SCRUMBLY, SWEET PAM, TAHARA

THE COCKETTES

Clockwise from upper left: Billy Orchid, Divine, Scrumbly Koldewyn, Pristine Condition, Sweet Pam Tent, Mink Stole, David Baker by Clay Gerdes, 1972.

In this conversation, I’m joined by three original members of the Cockettes: Scumbly, Sweet Pam, and Tahara. The Cockettes were a wild, gender-bending performance troupe that came out of San Francisco in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Their shows mixed drag, psychedelia, political satire, and absurdist theater in a way that shocked and thrilled audiences. They weren’t just performers—they were living art, pushing boundaries and helping crack open the door for queer expression in public life. 1970 “genderfuck.”

They were the glitter-covered edge of the early gay liberation movement, thumbing their noses at convention while creating space for a different kind of freedom. This conversation revisits their experiences from that era, how they made their work, and what it meant to live so far outside the lines.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

August Bernadicou: I want to start with the beginning of everything. Tahara and Scrumbly, what drove you into this world? How did you meet Hibiscus, the founder of the Cockettes?

Scrumbly Koldewyn: By 1969, he was everywhere and at a lot of places I went. Because of the Kaliflower commune, which was a commune where everything was free—they were trying to be part of a totally free society like the Diggers. He would come to our little place where we all lived. We were somehow connected, probably from going to the Stud bar and other similar places. He would visit us. We had some early Cockettes living there, like Miss Harlow, and I can't remember who else was there at the very beginning, but we had a lot. He eventually left Kaliflower.

Then we started the Cockettes. We'd been meeting at the Palace Theater. We were pretty much all there for Halloween 1969. I didn't go in costume or anything. On New Year's Eve, he said, "Everybody, Steven Arnold wants us to go up on stage and do a whole number.” Steven ran the midnight movies with Sebastian.

Sweet Pam: Nocturnal Dream Shows, yes.

Scrumbly: Nocturnal Dream Shows, yes, midnight movies at the Palace Theater. It was a big theater. At midnight or before midnight, we all went to the commune where Hibiscus lived at the very beginning with Irving Rosenthal and a bunch of people. Ralph was there, and we were able to raid the costume room because everybody shared clothes, right? We raided the costume room and got a bunch of dresses, and just put them on. Then we went to the Palace and just threw the whole thing up on stage and danced to the Rolling Stones.

Hibiscus was—also, you'd pass him on the street, or you'd see him out and about. He was always dressed in as much as he could get on with glitter on his eyes. His beard sometimes had glitter in it. He'd be throwing flowers at everyone. Later in the Cockettes, I always used to take him in my little VW downtown, where we'd get the flowers that the flower stands had thrown out. We'd throw them on stage. That's enough.

Scrumbly: You were there that night, weren't you? New Year's Eve?

Tahara: No, but we had already, just the month before in December, we're working on Luminous Procuress. I was in that. I lived in Berkeley, and you all lived in San Francisco. It was difficult for me to be there for whatever was happening. I met Hibiscus at Altamont, the Rolling Stones concert. Were you there? You were, Pam?

Scrumbly: I was.

Pam: No, I wasn't at Altamont. I was coming back from Colorado with David Johansen at the time. I missed the show.

Tahara: You had not yet come to San Francisco?

Pam: Oh yes, I'd been living with Ralph in 1968, and I knew Hibiscus already.

Tahara: Oh, yes. I can't remember a lot of that stuff, so long ago, but I met Hibiscus at Altamont. I had seen him in the streets dancing in his costumes. It's really, for me, very difficult to—I had just come to California, San Francisco, from Texas. My father was a fundamentalist Christian.

Scrumbly: Ooh, I didn't know that.

Tahara: Praise the Lord. I had been in this fundamentalist environment, and then I saw the Summer of Love happening. I thought, "Oh, that's where I need to be." I made this plan to run away and come to San Francisco. My father was not happy. I didn't tell anybody until the morning I left. He went and got a shotgun. He was a redneck, and he got a shotgun. He was in his underwear. It was like early in the morning. I was trying to leave before he got up. He came out in his underwear on the front porch. We lived in suburbia. He had that shotgun. He started shooting at the car, trying to kill me. I got out of there. Then I arrived in San Francisco, which was the complete opposite of Texas.

I saw Hibiscus in the streets not long afterward. He was mind-blowing, basically, mind-blowing. I tried and tried to describe the look because you must remember, I was from a different fundamentalist Christian background. I had never seen anything like that. I've tried to describe it. It's really hard to describe it because it was, you'd never seen anything like it. It was a work of genius, basically. He had these—nobody dressed like that at all. It was like something in the middle of everything that had nothing to do with anything. Anyway, you've seen pictures, I'm sure, of the robes and the feathers. It was very magical.

Scrumbly: He was walking theater.

Tahara: He was. I didn't know it, but later I was told that a guy named Jack Smith, an artist named Jack Smith in New York—Hibiscus had known him and had gotten his idea for these costumes.

Pam: Flaming Creatures, right?

Tahara: He made Flaming Creatures. It was an underground film. He was considered an avant-garde genius artist. Hibiscus got his ideas from that. They were all in that scene in New York at that time. Hibiscus was a theater person. His parents were theater people on Broadway. He knew Jack Smith and got his ideas from that. I saw him, and I was at Altamont, and he was an Altamont. I had been inspired by Hibiscus because I had been raised in—my father was a rodeo clown in Texas.

As a child, I had been raised by a fundamentalist Christian rodeo clown who wanted me to be in the act and play his little seven-year-old drag queen wife. I did, I played in all the acts. I did that until I was 17. I came to California, and I immediately saw Hibiscus. I was inspired by him. I began dressing like him, not as much as he did. I was still in the closet at that point, I think, and dressing up.

