ADRIAN MILTON
COCKETTES, ANGELS OF LIGHT, PERFORMER
Readers, you know we love the Cockettes and the Angels of Light. The LGBTQ History Project has documented more Cockettes and Angels than any other organization. Thousands of people now know who they are because of us. If you don’t, the Cockettes were a gender-bending, hippie, drag performance troupe who sprang out of the gay liberation revolution in San Francisco. Their first performance was New Year’s Eve 1969 in San Francisco, California. The term “genderfuck” was most likely coined by gay liberation activist Pat Brown to describe the group. The group was the satirical cutting edge of the Civil Rights movement that swept the country. Enter Adrian Milton, an original member. To learn more about the Cockettes, you can read our oral history featuring three Cockettes or our articles on Scrumbly, Tahara, and Rumi Missabu.
In 1970, Hibiscus, the founder of the Cockettes, formed the Angels of Light after he was kicked out of the Cockettes. The early Angels were closely associated with the Kaliflower commune, and they performed for free—they were a free theater troupe. Read our article on Bambi Lake, Greg Cruikshank, or our oral history with three Angels of Light.
I met Adrian Milton in New York City. We live three blocks apart. Adrian is a talker. In fact, the interview was over three hours. Adrian seems like someone who has been on a spiritual quest his entire life. His time in the limelight was fleeting, but he never stopped exploring and being creative. He is a painter (artist) full-time, and he embodies the spirit of the hippies (“free love”). The Angels of Light were a hodgepodge of people. They looked like the communities they represented. The biggest lesson we can learn from Adrian and the Angels is that life can exist when you reject capitalism and the status quo. By performing free theater, the Angels of Light made art accessible. They told the Vietnam War, “No.” They told those who needed food, both spiritually and physically, “We will feed you.” They dedicated themselves to their craft and called it “selfless service.”
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I always liked being outside of society. When I was coming of age, it was common for public figures to stay in the closet, and a lot of guys did. I was very open. I've had a boyfriend since I was five, and I was very happy with myself. I had no problems about being gay. I was closed off from certain avenues, certain professions, but I wasn’t really drawn to any of those professions anyway.
I went to Columbia University in New York in 1966, and one day, the school newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, had an announcement for the Student Homophile League. Gay and straight people were welcome. So I went, of course, and that was the organization of the first gay and lesbian group on a college campus. It's the oldest gay and lesbian group, and they used to have dances at Columbia every Friday night, and we all went, of course, because you could meet tricks.
I used to work at a club called Salvation in the West Village in New York City. One evening I was carrying a tray of drinks—everybody sat on silk cushions around the walls—and suddenly this Mafia man tripped me on purpose, and I said, ‘You motherfucker,’ or something like that. He got up, and he chased me into the kitchen, pushed me into the dishwasher, and started punching me.
I reached back, and there was a goblet in there, and I cracked him on the skull with it. Of course, that caused an uproar. It was 4:00 AM, and the lights were coming on. Judy Garland was sitting right outside the kitchen door, and she said, ‘Man, who freaked you out?’ Blood was running down the Mafia man’s face.
There was a lot of anti-gay behavior. On Fire Island, New York’s gay mecca, the police would raid the Meat Rack, and all those guys would be sent—given a fine or something. Their names were published in the newspaper, so most of them lost their jobs. In Florida, where I grew up, there was a police presence for gay people, but the police left the rich alone, and so there were a lot of rich gays who came for the winter, lived on boats in the Intracoastal Waterway.
After Columbia, I decided to move to San Francisco in late 1968. We were having a picnic in Panhandle park, and suddenly a man named Hibiscus came over to me. He was all in white, with flowers in his hair, and he handed me a note—he had taken a vow of silence then, because he was a devotee of Meher Baba, who was silent for 44 years. On the note, which I still have, it said, "Tender shepherd, help me lead my sheep." I was dressed very similarly to him, and he thought he saw a kindred spirit.
The first Cockette show was at the Palace Theater in Chinatown in San Francisco. It wasn't a show really. It was just can-can and jumping around and everything. Steven Arnold and the Cockettes made a movie called Luminous Procuress. I'm in several of the scenes; once as the emperor of the imaginary country and also as the black widow, where I was dressed all in black with black feathers. Around this time, my lover and I decided to go to India.
When we came back in 1971, I went right back to San Francisco. Hibiscus had been kicked out of the Cockettes, and they trademarked the name behind his back. Now, Hibiscus had a big ego, but he was great. He was full of ideas, and because he wasn't formally educated, he mixed and matched historical periods, costumes, and whatnot.
One of the fellows from the Cockettes, named Scrumbly, came to me at a dance one night. I was at some club, and he said, ‘Would you like to join the Cockettes again?’ And I said, ‘Well, let me think about it.’ The next day, Hibiscus came to my house. He said, ‘Oh, please join us, darling.’ So I did, and that was the Angels of Light. They were much younger than the Cockettes. Most of the people—the Angels of Light—were runaways, but a lovely group, and I still lived near Golden Gate Park. The Angels had a house. I once lived with them, but they wanted to all sleep in the same room, 20 people, and I tried it for one night. I said, ‘No, I'm going back to my comfortable bed.’
