\u201cAnd tomatoes from the back of the Safeway,\u201d adds Koldewyn, the Cockettes\u2019 musical director. Back then, Koldewyn wore a giant pretzel as a hat. Now he\u2019s 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 \u2014 not something the hippies had previously embraced. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe were an oasis in a desert,\u201d Koldewyn says. \u201cIn \u201969 I was in Golden Gate Park with my head in a guy\u2019s lap when this hippy dude walked by and said, \u2018What\u2019s the matter, can\u2019t you find a woman?\u2019 We influenced the gay rights movement, but at the same time the Cockettes were never political. We were just having fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe parodied everything,\u201d 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. \u201cWe took the culture of the street and put it on the stage. Nothing was sacred.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 John Waters: \u2018It\u2019s too easy to be gay\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n 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. \u201cRemember that time we smoked angel dust with [the blues legend] Johnny Winter?\u201d he asks Pam Tent. \u201cThat was weird.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh yeah. We were doing Hell\u2019s Harlots and Marshall ended up in hospital,\u201d Tent, also now living in New York, recalls. \u201cThen 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, \u2018They\u2019re taking me away!\u2019 while dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein. There was a lot going on back then that we wouldn\u2019t get away with today.\u201d \u201cLike people f***ing in the aisles,\u201d Koldewyn interjects. \u201cThat happened a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n This has provided rich material for the new show. \u201cI was hearing all these stories, and it was clear that the political moment the Cockettes were existing in mirrored our current one,\u201d Joey Monda, producer of Midnight of the Palace, says. Back then it was Richard Nixon; now it is Donald Trump. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The Cockettes were also forerunners of trans identity. \u201cThere we were, the first bearded drag queens,\u201d Koldewyn says. \u201cWe didn\u2019t hide our genitalia \u2014 in fact it got more than its fair share of glitter \u2014 because we realised that gender really doesn\u2019t matter, does it? It\u2019s what is coming from the inside that counts.\u201d <\/p>\n Hibiscus in the 2002 documentary The Cockettes, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n All this made the Cockettes a high society cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n \u2022 The Rocky Horror Show would not get made today, claims creator Richard O\u2019Brien<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cTruman Capote and Rex Reed came to see the show at the Palace and loved it,\u201d Tent recalls. \u201cRex 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.\u201d<\/p>\n What worked at midnight in San Francisco<\/a> 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\u2019 opening night, which was dismissed by Gore Vidal with the immortal line: \u201cNo talent is not enough.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe were burnt out after being taken to all these parties, we hadn\u2019t rehearsed and it was a total disaster,\u201d Tent says of the performance. \u201cThe sound system didn\u2019t work properly so the balcony couldn\u2019t hear anything, and it was quoted as being the worst show in the history of off-Broadway.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne critic said it was worse than Hiroshima,\u201d says Koldewyn with the authority of a man who has those words branded into his very soul. \u201cAngela 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\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Fashionable New York certainly didn\u2019t know what to make of Cockettes style, a combination of Thirties dresses picked up from what Koldewyn calls \u201cthird-hand stores\u201d, glitter, embroidery and an excess of hairiness. \u201cWe worked hard to get that look in the show,\u201d Monda confirms. \u201cThe Cockettes were all about self-made self-expression. That is the ethos of the Fringe.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cComing out of the closet, wearing the entire closet,\u201d Tent adds, in a neat summary of the Cockettes\u2019 style philosophy. \u201cBack 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Debbie Harry: \u2018I\u2019m pretty clean now. But I still have a dirty mind\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cSylvester had an entire show made up of Billie Holiday songs,\u201d Koldewyn says. \u201cWe all used to watch Busby Berkeley films at the Palace. Everyone was obsessed with the 1930s.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1973 there was a final show \u2014 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 \u2014 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. <\/p>\n \u201cThe old spirit of the Cockettes is not forgotten,\u201d Tent says. \u201cIt just got buried for a while. Now it\u2019s back and I\u2019m glad to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur legacy was in showing that everyone\u2019s expression is valid, especially when it is done from a place of acceptance of themselves, rather than a place of bitterness,\u201d Koldewyn concludes. \u201cOn top of that, we were being silly. We were saying, it\u2019s OK to be a kid again.\u201d <\/p>\n They sure were. Launching a gender revolution is one thing. Staging a show called Journey to the Center of Uranus is quite another. ![\"Person](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/e222c16b-944e-44dd-b9f4-51377dc5195b.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Midnight at the Palace is at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, to Aug 24, gildedballoon.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades before anyone thought up the term nonbinary, back when the word queer was still an insult, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-44085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}