GREG CRUIKSHANK
- 6 hours ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
ANGELS OF LIGHT, TUXEDOMOON, PERFORMER
Greg Cruikshank’s journey spans from Los Angeles in the segregated 1950’s to the radical, hippie streets of San Francisco. With a Creole mother whose family escaped the brutality of separate-but-equal Jim Crow Louisiana, Greg grew up in a city that was divided by freeways. He had to learn how to navigate the historical divisions of race, class, and queerness. Greg faced the Vietnam War draft and was drawn to the counterculture. At 16, he ran away to San Francisco. Living in communes and participating in the anti-war movement of the time not only redefined who Greg was at his core but also gave him purpose.
In this interview excerpt, Greg reflects on his time working with the Angels of Light, a gender-bending performance group that emerged from the Cockettes theater troupe. The Cockettes and the Angels of Light defined radical queer performance. We have featured numerous Cockettes and Angels of Light: Tahara, Rumi Missabu, Scrumbly, Sweet Pam, Bambi Lake, Zamba, and more. This was a time warp where gay liberation mingled with gender liberation to create an explosion of glitter.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was born in Los Angeles, California, 73 years ago. It was the 50s, and Los Angeles was basically sort of like disguised Johannesburg, kind of disguised. It was very segregated. The geography of Los Angeles, because of the freeways, created these kinds of townships, and there wasn't a whole lot of interaction between them. So if there were any white picket fences, they weren't near my freeway off ramp. My freeway off ramp was Watts, which is a black ghetto, and most people in LA wouldn't be in Watts. They would drive right by it because the freeway provided that access so that you didn't have to go through other people's lives, and you got off on your freeway exit, and you lived your kind of—like I said—segregated lifestyle.
My upbringing was with my maternal aunt, because I was absolutely not planned for and my mother was not ready to have a child at 42. My aunt pitched in to help her, and my father wasn't around. My family is from Louisiana, and my mother's side is Creole. My perceptions after all these years have sort of been that there was a night of wild abandon, and my mom probably didn't think that she could conceive anymore since she was 42, but wait, I showed up. So things were scrambled. She had to figure out how to raise a son in middle age, single in the 50s in Los Angeles, with a Creole, Black background. I can go on and on.
Most of my family was very impacted by the Jim Crow laws in Louisiana. The Jim Crow laws defined the designation of being Black. I don't think my family necessarily identified as Negro. There are many differences in the South. The amount of Black blood that you have in your ancestry creates a very distinctreality for you in this country—we're so racist. Most of the women in my family found work as domestics in very wealthy households, for many reasons, but I think mainly because they weren't as dark-skinned as most of what they would call colored people back then. So it's an interesting dynamic on that level, because those women became very predominant in running very prestigious households. They were trusted, and they made decisions for the entire house. They had this kind of attitude about them, and I sort of picked up that attitude, but my life was a little bit more complicated than theirs in a certain way.
Are you familiar with the movie Gay USA by Arthur J. Bressan Jr? It came out in the late 70s, and it was basically Arthur filming interviews at the San Francisco Gay Pride parade in the 70s, and I was completely dolled up. I was very excited about it, because I had finally found a pair of high heels that I could fit into. So in my interview, I say I'm really excited today because I've always wanted a pair of high heels. When I was four years old, I used to take my building blocks and put one in each sock, so I would have high heels, then run around the house with them on.
I felt the catalyst for the advances in Los Angeles was the Watts Riots in 1965. The riots put a different emphasis on one part of LA that people had once derided. And it was also in tandem with the Civil Rights Movement. It gave Southern California a very prominent identity as some place that could be very, very much skewed towards prejudice, and like I said, segregation.
When I was about nine, there was a weekly publication called Life magazine. They did this extremely progressive exposure of the gay underbelly in Los Angeles, including pictures of cruising areas, one of which was MacArthur Park. I remember it resonating with me. I wanted to find out where MacArthur Park was and where these people were, because I felt like I was identifying with the subculture being exposed, even though I had very little exposure elsewhere and very few identity issues.
I ran away with my first lover at 16 in 1968, and that was when the hippie thing was full on. We met in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice, and we both came to see what was going on in San Francisco because it was the center of a free-thinking movement. We moved to San Francisco together during the summer, and I realized, in a certain way, that there was really no reason for me to go back to Los Angeles and live with my mom. I was 16, and he was 26, but I don't think it was, it wasn't an exploitative kind of thing. It was a very real connection, sort of cerebral. He had been in a marriage to a woman, and so he was exploring this space. I felt like I was so exposed to the counterculture that going back to my room in my mom's house for another semester was something I wanted to avoid. So at 16, I called my mom and told her that I wasn't coming home.
I was a hippie. What I got from the movement was a sense of commonality and a communal vibe. I felt like it was a community that was going to allow me to actually be more comfortable with where I was and who I was.
