BEAVER BAUER, GREG CRUIKSHANK, TAHARA
- August Bernadicou
- 1 day ago
- 18 min read
ANGELS OF LIGHT, PERFORMER
The Angels of Light was a radical theater troupe that sprang out of the Cockettes, the first bearded drag queens to receive substantial national press. Hibiscus founded the group, having previously founded the Cockettes. Their first shows took place while they were still part of the Cockettes, before they fully separated in 1971. Their first play as an independent troupe was called The Moroccan Opera.
The Angels of Light is known as a free theater troupe. Until the end of the group in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Angels of Light did not charge admission. They dedicated themselves to their craft. They lived communally and ate a vegetarian diet. They were prepared for a radical revolution in which everyone was united by a common goal: creating an alternative system outside of capitalism and greed.
The following oral history features Beaver Bauer, Greg Cruikshank, and Tahara. It took place on July 28, 2026, at the San Francisco Public Library. It was organized to celebrate the new Bambi Lake anthology, Devour Me, Again. Bambi was a member of the Angels of Light in 1971.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
August Bernadicou: Tahara, when you were growing up, how were gay men oppressed, and how did the Angels of Light overcome their oppression?
Tahara: They were behind an iron curtain. There was nothing out there. I hated Texas, so I came to San Francisco in 1969—college students, old guys. In 1969, the Gay Liberation Front in Berkeley, California, wrote a play called—I can't remember, Pookie, You Better Not Take My Ding Dong?, or something, about being gay. We performed it in front of the Berkeley Student Union building. There were a lot of Vietnam War protests and stuff happening at the time. I had a line in the play, "I raped the entire Vienna Boys Choir.” I was 18 years old. I hadn't come out of the closet yet, either.
They thought it was a Vietnam War protest. All these people rushed up, hundreds of them. I tell you, within two seconds, they were dead silent. I mean, you could have heard a pin drop. Homosexual, ass-fucking, 1969, Berkeley. They all stalked off. Nobody said anything. Next week, we had another demonstration, a kiss-in, in front of the Student Union building, all the guys kissing each other. Then we had 25 people in the group. That was the beginning of gay liberation in Berkeley. They also had it in New York, and then in Los Angeles.
August: Thank you. Greg, do you want to add anything to that?
Greg: When I first got to San Francisco, I was 16 years old. It was in 1969. My background was pretty much activism because the war was raging in Vietnam. People my age were eligible for the draft, could be sent off to Vietnam, and were not allowed to vote until they were 21. A massive movement was trying to emphasize that the war was unfair and that there might be other alternatives to violence. I hated the idea that the government could take me—I'll speak for myself—and send me into a war they had created, a war that most people were feeling was unpopular.
The seated government was run by a moron. The idea of activism, though, was spurred by the fact that the government was incredibly oppressive and not listening to the people's desires. Before I came to San Francisco, I was active in the anti-war movement. I was a member of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. Beaver was in a group called SNCC, which was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After that, when we got to San Francisco, we twinned at some point in a building with the Black Panthers.
Then, some people were very active and had a very high profile, people like Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Mario Savio in Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement was part of the entire idea of protesting. Protesting was a very big thing, and it united a lot of people. Real quickly, I think that what the Angels represented to me, for most of the men in the group, was an alternative to the idea that we were going to be part of the establishment and also be fodder.
By the time we were 21 or 22, there was a whole new batch of young men they were trying to draft for the war. The idea was that we had created some community around that, but there was the nuance of men trying to create an alternative. The Angels romanticized that whole idea and gave us a sanctuary.
August: Beaver, how did you find the Angels, and what drew you to them?
Beaver: I was lost. I was a lost kid, and I didn't know who or what I was, or what I wanted to be. I had dropped out of college. I was still coming out of thinking I was a horse. I thought I was a horse as a kid. I didn't see how I fit into any part of the world or the situation that was around me.
I went to the Lower East Side in New York City, and then I met Rodney Price, a stalwart member of the Angels of Light and a profound creative mentor of mine. He was heading to San Francisco. It was the San Francisco dream, so I decided to hitchhike with two girlfriends and my dog. There was one other dog.