Then I saw Hibiscus at Altamont. He came up and saw me. I said, "Oh, I'm very glad to meet you. I really admire you." He said, "I want you to come to an event I'm having." He gave me a piece of paper with an address on it in San Francisco. It was the filming of Luminous Procuress. The following Saturday, I went to this address, and that's where we were filming at Steven Arnold's studio.

Scrumbly: Right.

Tahara: Pam, were you in Luminous Procuress or not?

Pam: No, I was not.

Scrumbly: I was. We did this giant frieze, where everybody, and a lot of people, were in it. Not Ralph, though, but Adrian, not Adrian Brooks, but other—

Tahara: Adrian Milton.

Pam: Adrian Milton.

Scrumbly: Johnny McGowan and—

Tahara: All the Cockettes before they were Cockettes.

Scrumbly: Kreemah Ritz.

Tahara: No, that scene was filmed in February. They’d actually done the New Year's show. That scene was filmed just a few weeks later. We got the same people, and Steven asked us to recruit people. We did other scenes like the Sea of Flesh and the Great Big Banquet scene.

Scrumbly: That was filmed before, you say?

Tahara: No, I'd say after. All of it was filmed after. Just a few weeks, though. I was at the filming, but I wasn't at the first show, so I thought the first show was afterward. Anyway, that's when I met the rest of the Cockettes who were there. Then the film came out, and the only problem, I thought, was that it was too long, but it was a beautiful film. It was so exotic, but I thought it was a little long.

August: Pam, what did the average day as a Cockette look like? Were you working a straight job?

Pam: No one worked. No, Kreemah Ritz worked. Kreemah was a bus driver. No, I didn't work, no. No, I came out here before I ever got involved with the Cockettes with David the Mad Bomber, who bombed Army Induction Centers. He was on the lam. Baby Bobby, who turned out to be famous in his own right as Bobby Miller of Studio 54 fame, was the photographer. The three of us came out here together. I met Hibiscus. I was living with Ralph, who coined the name Cockettes in 1968 in a commune.

Then I ran into Hibiscus. I met him in Golden Gate Park. He was in a tree singing with Ralph and some other people, and he was incredible. He invited me home, and I had nowhere else to go. I went to Kaliflower with him. Anyway, he kept saying, “Well, be in the shows.” I was just running back and forth to Colorado. I missed the first couple of shows. Our typical day, getting back to what we did, was just go—we'd walk up and down Haight Street a lot. That was early before the Cockettes. Then, when the Cockettes started, we would hang out at the Palace Theater. I would remember going there, and it was an all-day affair. Wasn't it Scrumbly? Everybody would just—

Scrumbly: All day?

Pam: I remember it being all day. I don't know where else we went.

Scrumbly: At the Palace? No, I never got there before midnight.

Tahara: No, during rehearsals. During the—

Scrumbly: Were all at midnight.

Pam: I don't know where you were—

Scrumbly: After the movie.

Pam: That was the daytime rehearsals.

Scrumbly: We didn't have any. They had to be after the movies, the Chinese movies played there.

Tahara: Oh my God, I'm in an alternative reality.

Scrumbly: It was so easy for us to be up at 4:00 AM when we were in New York.

Tahara: Scrumbly, we had daytime rehearsals there.

Pam: Yes, I know we did.

Tahara: Mr. Chu used to come and let us into the theater. I think they started around 3:00 or 1:00 in the afternoon, I'm not sure. Kenneth Marlowe came in the daytime.

Pam: That's right.

Scrumbly: I remember all the night ones, like when Johnny Winter came.

Tahara: Then the TV crew came and was trying—what were you on?

Pam: Really? The TV crew wanted us for that documentary, and they came in, and Hibiscus threw them all out. That was during the day. Oh yes.

Scrumbly: When Johnny Winter came there and gave people—

Pam: That was a good time.

Tahara: That was that bad Montgomery play. What's her face?

Pam: Sandy Love.

Tahara: Sandy Love. She always gave us hash all the time. Remember that? She was like a hash dealer. She was a lot of fun.

Scrumbly: Yes, Rolling Stone gave us hash to write the movie, which we never wrote.

Tahara: That would have been something shocking.

Scrumbly: Hibiscus turned down the cash and did it for hash.

Tahara: Tricia's Wedding was our movie, but The Cockettes film would have killed people. I remember Hibiscus brought you to rehearsal, and you brought with you Marshall Olds.

Scrumbly: Oh, yes.

Tahara: His wife, Diane, and their little girl, baby Magic.

Scrumbly: Magic.

Pam: I had been living with them in New York because Marshall was an ex-carny and, of course, eventually he joined the Cockettes and they had picked me up off the street because my apartment burned down in New York and I was sitting on my suitcase in front of Gem Spa with a “take me home” sign around my neck. They had taken me home. I knew them from New York, and they came out here, and we eventually started squatting on Sutter Street across the street from Kaliflower.

Tahara: What is squatting?

Pam: It was during the redevelopment agency shut-down.

Tahara: Is it actually squatting?

Pam: The redevelopment agency in San Francisco shut down a lot of houses in Japantown because they wanted to redevelop the neighborhood. We just moved in, took the boards off the windows, and Marshall hooked up the utilities down at the street level, and we lived there. We even got our mail every day from the mailman. It was great.

Tahara: Did they pay rent?

Pam: God, no. Beaver did the same thing in a different house. A lot of us were living rent-free, so we didn't have to work. Even when I was living with Ralph, I was renting a walk-in closet for $20 a month. You don't have to do a whole lot to make $20 a month.

Scrumbly: On Haight Street, when we lived on Haight Street, there were 10 of us. The rent was $150.

Tahara: For 10 people, right?

Scrumbly: 10 people.

Pam: We didn't have to work in that sense of the word. We were always busy, always busy. It took a lot of time to put your drag together. We spent a lot of time going to thrift stores—anywhere we could. We were really immersed in the whole thing.

