'Like people f***ing in the aisles,' Koldewyn interjects. 'That happened a lot.'
This has provided rich material for the new show. 'I was hearing all these stories, and it was clear that the political moment the Cockettes were existing in mirrored our current one,' Joey Monda, producer of Midnight of the Palace, says. Back then it was Richard Nixon; now it is Donald Trump. 'There is a lot to be scared and despondent about right now but the Cockettes were also in a period of political oppression and they got through it.'
The Cockettes were also forerunners of trans identity. 'There we were, the first bearded drag queens,' Koldewyn says. 'We didn't hide our genitalia — in fact it got more than its fair share of glitter — because we realised that gender really doesn't matter, does it? It's what is coming from the inside that counts.'
All this made the Cockettes a high society cause célèbre, attracting fans from Sylvia Miles to Gloria Vanderbilt. The future disco sensation Sylvester arrived in 1970 to audition with a gospel rendition of the theme to The Mickey Mouse Club, and everyone realised they had a seriously good singer in their midst. The Baltimore director John Waters, whose early trash classic Multiple Maniacs was a midnight movie favourite at the Palace, brought his own drag star, Divine, to meet the Cockettes in 1971, introducing an anti-flower power energy to the troupe. That's when a schism formed, with Hibiscus wanting to maintain the original communal, anticapitalist spirit and other members of the Cockettes wanting to get paid, not least after an offer came to transfer the show to New York.
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'Truman Capote and Rex Reed came to see the show at the Palace and loved it,' Tent recalls. 'Rex wrote a syndicated column, raving about how this was the only true theatre, so we got an offer to play the Anderson Theatre on 2nd Avenue. They hired a bus and we got trotted out to society parties, all dragged up.'
What worked at midnight in San Francisco did not work for an early evening in New York, however, not least because expectations were so high after the show was heavily hyped. Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Liza Minnelli were among the glitterati turning out for the Cockettes' opening night, which was dismissed by Gore Vidal with the immortal line: 'No talent is not enough.'
'We were burnt out after being taken to all these parties, we hadn't rehearsed and it was a total disaster,' Tent says of the performance. 'The sound system didn't work properly so the balcony couldn't hear anything, and it was quoted as being the worst show in the history of off-Broadway.'
'One critic said it was worse than Hiroshima,' says Koldewyn with the authority of a man who has those words branded into his very soul. 'Angela Lansbury hated it so much, she threw up. The New York audience were making the scene and they wanted to be transported, but they weren't willing to go where we wanted to take them. They should have been forced to take LSD on entry just to shake them up a bit.'
Fashionable New York certainly didn't know what to make of Cockettes style, a combination of Thirties dresses picked up from what Koldewyn calls 'third-hand stores', glitter, embroidery and an excess of hairiness. 'We worked hard to get that look in the show,' Monda confirms. 'The Cockettes were all about self-made self-expression. That is the ethos of the Fringe.'
'Coming out of the closet, wearing the entire closet,' Tent adds, in a neat summary of the Cockettes' style philosophy. 'Back then thrift stores were full of Thirties dresses and art deco furniture, which is the era we loved. One of the Cockettes even lived on a commune where they only drove Thirties cars.'
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'Sylvester had an entire show made up of Billie Holiday songs,' Koldewyn says. 'We all used to watch Busby Berkeley films at the Palace. Everyone was obsessed with the 1930s.'
In 1973 there was a final show — in the San Francisco building occupied by the apocalyptic Christian cult the Peoples Temple, just before its leader, Jim Jones, relocated the cult to Guyana and led more than 900 followers in an act of mass murder/suicide — and then the troupe dispersed. Hibiscus died in 1982, an early victim of complications from Aids. Sylvester, having become a mainstream disco superstar, followed in 1988. Koldewyn went on to form a vocal harmony group called the Jesters, while Tent worked as an accountant before taking up writing. Both say the Cockettes continue to shape their lives.
'The old spirit of the Cockettes is not forgotten,' Tent says. 'It just got buried for a while. Now it's back and I'm glad to see it.'
'Our legacy was in showing that everyone's expression is valid, especially when it is done from a place of acceptance of themselves, rather than a place of bitterness,' Koldewyn concludes. 'On top of that, we were being silly. We were saying, it's OK to be a kid again.'
They sure were. Launching a gender revolution is one thing. Staging a show called Journey to the Center of Uranus is quite another. Midnight at the Palace is at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, to Aug 24,