I think we panhandled $5; we didn't have a map, and I didn't have a pair of shoes. I stuck out my thumb—we didn't even know which tunnel to go to. It was California. Somehow, we made it out here in 10 days—we went backward by mistake a couple times and got picked up by the police for being runaways, always. Then I thought, "Here it is. I'm in San Francisco. I'm going to find Rodney. He's out here."
Then the day after I got here, I went, "I'll go to the Fillmore West," and there he was, standing in line. I started crashing around and squatting in multiple redevelopment houses, as they were called then, over in the Western Addition. I moved, it seemed like, every two or three days. I was always moving, and we dragged and pushed a couch down the street to some apartment, hoisting it up the stairs, and tried to hook up the electricity for free. Then we met Hibiscus. Hibiscus came down the street, and it was like someone I'd never seen before.
I felt like the air around me changed. There were crystals in the air. When you see something as marvelous and as different from Ohio as you could get, you wake up. It was absolutely thrilling to me. He said to my two friends and me, "You can be the Florodora girls." I don't know if anybody remembers the Florodora girls. They were little rascals in drag, and a show that they did in a barn. "Let's do a show." I was ready. I signed up. I wanted it all. I was ready to be an Angel of Light. I wanted to perform.
I had a completely pulsating creative energy and drive within me because I had always drawn as a kid. I loved to draw. I didn't know where it would go. I was like, "Am I going to draw pictures of people's horses?" I was really naive. I found my creative family in the Angels of Light. It was an arena and an opportunity to find my creativity and explore it in a way with an incredibly wonderful, supportive, and, of course, sometimes fighting group of people, but to find a way to express my creativity and say, "One day I'm going to be this,” or “tomorrow I think I'll dress up as that."
It was an incredibly amazing way to start discovering myself and unleashing other parts of myself through drag and costume, putting on different clothes, and exploring different parts of my personality. Then I realized it was about the ability to transform myself, learn from that transformation, share it with other people, and hopefully encourage them also to feel free to express themselves and transform themselves.
I still work in the arts today, but the Angels were definitely the singular, most complete, expressive voice I ever had. I was just such a part of it, and they were such a part of me. It was complete. The fluidity between life, performance, and street was seamless. There were no edges to it. They all folded into one. I thought that was extremely wonderful, and that was really, really exciting to me.
August: What issues did you care about in the Angels, and what issues did the Angels of Light care about?
Greg: The first, I think, issue for the Angels was basically our desire to make free theater and not charge at the door. One thing that would create an alternative to the establishment was that there could be something for nothing. I think one of the big deals about the Angels of Light was the fact that we tried to make it so that when you saw the show, you were amazed that it was for free. You could do a lot with the back of a refrigerator carton and some glitter.
I think our energy and our vision were really otherworldly for the average audience member.
Underneath that was a desire to also connect to the community and invite people, if they hadn't already done that, to become part of a community that was alternative, that was seeking a way to divorce themselves from the mainstream.
Beaver: I thought it was really profound to be able to share with a lot of people. We did teach free classes in our studio. We got a studio at one point. We would put anybody in the show if they would show up for rehearsal. You had to show up and rehearse. We rehearsed for ages and weren't stoned at rehearsal. Before or afterward—it's your own business. We didn't want people showing up loaded at rehearsal, even though I'd say we performed a few things loaded.
I think it was a profound experience teaching each other to dance, African dance, line, and whatever anybody might be learning—Bharatanatyam from India, Shaolin, and the martial arts that we took in the park, over in the Panhandle park at that time, with remarkable teachers. Learning all those forms, increasing your cultural knowledge, and then sharing it with other people for free.
We had this concept called selfless service. It was about serving people without necessarily calling attention to it or claiming credit for it. This was new behavior for many of us, and we found it liberating.
There was something great about it. We had programs. We never put the year on it. We didn't say who did this, who did that until maybe around Holy Cow. I think it was really freeing. We weren't there to seek individual fame, which was really nice.