Scrumbly: I used to make costumes and clothing for the Third Hand Store.

Pam: That's right. Marshall and Diane worked at the Third Hand Store, where we got a lot of stuff.

Sweet Pam Tent (left), John Rothermel and Pristine Condition by Clay Gerdes, 1972.

August: Scrumbly, how did everything being so inexpensive and cheap affect your creativity?

Scrumbly: Oh, it gave us lots of free time to be high a lot. When you have just free time and you do what you really feel you want to do, you can be so creative. You can be so much more creative, unless you want to waste your time on something, some downward spiral. Yes, we all had a great time. Let's see, what do I need to talk about? Oh, yes, the lack of inflation. It was just, $150 back then, which is more like $1,500 now.

Pam: That meant $15 per person,

Scrumbly: $150 now, which—

Tahara: I only paid rent one time. Nobody at that house had any money, as I recall. I think John Flowers might have had a little bit.

Pam: Yes, he took out a loan, a college loan, because he was going to open—

Tahara: Rent, we had to—Scrumbly, I think you collected the money, and paid the bills. All I remember about rent and stuff as it was, we didn't have any money. I think the whole house was supported by two or three people.

Scrumbly: Oh, most everybody kicked in something.

Tahara: I only once contributed $30 in the whole year I was there. The other thing I remember is that we never had any food. I'm just kidding.

Scrumbly: We used to make brown rice and vegetables all the time.

Tahara: Now, this was before Jet, because Jet didn't come till later when he decided to break up the Cockettes.

Scrumbly: I used to be the one to go to the store and buy a 100-pound sack of brown rice.

Pam: Boy, there was plenty of it.

Tahara: I don't remember any of that. All I remember is the lighting technician for the Cockettes and his boyfriend, Reuben, and Daryl. Reuben got a job in a donut shop and brought home all the boxes and boxes of leftover donuts every night. We ate donuts for three weeks until we were all vomiting and nobody could look at a donut, and he kept bringing them. Then, finally, he quit that job, and then we all started drinking red wine.

Scrumbly: We were not above going to get vegetables that were thrown out by the grocery stores.

Pam: Hibiscus would have these things where we'd go raid the dumpsters outside the grocery stores.

Scrumbly: Yes, and we’d do things like go to… There was a bar in—

Tahara: I know you cooked. I remember you used to make spaghetti, and Goldie Glitters cooked sometimes, and John Flowers would—

Scrumbly: Oh, yes. She made Russian baked chicken.

Tahara: Oh, I remember you did make… We were all meat eaters, or I was. You made a chicken for Sebastian when he came, the manager of the theater, when he came over, and we had that—the French Revolution.

Pam: The horrible meeting, that horrible meeting. Right.

Tahara: Jet vomited during the meeting because we were eating meat, and he was a vegetarian. We were eating meat, and he vomited.

Scrumbly: Poor Jet.

Tahara: Oh, he's gone now. Gone. I know. It was the final reward.

Scrumbly: Poor Jalala back then.

Tahara: He was Jalala. Jalala is, he got the name from, a Moroccan dance, a type of trance dance in Morocco.

August: Tahara, you were involved with gay liberation in Berkeley. How did the climate of gay liberation, civil rights, anti-war, women's rights, and women's lib play into the Cockettes' performances?

Tahara: There were actually—I wasn't the only gay liberationist in the Cockettes. Lyndon Sandler, he and I had been in the Berkeley Gay Liberation together. Also, John Flowers was in Berkeley Gay Liberation. When I got into the Cockettes, I told them to come and see a show, and they did. Instantly, they wanted to join, and they did. The interesting thing about the gay liberation is it was—the difference between the Cockettes and gay liberation was that the Cockettes were more of an art liberation, gay liberation art. The gay liberation was much more government-focused, and passing laws and stuff.

Scrumbly: Yes, I think the Cockettes were visceral. I think what people used to say is that we did more for gay liberation than any group had at that point. Because, for one thing, we got all of these… We were the first gay hippies, actual hippies. Many people in gay lib were not exactly hippies, but we were the freaks. We were the ones who had been dressing up because it had crossed over into the culture, merging with rock and roll. We used to always go to the Fillmore and the Avalon back in the day. We gave our name as being on the guest list, and somebody on somebody's guest list was sure to be there. We were involved in that scene, the groupie scene, like especially Miss Harlow and—

Tahara: They made a film about that called—

Scrumbly: Yes, Groupies. A lot of them were in it. The fact that we did gender role confusion, the fact that we attracted a large contingent of different kinds of people, rather like all the freaks in San Francisco, who were open to this. Everybody was opening up about their sexuality.

Pam: Right. There weren't any strict labels. It was hybrid hippies, hybrid. There were gays, hippies. We all were…

Scrumbly: And everything in between.

Pam: Everything. There weren't any strict labels like “you belong here” or “you belong there.” It was all of us.

Scrumbly: Yes.

Pam: It was a wave, really.

Tahara: I remember, Pam, when you came to the Cockettes when Hibiscus brought you to the rehearsal. You were dressed like a hippie earth mother.

Pam: Really? I believe it.

Tahara: You had this long curly hair past your waist. You had on a granny dress, this long, old-fashioned dress. I think you were wearing a homemade blouse with ruffles.

Pam: I have no doubt.

Tahara: I think you were barefoot also.

Pam: Perhaps.

Tahara: I looked and I thought to myself, "Now, how does she fit in with a raging drag queen, gay drag queen?"

Pam: Hibiscus saw something. He saw something in each of us, and it worked.

Tahara: You later became one of the featured performers, and you were in—God knows how many years you were in Cockettes. I don't know. I was in the first year. I left and went into the Angels of Light.

All of those differences we had in those days over free or not free—you remember all the schisms, and everybody was like, "You're going to Hell,” and all this stuff. It all seems now to have blended more. Scrumbly, for example, did music for the Angels of Light.

