Original Glitter Queens

To the masses, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene of the 1960s evokes visions of flower children on acid trips and free love. But so much that defined the era gets glossed over, including a messianic, bearded man named Hibiscus who coated himself in glitter, threw on a dress and made as big an impact as any.

In advance of its screening at Hollywood Theatre, Weissman sat down to chat about his award-winning, warts-and-all documentary.

WW: How did you discover the Cockettes?

David Weissman: I was a teenage hippie kid in Los Angeles, and I wasn't out of the closet yet. I didn't have much connection with gay people—certainly not drag—and all of a sudden you'd read in Rolling Stone or the L.A. Free Press about this gay, bearded drag-queen theater troupe. I saw their film Trisha's Wedding (1971), which was a parody of Nixon's daughter Tricia's White House wedding. It was a life-changing experience. I met a couple of Cockettes when I was out of high school living in Venice Beach, and when I moved to San Francisco in '76, I met a range of people who had been involved.

You have a lot of former Cockettes speaking in the film but, aside from John Waters, not a lot of outsiders.

Sometimes documentaries have too many people, so you don't get to develop a relationship with the people on screen. We didn't want anyone in the film who didn't have a direct involvement. It takes you out when you have people pontificating. I had to deal with some very difficult and eccentric people, and some unbelievably generous people. Then there are people who—once you do find them—are suspicious. They may have had a bad history with the troupe, or felt they had been fucked over, or they wanted money. I got to meet all these people who were legendary to me, who were part of counterculture royalty.

As somebody who was a fan going in, was it fascinating or distressing to see what your idols had become in reality?

Some of them had very hard lives. All of them were very hard drug users. There was a lot of death from overdoses early on, but many died during the AIDS epidemic. But there's nothing in the film that I didn't already know. You have this counterculture revolution that's very based on LSD and rejected bourgeoisie norms and pre-existing structure. It was a time of despair and incredible idealism. San Francisco was the most extreme flowering of all of those pieces: of politics and psychedelia and sexual exploration.

Where do the Cockettes fall in that era's legacy?

It was just a couple years, but it did in a sense presage a darker cultural period. I've described them as being the last of the pre-ironic avant-garde—this happy, celebratory wildness that faded pretty quickly.

SEE IT: The Cockettes screens at the Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Sunday, Sept 13. $8.

Willamette Week