August: Tahara, what was the Angels of Light's influence? Can you talk about Kaliflower? What Kaliflower was, and the relationship between Kaliflower and the Angels?
Tahara: Kaliflower. 1969, I came to San Francisco. There used to be a guy, as Beaver explained, who would dance around in the street. He went by the name Hibiscus, a gay guy, about 20 years old—gorgeous blonde hair, beard, mustache, hippie. He was always on LSD, but he had been a theater person on Broadway. His parents were on Broadway. He did all the child star acts and everything. He was used to makeup and costumes.
He put on these outrageous costumes and became different characters—Tibetan dancers, dervish dancers, all kinds of things—and he would be on LSD, dancing in the street all the time. As Beaver said, he was a huge inspiration. He lived in a commune, which I later found out was called Kaliflower, which was back in the hippie days. You wonder what happened to the Summer of Love. It went underground. Within a year after the Summer of Love in '68, it was dead in '69 when I came here.
Nobody on Haight Street—burnt-out drug addicts, no street lights either. It was dead. They went underground and started living in communes, because a lot of hippies were from somewhere else, and they crash-padded, and I stayed here. Those turned into more stable living situations with more hippies. There was this one called Kaliflower commune. I think it was one of the first ones that actually said, "We are a commune."
18 people were living there, mostly mixed, gay, straight, a lot of women. It was all run by this guru whose name was Irving Rosenthal. He had been a beatnik in New York in the '50s with Allen Ginsberg. He was very good friends with Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg used to visit the house and stay there. He had a commune, and he brought Hibiscus, Peter Orlovsky—Ginsberg's boyfriend—and this guy named Mati.
This was Irving Rosenthal. He had written a book, a beat book called Sheeper. He had been a high school teacher in New York. That's how he got paid. He brought them out during the Summer of Love to San Francisco—and of course, LSD and magic. He rented a house, and he brought a printing press a little later. He had been publishing poetry, beat poetry in New York. He had his own printing press, so he sent for that.
Within a short time, he had seven or eight people living in this commune. He was very controlling. Everybody was freaking out on LSD. You couldn't even eat dinner without knowing whether or not there was LSD in the salad. I got dosed twice. My God. Anyway, he brought out the printing press, and they began printing this newsletter for commune people in these formerly crash-pad flop houses or something.
They published Kaliflower, and Hibiscus started taking LSD. He began—Irving was making a film called Ona Toy, about a Japanese brothel with all these hippie people living there on drugs and everything, which has never been seen, as far as I know, but it is somewhere. He got them all dressed up. Irving had been a friend of—Jack Smith is the one that inspired all of this, all the Angels and the Cockettes. His ideas inspired all—Irving wanted to make a Jack Smith-type film with his commune to give them something to do other than just hang out. He was making that film. That's where Hibiscus got his idea to start dressing in drag.
August: Beaver, what inspired you when you were in the Angels?
Beaver: I was inspired by the ability to exercise all my creative juices. I could paint a set, choreograph a number, make up a dance, and figure out the set. We would write pages of dialogue sometimes to create our characters. I found pages and pages of dialogue and research I had done for Cyclones with all these different versions of things we did.
I think it was also fun getting to know more about each other through working and making things up. What a lucky thing to be able to make things up for your life. What a blessing that was. I just think it was being able to act out what I wanted to act out, and also feel that perhaps you were inspiring the audience—that you were bringing them something poetic and funny.
Maybe through irony, ridiculousness, and over-the-top and preposterous things as a way of delivering a message that was deeper than it appeared on the surface. I think the Angels did that really well. Our show Holy Cow—somebody one night came to me afterward and said, "I've got Andy here," or whoever it was. They had brought their friend's ashes to the show.
He said it was the most happy moment they had ever had, and it was the most wonderful thing that they had ever seen. They brought this person's ashes to the show. That just really knocked me. It was like putting me on a cloud for a very long time, thinking how powerful that must have been.
August: Greg, what did you want people to take away from the shows?