Scrumbly: I played for a lot of Angels shows.

Tahara: Yes, he's been in a lot of Angels shows. Pam's worked with a lot of Angels? I don't know if you were in any Angels shows.

Scrumbly: Cinderella II. She was in that.

Tahara: I was in Cinderella II.

Pam: Also, the Moroccan opera.

Tahara: Nowadays, the political differences and the philosophy are not as intense.

Scrumbly: The Angels were relaxed. They relaxed their free show, their free theater. We all relaxed our—we just didn't see that, since we were sneaking so many people into the Palace Theater all the time, the ones that couldn't afford the $2 entrance.

Pam: We never made any money anyway.

August: Sebastian threw a fit because they had already sold those tickets. When the people arrived, someone was already sitting there. That was a problem.

Scrumbly: They didn't reserve seats. Once in a while, he did. He just let it go on.

Pam: There were 1,300 seats in that place. There were a lot of seats.

Scrumbly: Sebastian was aware of it. He let most of it go on. Only when they had sold these tickets and there wasn't room for the ticket buyers did he get upset.

Pam: We got in trouble with the fire marshal. Because they packed that theater. People were sitting in the aisles some nights. It was completely packed.

Tahara: Everybody was on drugs.

Pam: The fire marshal came. Sebastian got hauled off to jail at least once.

Tahara: Sebastian was taken to jail?

Pam: Yes, he was.

Tahara: I didn't know that.

Pam: Yes, for overcrowding the theater.

Tahara: I was shocked when I heard the Palace Theater was paying off the police. Yes. I didn't know that either.

Scrumbly: No, back in those days, everybody did.

Pam: Yes.

Tahara: We were basically criminals.

Pam: Our shows went on. We performed the Halloween show, which ran until 4:00 AM. This is way past the time that anything was supposed to be open.

Tahara: There were so many people freaking out on acid in the show and in the crowd, the audience.

August: Can you talk about a couple of the plays, Scrumbly?

Scrumbly: Let's see. Which one, Pam, or—oh, how about the first New Year's one, Tahara? I think that was the last one you were in.

Tahara: Which one?

Scrumbly: Our one-year anniversary. It was New Year's, and we did it at Bimbos. I remember Goldie Glitters being carried by—she had four guys carry her, and you sang The Moon of Manakoora, and you had these big dried branches you would wave all the way across the stage, and ideally, you'd smack somebody in the face a little bit. There was a lot of physical comedy in the Cockettes' shows. Before that, there was the first scripted show, which one of our members wrote, Link Martin, and I wrote music for. It was the first all-original show. Now, up to that point, we'd done shows like Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma, The Fairytale Extravaganza.

Tahara: Hibiscus wrote it.

Scrumbly: Yes. He'd started those, but we all partook. What happened for those early shows was he would invite people to go along with this theme, and we'd all come up with our own number. We'd all cast our own numbers with the people we wanted involved and make all the arrangements. I played piano at the very beginning, but then we had other people come in so I could get up and freak around too.

Pam: It's kind of a free-for-all a lot of times.

Tahara: It was mostly Broadway musicals.

Scrumbly: Yes, a lot of attention to Broadway musicals, but that was, for instance, Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma. We did one that was like Madame Butterfly or something, but we can't do that now.

Pam: It was in fake Cantonese, wasn't it?

Scrumbly: What?

Pam: Wasn't it in fake Cantonese?

Scrumbly: Rumi Missabu always said, but it wasn't fake anything. It was just—

Pam: It was in Rumi's mind, he was saying.

Scrumbly: Geishas were not Cantonese, they were Japanese. See, that's the problem…

Tahara: Nobody cared.

Scrumbly: I know. Except me, and I'm a stickler for accuracy.

Tahara: God knows what you're seeing on acid.

Scrumbly: Historical accuracy is important to me.

Pam: At that point, there wasn’t historical accuracy. We mixed everything. We mixed cultures. We mixed everything.

Scrumbly: Yes, because it was just totally free expression. There was—

Tahara: The Cockettes were not racist at all, not at all.

Scrumbly: When we did the circus show about the middle of the—no, that was the second year. No, I can't remember when it was. Anyway, I went out on stage in a dress, and I was having some sort of pain, and I thought, "Is there a doctor in the house?" It was the circus show, and four people, dressed as elephants, came running up, accompanied by elephant doctors.

They operated on me, they pulled out Saran wrap and everything. There was a Filipino film where a doctor actually reached in without drawing blood and pulled things out.

Pam: I never understood that number.

Scrumbly: I know. Is it real?

Pam: They were singing, "Dowhatonme, dowhatonme."

Scrumbly: It was hard to believe. I had to leave. I had to go out to the lobby during that film. Anyway, it impressed us. I had a dowhatonme and I got up and said, "Do what? Do what? Do what on me?"

Pam: Do what you want on me…

Scrumbly: That kind of freedom, that kind of craziness. Goldie Glitters had her flea circus where she walked out with this little tiny box, and she says, "Okay now, jump." She'd call out and have them do tricks.

Tahara: She pulled them out from her groin, I remember.

Pam: Yes, she squatted. She squatted and let the crabs jump off.

Tahara: Everybody was on acid.

Scrumbly: Wow.

Pam: It was bizarre.

Tahara: John Waters was there.

Scrumbly: Pearls Over Shanghai was really great. Such a fun show to do, even though we can't do it now because—

Tahara: Why not?

Scrumbly: Because we can't—

Pam: It's culturally…

Scrumbly: Asians that aren't Asian.

Tahara: Oh, I see. Yes, that's true. We even did Black face.

Scrumbly: Yes, I know. It was a send-up of old Hollywood, Pearls Over Shanghai was.

Pam: Shanghai Express.

Scrumbly: That's what we were parodying, and we knew it was ridiculous for Chinese to appear that way.

