COCKETTES
Tahara began dressing in drag in 1957 in Texas when he was seven years old. His father was a rodeo clown, and he cast Tahara in his rodeo clown acts as his midget wife.
Tahara was also a member of the late 1960s early 1970s San Francisco hippie performance troupe, the Cockettes. The Cockettes were high-action, out-front, out-of-the-closet entertainers, and the satiric cutting edge of the first wave of Gay Liberation. You may remember the Cockettes from our numerous features on Rumi Missabu, who was also a member.
Unlike Rumi, Tahara stayed in San Francisco and joined the Angels of Light, the free theater offshoot of the Cockettes founded by the Cockettes’ founder, Hibiscus. The Angels of Light lived a communal life, ate vegetarian meals, and had to deny credit for their work. They embodied the hippie mantra. You can read Tahara’s autobiography on his Facebook page here.
—August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I came to San Francisco in July of 1969 with other hippies from Texas. We were all rejects and thought it would be the Summer of Love. It wasn’t. The streets were depressing when we arrived, and everyone was on heroin.
One month after Stonewall, I and a group of radical students and gay men at the University of California, Berkley came together. It was the peak of the 1960s: women’s lib, black liberation, gay liberation, and the Vietnam War. Protests were going on. We decided to start a theater troupe called Gay Liberation Theater.
I had seen Hibiscus, who would later found the Cockettes, in the streets dressed in costumes and dancing and singing. He never spoke. He just danced and sang. His robes and feathers inspired me, and I started making my own costumes. I had not officially met him yet, but I started moving in that direction, wearing costumes like him.
With Gay Liberation Theater, we performed our first play at Sproul Plaza in front of the Student Union building at the UC Berkeley. I was eighteen years old. Although I knew I was gay, I was not out of the closet. The whole thing was kind of weird to me. A big crowd gathered, you know, a couple hundred people, and everybody was watching.
I guess they thought, ‘Oh, here's another protest.’ But as soon as we started talking about homosexuality and all that stuff—it was a funny play written a lot of funny stereotypes of gay people and jokes about gays and a lot of humor. The main people in the troupe were Gary Alinder and Konstantin Berlandt. Konstantin was a student also at Berkeley, and he was the most radical of the group. He wanted to burn everything down: America is no good, burn it, and then redo the country with gay liberation, women's liberation, whatever. So we had quite a crew.
I was very uncomfortable coming out and talking about homosexuality publicly because I had been raised by a Christian fundamentalist father in Texas who said everything was evil. Even though I was uncomfortable, we did it. The crowd’s reaction was stone silence. Nobody said a word.
The next demonstration was about a week later on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. We had a gay kiss-in. Everybody was making out in the street, and people were shocked because those things were illegal and didn't happen in those days. I was in the Gay Liberation Theater in Berkeley for about six months.
In December of 1969, I went to the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California, where the Hells Angels were security. It was the concert where the Hells Angels stabbed someone to death. Most of the crowd was on LSD, and it turned into a huge freak-out. Everyone ran when the rioting started. The Hells Angels started beating people with chains.
I remember Mick Jagger saying, ‘Fellas, fellas, fellas, can we get a hold of ourselves?’ He was talking to the Hells Angels. They weren’t going to do anything except rage.
When the concert was over, I had to figure out how to get back to Berkeley. I was about 10 miles from home. I was going to hitchhike. I went up to the road, and there was Hibiscus in a truck with some people. He was in all of his finery. He saw me, walked over, and said, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you. I started a theater troupe called the Cockettes, and I would like you to be in it.’
He gave me a piece of paper with his name and number on it and said they were making a film and that I should come by. So I went there the following week, and he and a lot of other Cockettes were there. The film was Luminous Procuress. It was directed by Steven Arnold. He was the first real artist I met.
The film was based on Roman classics and Satyricon, a famous book about a well-known, lavish, and elegant party. The rice contains diamonds, and the ceiling opens up, and birds fly out. The guests eat exotic things like roasted flamingos. They have all these silver and gold utensils, and the host nonchalantly throws them away after every course.
Then Hibiscus and I began to hang out and meet each other at parties. About a month after the movie filming, we finally got the Cockettes together. He secured the use of the Palace Theater in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Previously, the Palace Theater showed underground films at midnight. They were strange films you could never see anywhere else that hippies would like.
Somehow or another, Hibiscus talked them into letting the Cockettes go on stage during an intermission. The first performance was just a dance on stage. A lot of the Cockettes took their clothes off. The crowd loved it. They asked Hibiscus if he would do it again, and he said he wanted to do a whole show. They asked when we could start, and Hibiscus said the next full moon because he was superstitious. He thought it provided positive energy, so it was agreed.”
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