Greg: The combination of energies among the Angels was very powerful, and it had its own resonance. I think anybody who experienced the show probably felt like, "Where the hell did this come from?" There were a lot of layers and a lot of depth. I think that, because we knew each other as family, there was also the feeling that you were witnessing something very intimate.
At that point, we were very open. Life was very open. There wasn't even the possibility that you could join or get something instead of the show, something even closer, something more intimate—a sense of community, for sure, a sense of creativity, and a sense of magic.
August: Tahara, did you think the world would catch up with you with the free theater and communal living?
Tahara: We were so young and naive that I thought everybody would be living in tents in six months. God, my parents certainly weren't going to catch up, now that I think about it. What we did—we thought we were the revolution, basically, and everybody was going to go in this direction. They did. Look at it now, compared to where it was then.
Now, here's an example. The first male nun, for example, was Sister Ed, who was in the early Angels of Light and stayed for several years. He had come to a Cockette show. He was 23 or something, dressed as a nun. I'd never seen a man in a nun outfit before. He made a perfect replica of a Benedictine nun. He looked like an old man anyway, even though he was 23.
Then I got to talking to him. He told me he'd made over 23 nun’s habits. He used to wear them. He would go out in public in a nun's habit. You couldn't tell he wasn't a nun, could you, Beaver?
Beaver: The funny thing with Ed is that he didn't take it and twist it in a way like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence later did. He was authentic. He goes, "I've got the right kind of blue serge that the Carmelites use. There's 75 pleats here, and you have to iron this with this."
Tahara: Everybody thought he was a nun—he smoked cigarettes as a nun on the street. We were with him one day on the street. He pulled out a cigarette at the bus stop and started smoking. These two women said, "Do you see that look of defiance in her eye?" He was once in the Goodwill. A guy who was running it came over and said, "Don't make fun of God. He doesn't make fun of you."
He did it. He went out with us. We were all in drag, negligees and prom gowns, and Sister Ed dressed in an authentic nun's habit. Sister Ed—he was the first male nun. Now they have the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which do an awful lot of good work, I have to say.
August: Tahara mentioned the word "revolution." What did the revolution look like for you all?
Beaver: I think it meant living outside the lines of life that were set down for us—that's how you were going to grow up, and you were going to behave that way. That a relationship wasn't what people told us it was going to be; it could be anything. A relationship could be anything, that it was valid, beautiful, and wonderful. We made such close friends. I thought that was really, really amazing.
I think the other thing I really liked was how scrappy we were. I think there was just something incredibly delicious about being scrappy and making something out of nothing. I thought that was just so exciting, that you didn't have to have a lot of money. You didn't have to have all the resources in the world. If you had the desire and the energy, you could make it happen. You could make it happen.
I think that's, once again, my favorite transformation because cardboard became India. Anything could become anything.
Tahara: It was all free, too.
Beaver: Yes. We dumpster-dived. We crawled around the streets. We got things at thrift stores. Everybody wore each other's—we had a thing called the drag room. I don't think we described our house with the drag room.
Tahara: Every queen in town came over the night of a show to put on their drag. When people came in, we didn't even know them. They got dressed in the drag room.
Beaver: Then we'd find their jeans kicked to the corner. "What happened to that dress and the sequined sweater?" It would all go out on the street and very likely never come back. We put all our clothes in one room. We fed maybe 30 people a night at our house. It was us and anyone coming over. We sat in a wonderful circle on the floor and took turns serving each other. It was a real point of pride to take care of each other, and bring people in and serve them.
Tahara: There were two other guys who hung around the Angels of Light—Corky and Jojo. They were on the edge of everything and constantly plastered. Basically, I have to be honest, in the Angels early on, we were all alcoholics. We went to the bar every night. You may have been one of the exceptions. I know Madeleine didn't drink.
The rest of us were drinkers. Corky and Jojo were just so stoned all the time. I don't think either of them could have walked a straight line. Some people think this is all very sad, pathetic. Bambi Lake is one of those really bizarre characters in the Angels of Light. Actually, in the Angels, she was really good. She was sweet, kind, and loving. How many of you have heard of Bambi Lake?