Pam: They say the audience was in on the joke.

Scrumbly: Yes, they were in on the joke.

Pam: It was what we were sharing. We were mocking all these things in society, and everybody was in on it. The audience was part of the show.

Tahara: It was an ignorant racial stereotype.

Pam: It was.

Scrumbly: It was, but it's no more than the movies.

Tahara: What was done, at that? We had three Black people in the Cockettes. Sylvester, Linden, Toby, am I forgetting anybody?

Pam: Reggie.

Tahara: Reggie, four. I don't remember them objecting. It was not done in the spirit of racism. It was done in the spirit of kindness.

Pam: We were taking the piss out of everybody and everything.

Tahara: It’s now considered racist. Back then, it was racist, but…

Scrumbly: If there was some, we could have been more woke.

Tahara: Yes, woke.

Pam: We wouldn’t have been the Cockettes if we were woke.

Scrumbly: We didn't mean to hurt anybody, and—

Tahara: Woke, which will soon be illegal.

Pam: The Cockettes were almost illegal.

Tahara: They still are.

Pam: We took everything to this extreme to show how stupid it was. All these stereotypes were so ridiculous. We took it to the extreme to poke fun at it because we knew how ridiculous it was.

Scrumbly: We would parody everything.

Pam: Everything. Nothing was off limits.

Tahara: The thing I recall is that people back then, when they saw one of us in our looks, they did not know what it was. The identity of a gay person or a drag queen or whatever had not yet come to be. The only term for men who dressed as women was "drag queen," and this term referred to someone who tried to pass as a woman. The Cockettes—

Scrumbly: Not us.

Tahara: We had beards and mustaches, and the women, they dressed like fairies or something.

Scrumbly: Michael used to wear a dildo.

Pam: I used to have a mustache in Pearls Over Shanghai at one point.

Tahara: People, when they saw us, they didn't identify it as gay, or this is gay, or this is a drag queen. It just went like that, and nobody knew what to say. Then, as it became more gay identified, nowadays they look at it and say, "Oh, that's a drag queen," or, "That's a gay," or something like that, but back then it wasn't that easy.

Scrumbly: Because what we were showing is, these are people, these are real people, and we can't be classified. You can't put us in a box. I think it helped a lot at that period in time to eventually make life a little easier for trans people—make their acceptance a little easier. It was a big influence on a lot of people. They picked up on us in France, Germany, and Italy.

Tahara: Yugoslavia.

Scrumbly: Yes, they influenced a lot of people all over the world. David Bowie.

August: The Cockettes went to New York, but Tahara, you didn't go. Why didn't you go to New York?

Tahara: Oh, I was in the Angels of Light, which came out of the Cockettes. There was a whole, huge schism in the Cockettes over money and—

Pam: Free show.

Tahara: —commercial. You have to remember it was the height of the Summer of Love hippie period, and it was all these idealistic ideas about reforming society and new ways. We were in the midst of the Vietnam War at the time. I didn't go myself. I told them I was married to a canary, and then I had to move, but it was… Oh, anyway, so why didn't I go to New York? I was in the Angels of Light at that point, and I was doing free theater, and we'd had a whole schism with the Cockettes, and they wanted to become famous with a career, whatever.

Scrumbly: Many people's motivation and objection to Hibiscus was that he kept upstaging people.

Tahara: No, I understand that. I agree.

Scrumbly: Also, we wanted to be more rehearsed. Some of us were getting tired of just throwing these shows together, sloppy shows, and we wanted something with a little more polish, because we wanted our own performances to be better.

Tahara: There were a bunch of the Cockettes on heroin.

Pam: No.

Tahara: They weren't. I heard a lot—

Scrumbly: Well, there were some by the time we got to New York.

Pam: In New York, there were a couple of things, a couple of people, but no, it wasn't predominant at all.

Scrumbly: There were maybe two or three.

Tahara: I think we were all alcoholics in the Angels of Light, most of us, and then later on, they wanted more polish, and people quit drinking. Anyway, I was in the Angels, and it was really a matter of philosophy and ideals. We were a free theater group; they were a commercial group. We didn't do any publicity, and our Angels of Light did publicity; we didn't charge money, they charged money. It was just that.

Then, of course, we had a different communal lifestyle. We were into this ideal called John Humphrey Noyes Plan of Ideal Living, and Kaliflower had Irving Rosenthal as the guru. He told us that the new world is coming, and we'll all be living together, looking each other in the eye, and living real lives. We went for that, and the Cockettes didn't go. Neither did John Waters; he was against that. They were rehearsing downtown with Sylvester, Johnny, Bobby, and all these people. Rumi, I don't think he went, did he?

Pam: No. Rumi did not go.

Tahara: He didn't go. Who else didn't go besides Rumi and me?

Pam: Hibiscus.

Tahara: Hibiscus. Anyway, well, they’re downtown rehearsing, and we're in the Angels, we're all free, and Hibiscus, unknown to anybody, sneaks to the Cockettes rehearsal and begs to be put in the show. He says, "I'll write a great show for you if you'll let me go to New York with you." As Scrumbly said, he was an egomaniac, a charismatic genius who inspired many people. If there were 12 songs in a show, he had to sing 8 of them. He had an enormous ego in that way.

They didn't want him because they knew who he was, and Sylvester especially, because Hibiscus had ruined one of Sylvester's songs. He burst out on stage dressed as a zebra in the back of Sylvester, and Sylvester, after that, never liked Hibiscus again. They didn't want him there, Sylvester, Bobby, John Flowers, and—

Pam: Rothamel.

Scrumbly: Do we really name all these names?

Tahara: What?

Scrumbly: I don’t really think we should name all these names.

Tahara: Well, they're all gone, aren't they?