Most of the people in the Angels of Light were gay, although Johnny (later Bambi Lake) transitioned—there were a few straight people too, and it was a great time. We used to give shows for free. That was one difference between the Cockettes and the Angels of Light. The Cockettes charged to get in. We believed in free, and we would provide food as well, fruit mostly, and spread it to the audience. One Angel, Sister Ed, who dressed in a nun's outfit, would tell her jokes, and they were bad jokes. The audience would start throwing fruit at her. Sister Ed was quite campy.
I became friends with someone named Raggedy Robin, a well-known clown and a big feature in San Francisco. He was in Life magazine, and this girl saw it somewhere in Florida; she called herself Raggedy Jane, and she came to his doorstep as a clown, so he decided to marry her. It wasn't a real marriage, but it was at Glide Memorial Church, which was the big progressive church there, and it was quite an event. I mean, Timothy Leary, an author and psychologist who advocated taking psychedelics, was there. Everybody who was anybody in town at the time, and of course all the hippies, went. It was wonderful. It was a great, great wedding, and I stayed with Robin for a while. But one night, I was awoken by some screams. Robin had some lovebirds in a cage, and his monkey had gotten in and strangled the lovebirds. I thought, well, what's to keep him from attacking me in the middle of the night? So I left. I went back to the place I always returned to: 1887 Page Street, a gay commune. We would gather, and people would come over, and we'd all sing.
The Angels of Light wanted to give free shows, and the Cockettes wanted to charge. We also gave free food—it was a very ragtag group. It got more sophisticated over time, but our audiences loved us, and the symbiotic relationship between the audience and the Angels of Light was so tight that the audience almost became participants. One show we did in a warehouse off Van Ness Avenue, where the Black Panthers had their headquarters, and we were two floors above them. Hibiscus decided we were going to do a version of Showboat, so we turned these shopping carts into show boats—steam paddleboats with cardboard—and we all had to do blackface. Well, the Black Panthers found out, came up, and smashed all our sets. But then we cleaned up that show and continued. I sang Love Me or Leave Me.
The shows were more or less like vaudeville shows: separate acts. Sometimes we tried to tie it together, like our Wild West Show. We started in Massachusetts, and all these spinsters wanted to get married, so they became mail-order brides to California, and I was Doctor Feelgood, who sold snake oil. I was to escort these girls out to California, and then I was drinking so much of my own snake oil that I turned into a woman. So I did drag. I had a short petticoat on with five petticoats under the outfit. It was fun. It was great fun. And we did that show a couple of times because it was quite a success. I mean, everybody loved it. Then, we went to Stanford University. We went to Davis, California. We went somewhere in Oakland to a college there. At any rate, we traveled around. But mostly, we did it in San Francisco, and we used the University of California, San Francisco Extension Building mainly. That was our standard venue.
We did a show called What Ever Happened to Baby Jesus?. I was a Christmas tree at that show, and I had wire mesh on me and battery-operated lights so that I would twinkle a lot. It was a satire of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, coupled with the nativity. You know, just crazy. We did an Egyptian show—we were having an Egyptian tea party. And then we walked up to the front of the stage and said, ‘Would you like some tea, darling?’ And then we all kept saying, ‘Darling, darling, darling,’ and some straight guy in the back freaked out, and then he started swearing at us and threatening us. But we didn't stop the show, and so those are the kinds of things that happen.
Periodically we would do outdoor shows. Oh, one outdoor show we did with Hibiscus was a Halloween thing on Castro Street before Castro Street became completely gay. It was mostly families actually, and we were on a platform truck, and Hibiscus had put a pillow inside his dress. We were saying ‘San Francisco, open up your Golden Gate,’ and unbeknownst to all of us, Hibiscus started saying, ‘Open up your Sharon Tate,’ and he pulled out the pillow with blood all over it. It went all over the kids and the audience.
We would go to the flea market in Berkeley, and you could get a 10-by-12-foot Oriental rug for $5, because in the '60s everyone wanted to be modern. In New York City, someone sold Tiffany lamps on Christopher Street near the river for $20—real Tiffany lamps. Very few of them sold. People didn't want them. Now they're worth $300,000. I actually had one, and I left it in the apartment that I left when I moved Uptown. Mercedes was quite a character. She was all over the place. Very much a club lady. She went to gay bars that had a lot of women in them. Most of them weren't lesbians. They were just fag hags, basically, and they liked that phrase. Today, I don't think people like that phrase. I'm not sure. I mean, it's a different ethos today. Everything has changed, which is only natural. Life is about change. New York City has changed. It's constantly changing. Who knows what it will be ten years from now?”
Date and Interview Information
Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2026
Time: 12:10 PM EST
Location: New York, New York
Related Stories
About The LGBTQ History Project
The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives and the QueerCore Podcast.
Wonderful Interview. Adrian Milton is a treasure house of Stories, always fascinating!