OFF-THE-GRID
RUMI MISSABU IN CONVERSATION WITH AUGUST BERNADICOU

Rumi Missabu was born in Hollywood. In 1967, he took a bus to San Francisco, made a wrong turn, got lost, and was too stubborn to ask for directions. The first place he lived after he ran away was in a water tower with a lesbian poet. Shortly after he arrived in the Bay Area and barely twenty years old, he joined the drag performance troupe, the Cockettes. The Cockettes were high-action, out front, out-of-the-closet entertainers, the satiric cutting edge of the first wave of the Gay Liberation.

 

Rumi left the Cockettes after a year and a half, moved to New York, and then returned to San Francisco. For 35 years, he never had a government ID, work record, or social security number. The closest form of identification he had was an expired San Francisco library card that said "Rumi Missabu."

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In his first public speaking appearance in nearly three years, Rumi, in conversation with his 45-year junior biographer August Bernadicou (The LGBTQ History Project), discusses his time off-the-grid living in an alternative world with no plan to resurface.