Scrumbly: Let it be in the past, things—

Tahara: Anyway, they grabbed Hibiscus, and he was a masochist. He probably loved it. Grabbed him, and threw him down a flight of stairs, and, “Get out, you fucking bitch.”

Scrumbly: No.

Tahara: It was all over town. Everybody was talking about it. I confronted Hibiscus about it.

Scrumbly: Hibiscus had a fight, physical fight, and it was not good news. It was not pretty to see; we were all really upset by it.

Tahara by unknown, 1970.

August: Pam, what does the 2025 queer revolution look like?

Pam: Oh, wow. I'm in sleepy Sonoma County, so I'm not down in the heart of it like everybody else is. Scrumbly would have his thumb on the pulse of what's going on in queer culture more than I do. I'm kind of tucked away now.

Scrumbly: Well, that’s something that this almost 80-year-old man wants, as much as I can, to keep track of. I don't know, it just seems like the movement… I love this Pride Sunday tomorrow because a lot of the corporations are out of it. It started, to me, to get a real middle class, and what happens when big money comes in? That's the kind of thing that can happen. There's just too much influence, just like coming into a government too much, you can't help it. You get big donations from corporations, and you try to keep those donations coming in.

I think reexamining where we are and realizing how we feel and what the basic tenets are for gay liberation, is to be even more inclusive than we've been. That aspect of it is good to me. It’s a good sign. It's just like the pendulum swing. Hopefully, it swung so far that it's going to swing in the other direction, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to be the President. Some experts are actually saying that. Historically, it always swings. Our reaction to what's going on right now can be a really good thing.

August: The Cockettes seem like they're the opposite of assimilation, and it seems like you might have been talking a little bit about that, Scrumbly, but what happens when the gay community assimilates?

Scrumbly: It gets stronger, it gets more vital, it brings us together. I think that's the basis of what the Cockettes were. It’s everybody who doesn't stick to a certain stubborn dogma, everybody who is open to other people, whether they’re gay or straight or anything in between.

Pam: We were a family, though. We were a family.

Scrumbly: I mean, yes, it's family, and feeling like we're just people, we're trying to be anything we're not, we're just us. "Please allow us to exist. Thank you very much." That's what the Cockettes were saying.

August: Did anyone have a comment on this? What do you think of drag as an act of grooming children?

Tahara: Well, as a seven-year-old drag queen rodeo clown, I'm the last one to ever say no, but I think it's stupid. I think it's just homophobia, pure homophobia. Also, I think there are gay children. I was a gay child.

Scrumbly: I knew I was.

Tahara: Scrumbly was a gay child, Pam was a gay child. It's there. They don't want it, though. They don't want it. In 2025, I'm in the present, but there are still other people who are still in 1952. It's just the way it is. I'm a little afraid myself nowadays, I think. Sometimes, I'm nervous.

Pam: I think we all wanted to embrace our differences. I think that now everybody is in separate little corners, fighting and arguing. Back then, we embraced our differences, too. I think our group was more inclusive than it is now.

Tahara: I know, but we were such a small, tiny group of people. We weren't a huge country or world then. We were just this tiny little—couldn't have been more than 50 of us or so. I remember the Palace Theater in the first show. The first show I was in had an audience of about 50 people.

Scrumbly: Right, but they were there for the midnight movies, and we were a surprise. After that, they started coming. It took about three months for the line to go around the block outside the theater. Again, that was the idea: we're inclusive. I don't remember even thinking about anybody's race or about their racial identity, for instance.

Pam: Or their sexual identity.

Scrumbly: Or their gender identity. They were just people.

Tahara: I still had a lot of racist ideas left over from Texas. Sylvester and I had an interesting conversation once about racism. He said he didn't like to talk about race, and he was afraid. He said, if he answered my questions, I'd ask him if Black people liked white people for sex, because he was always sleeping with white, hippie men. That was his choice.

Scrumbly: Oh, yes.

Tahara: He said he didn't want to get into a race discussion. Anyway, I did have some racial prejudices. I'm over them now, I hope. I was married to a Black man for years. My partner, Arnold, and I were together for 17 years. He was Black.

Scrumbly: Wow.

Tahara: He passed away. He's gone now. He’s been gone a couple of years, but I miss him.

August: I want to ask about queer expression as liberation. Do you think that is a good approach, or should we be more militant? Can you compare, contrast, and give your thoughts on a vision for the future?

Scrumbly: Right now, it's hard to say. We have to keep creating. We must continue to express our feelings. We have to work hard on our love for everyone and our connection with everybody. On the other hand, I really feel like we're watching this country turn into Nazi Germany right before our eyes, and I can't believe it, and it makes me sick. I'm shocked that our politicians aren't taking drastic action to counter it. Did I stray too far from the original question?

Tahara: No, that's a good answer.

Scrumbly: I think we need a very strong, united resistance.

Tahara: It's happening, but the politics now are all about hate. It's all hate.

Scrumbly: That's why the only thing we can fight it with is the opposite of that.

Tahara: If you look at it from the other side's vantage point, they think we're going to make their children wear dresses and get fucked in the ass and stuff like that, so…

Scrumbly: I know. Totally ridiculous. As soon as people get to know other people who happen to be gay or something in between, they start changing their minds.

Tahara: I believe it will change. I don't think this hatred is going to continue because it's so fruitless.

Scrumbly: Yes, it's very true.

Tahara: If you look at the gay Pride parades today, everybody's smiling, there are rainbows, there are colors, children, people dancing. They had a straight pride parade last week in Idaho. My God, I've never seen such stern faces.

Scrumbly: There you go. These people are not happy, and they won't be.

Tahara: I don't know how to get beyond Gaza and stuff like that. It's just stuck in a hole.

Scrumbly: It's hard…

Pam: It's about being who you want to be. Everybody has to be who they want to be, and that's what makes you happy. That's what makes us all collectively happy, when everyone is being who they want to be.