August: Let's talk about Bambi at the end.
Beaver: I just think if we’re going to mention Jojo and Corky, we also have to mention Ralph Sauer.
Tahara: Oh, my God.
Beaver: Ralph Sauer was one of the funniest people on stage—and at home, even funnier. He would dance. He knew every word to every show tune in the world. He sang it with full fervor, voice, and excitement.
He was incredibly creative. He made masks, he did costumes, and he ran around with hundreds of arms taped to his back. Then, on his hairy, bare stomach, he wore a baby bottle nipple. That was just the fun part of the Angels—was to take everything and give it a little turn.
Tahara: He was the very first guy to have a beard and a mustache and wear women's clothes in '67, even before Hibiscus. Ralph's humor, my God. He came up with a lot of great titles and songs. He wrote a country-western song for gay truck drivers called 60 Males to the Gallon.
We were doing an Arab show with belly dancing, and he came up with the title Turban Renewal.
Greg: Fifi.
Tahara: We called him Fifi. We all called him Fifi.
Greg: I think one of the things was that having someone around like that made it feel much more like you weren't doing the wrong thing. A lot of us decided to come to San Francisco and join the counterculture. It was a big step. On a certain level, there was a family connection that you might not be able to have anymore—something that you were turning your back on. You knew your family might not accept you.
The idea that you had a community, and you had a good time. You had an abundance of food, we had family, and we nurtured children. It existed outside of—again—outside of the establishment, but with this amazing amount of creativity, humor, and love for a while.
Tahara: The question is, could you do it now? That's the question.
Beaver: Also, there was an incredible network besides the Angels and Kaliflower. There was the Hunga Dunga commune, and they were a free food family. We would give them our food stamps, and then they would deliver food to a group of communes. They delivered it based on what people needed rather than how much was put in. We pooled our money.
We were into fairly healthy and radical food; we were into vegetarianism—sometimes veganism. The Kaliflower newspaper, which I believe Tahara talked about, was passed out—by hand— to the communes. This is before TikTok or any of this, but it was delivered by a hairy freak. There were recipes, ways to have sex, how to wipe your butt with water, and maybe a review of an Angel show. They covered everything. It was a really profound way of sharing.
Tahara: The underground was amazing. San Francisco, after the Summer of Love, went underground. For us as artists, it was like being in Paris in the 20s or something. It was magical, and there was so much creativity. It was really like an art scene.
August: Greg, can you talk about how a play came together, and what one of the plays was or what it was about?
Greg: We did a play. We did a show called Paris Sights Under the Bourgeois Sea. The milieu was like a royal revolution based on the French Revolution. We would have meetings constantly, every day. That's what we were going to do: try to flesh out how to make the statement and how to vary it within the context of the revolution coming. We thought that there should be an emphasis on the plague.
We did a show based on the idea that a plague was approaching, without really—.
Tahara: Before AIDS.
Greg: That's what I was going to say.
I just thought, in retrospect, in the communal idea and the community mind, there was something very prescient about the idea that the people had to prepare for a plague that was on its way, and we had no idea that that actually skewered into something that was going to impact everyone for quite a while.
Tahara: It was basically anti-capitalism. The plague came along. Adrian Brooks played a countess. Her name was Countess Flushette. She had a huge toilet on top of her head with ostrich feathers coming out of it. We were all dressed as these huge French countesses. Gregory had a little boy statue, about 3 feet tall, that pissed into Adrian's toilet. This was at the Opera House next door to the United Nations.
Greg: That took a lot of meetings. We had to have a lot of meetings before we figured out how to do that.
Tahara: That was about the French Revolution, though. Rodney had, I think, 14 dances in that show. He was one of these people—he studied every kind of dance you can think of. He brought a lot of new people into the Angels. He was absolutely adored by the young women he taught to dance. We used to call them the Rodney Fan Club. He was a really sweet guy. He choreographed all the dances.
I think our biggest dance was in Paris Sights. We had a penguin number.
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