Tahara: They don't want that. The other side doesn't want that. They want you to be them, and that has never happened. It'll never happen. Maybe that is the whole reason for life, maybe, all this constant battle. We're lucky that we've been through civil rights battles, because that's a guide for us. We've come so far, my God. I never thought we'd have gay marriage, at least when I was young. I never conceived it would happen. Like Kamala says, we won't go back.

August: How did y'all get your names? We can start with you, Pam.

Pam: Oh, my name was given to me by STP John. STP John was an old boyfriend, and he started calling me Sweet Pam, and it just stuck. It just stuck.

Tahara: You were a hippie, or was that something that you got in school or something?

Pam: No, they called me Pap Tent in school, because my name was Pam Tent, so they called me Pap Tent.

Scrumbly: With my last name being Koldewyn, they used to call my brothers and sister Hot Beer.

Pam: I know how you got your name, Scrumbly. You were stoned with Sylvester and Emerson, maybe, or somebody.

Scrumbly: This was 1968, before I ever met Sylvester.

Pam: You were smoking pot and eating cookies or something?

Scrumbly: No, I don't know. We were just—

Pam: They said, "You're not Richard, you're Scrumbly."

Scrumbly: We were just hanging out, and they wanted to give me a nickname, Hip and Bloop. Emerson, and I can't remember Bloop's real first name. They wanted to give me a nickname, and so they said, "How about Camerata?" "What? No way."

I remember one early, early LSD trip. The word that summed everything up for me was Scrombit. They changed that into Scrumbly, and they called me that. Then, when I moved into the big commune on Arguello Street, and met with the people from the groupies and met Hibiscus, I was Scrumbly. They called me Scrumbly. You couldn't stop it after that.

Tahara: Now, was this in San Francisco or Los Angeles?

Scrumbly: San Francisco. I never lived in LA.

Tahara: I thought you were from LA.

Scrumbly: Riverside. I left there in 1964 and went back once for a year, then came back.

Tahara: Pam, you're from Ohio?

Pam: Michigan.

Tahara: I was in gay liberation. There was a friend and another guy in gay liberation named John. He was from New York City, and he had known Hibiscus there. They had both been in a play together off-Broadway called Gorilla Queen. I was starting to know Hibiscus in gay liberation, and John said, "Oh, I know him. We were in Gorilla Queen together." As I said, I was starting to dress up like Hibiscus. My name at the time was Jimmy.

Jimmy the Cockette. Anyway. He said, "Oh, your name isn't Jimmy." There was a character in Gorilla Queen called Tahara Noogie White Woman. He said, "You are Tahara Noogie White Woman." John said this. That became my stage name, and I became Tahara Noogie White Woman, but it was shortened to Tahara. The only problem with having a name like Tahara is that everybody says, and I don't know how many times I have repeated it, they say, "Where did you get the name Tahara?" How long did it take me to tell you the story? The only one that didn't call me Tahara was Sebastian, the manager of the Cockettes. He never got it right. He always called me Tiara.

August: What did the manager of The Cockettes do?

Scrumbly: Oh, Sebastian, you mean?

August: Yes.

Scrumbly: Well, he ran The Nocturnal Dream Shows business end of it.

Pam: He did the publicity.

Scrumbly: With the filmmaker and artist Steven Arnold, they would choose the films for bookings.

Tahara: My understanding is Sebastian was originally the accountant for the midnight—

Pam: No.

Scrumbly: No, I think he was an accountant in his private life at first, and he eventually left that.

Tahara: I remember Steven Arnold was manager or doing the door and running the thing. Then he got busy with Luminous Procuress, and Sebastian took over as manager.

Pam: Well, yes, he and Michael Wiese.

Tahara: Yes, and then he was also doing the books, hiring people, and getting stuff together. Sebastian contributed quite a bit to the shows. He rented a Klieg light for Hollywood Babylon. He got red carpets. For me, I think Hollywood Babylon was my favorite show.

Scrumbly: That was fun.

Tahara: Yes. What was your favorite show? Pam?

Pam: Remember, Tahara, you and I were waiting a couple of blocks away? They were going to have us all arrive in limousines, and they had one of those big checkered cabs, a pink checkered cab. We're waiting and waiting for our turn. We're all dolled up. We're all in drag. Then some tough guys chased us, and we ran in our heels.

Tahara: Tiny thug gang.

Pam: We ran in our heels all the way to the Palace because the cab never came. We said, "What happened to the cab?" and somebody said, "Oh, he went home." Remember?

Tahara: They had already started the show inside without us.

Pam: Yes, right.

Scrumbly: No way.

Tahara: Nobody even said, "What happened to you?" We were completely forgotten.

Scrumbly: No. Well, that's typical, but Michael Kalman should have realized you weren't there.

Pam: It was such a big opening with Klieg lights and people taking pictures on the red carpet. We're blocks away, scared out of our wits.

Tahara: What was your favorite show, Pam?

Pam: Oh, I don't know. Of course, I loved the Halloween show.

Tahara: Oh, yes.

Pam: I loved the Halloween show. That was great. I liked all the shows, really, pretty much. Tinsel Tarts, I liked Tinsel Tarts.

Scrumbly: Yes, I liked that and Pearls. I liked both the French shows. Les Etoiles du Minuit after New York, when we came back, was a really good one.

Pam: It was triumphant, that show.

Scrumbly: Yes.

Pam: I just had a baby. I was in the audience. I was like days out of the hospital.

August: Weren't you supposed to do a show with Alice Cooper?

Scrumbly: Yes, and it was canceled by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Pam: At the LA Palladium. Yes, it was going to be at the Palladium.

Tahara: All these big rock groups were coming around wanting to do stuff with us.

Scrumbly: GTOs, we were going to open for them.

Tahara: Iggy Pop.

Pam: Eric Burdon and the Animals. Remember that?

Tahara: GTOs and The Cockettes were going to open for Iggy Pop.

Scrumbly: Who was it? Someone at the Brooklyn Community Theater once cancelled —was it Captain Beefheart?

Pam: Captain Beefheart, yes.

Tahara: Captain Beefheart, and then there was another group. Oh, fuck. Who were they? The Kinks. We were going to do the album for them, the album cover.

Scrumbly: Ray Davies danced with me in New York.

Pam: Yes, right.

Scrumbly: Yes, with full costume as Lily Fastrada.

Tahara: The Beefheart group, they all went. I didn't go. They wanted the people who were better at diplomacy and business to go. I was an alcoholic mess. They went, and as it turned out, two of the Cockettes wound up making out during the meeting. Two men, Cockettes. Beefheart went crazy. It turned out he was a homophobe. He said, "I'm not doing a show with a bunch of queers," and he threw them out. The posters had already been printed, along with all the tickets and everything.

What was the other group you were going to do it with? They went homophobe too. There was some other group.

Scrumbly: I don't know, but they were kind of scared. Yes, we were a bit much.

Tahara: Alice Cooper got his look from the Cockettes—his look with drag and all that stuff. I met him. We went to see him. He was dressing like a college frat boy then. The Cockettes walked in, and he went like that, just crazy. At the next concert, there he was in drag.

Scrumbly: Someone in the Q&A was asking if we knew anybody from the rock scene back then who was more on the gay side.

Tahara: From where?

Scrumbly: In the rock scene back in the early '70s. There you have the Kinks, especially Ray Davies. Who was the drummer from The Who? Keith Moon. Keith Moon was into it. He gave some of the Cockettes rides in Central Park. Try to think about who else.

Tahara: Johnny Winter.

Scrumbly: Johnny Winter.

Tahara: Janis Joplin, although I never met her, she did come to the show.

Pam: They come to the show.

Scrumbly: Oh, yes, they came to the show. So did a bunch of socialites.

Tahara: Iggy Stooge came home with us after his concert and had his 13-inch penis having sex up with everybody.

Scrumbly: Yes, I saw it. I saw it myself.

Tahara: I saw it.

Scrumbly: I came back from Yosemite, and there he was in my loft.

Tahara: He was cute.

Scrumbly: Yes, he flirted with me when I came in, but I was not going to do the three-way.

Tahara: It was so big, it was useless.

Scrumbly: Oh, yes. I saw one other like that in my life.

Tahara: Dare I ask?

Scrumbly: Somebody from New York came and visited and said, "Oh, I have to share this with everybody. You get a hack at it, too, if you want."

Tahara: The rock stars never came backstage. I don't think any of them ever came backstage.

Scrumbly: Yes, but they talked to us.

Tahara: Yes, I think they might have left early because they didn't want to get mobbed or something.

Scrumbly: Yes.

Tahara: God, it was such a fun trip, that whole experience. The celebrityhood, it all happened so fast, too.

Scrumbly: It was a fantasy of being a celebrity. It was a fantasy. I didn't really buy it for one minute. You could go along with it and just feel like that, because when you went out—well, I would still get recognized. I'd walk out of the streets in San Francisco as late as 20 years ago, and in half an hour, I might run into three people and say hi to you. It's just...

Tahara: I couldn't handle it myself. It was very difficult to have mobs of fans constantly. It wasn't that they wanted to be your friend, which I didn't mind. It was a lot of people who were not the kind of people that I could trust, for example.

Scrumbly: Some people looked at us like the Beatles. The things we would say and do on stage could be interpreted like they interpreted the Beatles.

Tahara: Also, it attracted some weird people. Do you remember Hot Hands Harry?

Scrumbly: No.

Tahara: He used to come over to the Cockette House on Haight Street, and he was a huge fan. He started coming over, and then a little after a couple of visits, clothes, money, and stuff started disappearing. You remember that?

Scrumbly: I don't know. Maybe I was gone by then.

Tahara: You threw him out when we caught him. He was in the closet with a bag, stuffing everything.

Scrumbly: I had to kick out.

Tahara: You said, “Get out. Get out. Don't come back.”

August: Did you ever think you'd make it in straight culture?

Tahara: Are you kidding? Not then. Not then.

Scrumbly: I didn't want to. I was able to keep doing the alt thing for quite a while after the Cockettes. I don't know; I guess my first equity show was a production called Master Ronnie, about Ronald Reagan. I had all these other groups afterwards. Then, eventually, in the mid-80s, I formed a trio called the Jesters, and we were pretty normal; we toured Europe and everything.

Pam: You wore tuxedos.

Scrumbly: Three times. Yes, we wore tuxedos.

Tahara: You were a professional.

Scrumbly: Yes. I've been invited to the Bohemian Club several times and have attended, but I've always felt uncomfortable there. I was not there during the meetings, but with the guy who used to conduct the symphony chorus, and with Peter Minton, who was our pianist for a while.

August: Can you all just talk about what you want the youth or the future generation to learn from your time in the Cockettes and the Cockettes? Pam, you can start.

Pam: Just be yourself. Just be who you are. Go for what you want. Don't let anything stop you. Just enjoy everyone around you. I don't know how else to put it. Don't become what anybody else wants from you. Just be yourself.

Scrumbly: Yes, if you try to be somebody else, you are not going to enjoy other people being themselves around you. You're going to think, oh, that can't happen.

Pam: You'll be miserable. There's so much misery in this world. The only way to change it is to radiate happiness and be happy in your own skin, and help other people to be happy in theirs. That's my hippie philosophy, which I still have today.

Scrumbly: Be your authentic self. Even if you think that's a freak, be it. Be it. As soon as you accept who you are, it won't seem so freaky anymore. This is my normal. This is what you get. Things start falling into place.

Tahara: Young people, you may be very confused, but you can think through it, and everything is not confusing.