I finished high school in San Francisco. I think it was probably 1970 when I met some of the gender-bending theater troupe, the Cockettes: Tahara, Scrumbly, Sweet Pam, and Fayette. Their offshoot, the Angels of Light, had a commune in the early 70s. It came together because we were doing shows as a theater group. One of the group's early desires was to stage a show every full moon.
Before I actually met the Cockettes, I saw a couple pictures of them, which ignited my own issues with androgyny and self-presentation. I saw some of the Cockettes addressing androgyny in a way that was very compelling. I wanted to stay the person I was, but it gave me a sense that I wasn't alone.
The Cockettes also had a house on Haight Street. It was wonderful that we could go there—a few of us were much younger than some of the others, but we could go there—and and we felt absolutely kind of a part of the scene, even though we weren't in the shows yet or doing the theater. The stimulus for the Cockettes was Hibiscus. He founded the group and the Angels of Light. He became a very close friend of mine. He had a very impactful presence on people at that time, encouraging people who were interested in the thing that was going on—the phenomenon that was going on—with gender identity and with the Cockettes and how the hippies kind of melded all of that into the larger cultural upheaval. Hibiscus was a catalyst. He would say to almost anyone, you should be in our show, which I think caused the schism between the Cockettes and the Angels of Light. Hibiscus was inviting people to come into the theatrical world and perform, but that was not the Cockettes’ idea of theater.
Hibiscus lived in a large old Victorian on Church Street, and several of us lived in the Haight. From there, there was a large house on Oak Street that we all moved into as a commune. Hibiscus didn’t move in; he went back to the East Coast.
Kaliflower was an influence. They were a commune and put out a newsletter that connected all the Bay Area communes. I was never in the actual commune, but they were the sort of mother commune for all the satellite communes that happened at that time. The Angels of Light was sort of the satellite of the Kaliflower movement and definitely had guidelines that we kind of adhered to, certainly the idea that we needed to create an environment that was absolutely isolated from the real world, the straight world, the idea that everything we were conscious of, the alternatives that Kaliflower was exposing or detailing would actually make your life in San Francisco doable. Kaliflower was impactful for all the communes, in the sense of saying, let's buy our own food together. Let me show you how to wipe your ass without using toilet paper. Let's talk about how our diet might be less meat-centered. All of the things that hippies kind of gravitated towards, Kaliflower was actually an expert in those areas, the extreme underground.
Kaliflower had a printing press, which they used to print a sort of newsletter that always included some kind of art on each page. The newsletter was distributed to any commune that wanted to sort of join that circle. One of the things they suggested, and most people agreed upon, was that it would be cheaper for all of us to pool our money for food, and they would do the food run weekly. Other communes would participate, and then the food would be distributed among them. So, in that way, we had overlapping ways of dealing with each other and knowing who each other was.
When we moved to Broderick Street as a commune—we were then doing shows, trying to do them every full moon. The venue we used as a theater for the shows was an extension of the University of California campus, and Keith St Clare oversaw scheduling and the theater. So he was very, very influential in the sense of giving us a venue as a very crazy, wild, gay theater troupe; we had to have some place to perform. Keith was always open to us performing there—always open to us trying to make it on the full moon. The underlying premise of some of the Angels' early shows, for sure, was that there was no charge at the door. There was no way the money was going to be there, and the work the Angels did was not going to be monetized. It was again part of the idea that we existed outside of society—we refused to monetize free expression. Keith understood, and he never actually asked us to charge money.
Bambi Lake was not Bambi at this time. When I met Bambi, Bambi was Johnny Dancer. We called him. He lived in the suburbs, and he definitely wanted to be in the Angels’ show. I don't know where the initial introduction was, but he wanted to be part of the shows. I have a Super 8 film of him at the third San Francisco Gay Pride parade. We had a truck, and Johnny was down, dressed as a geisha. My history with Bambi is completely and totally entwined and layered, and we were, I can't even, yeah, I guess we, I could say we were very close.
One of the other things that was very compelling for me to become sort of a leftist, if you will, is the fact that I was African American. In tandem with the hippie movement there was a Civil Rights Movement. I think I mentioned earlier that the riots in Watts galvanized a lot of people, and from the Black civil rights movement emerged the Black Panthers—and by any means necessary. Angela Davis and these people had radical ideas–they were looking for a revolution. They absolutely needed to think there would be a reason for them to be armed and a reason for them to go to battle, if necessary, because things were so stacked against the Black community in America. I think that kind of mentality inspired and fed other alternative radicals. It was a nuance that people felt could happen. We were on the outside, and we were actually afraid, you know, because we might be attacked. After all, we were rebelling against the government, against the fact that the government still existed, and against the fact that the government, if it wanted to pay very close attention to what was going on, could be a threat to us physically. So it galvanized the radical stance people held. You have to actually feel and believe that there is a potential for your life to be compromised.
One of the earlier Angel shows was in a warehouse that was called 330 Grove. 330 Grove was a big community space at 330 Grove Street. It wasn't a commune; it was a community space, a space for activists. The second floor belonged to the Black Panthers. The third floor was the floor where the Angels did shows. So, essentially, what you had was a layer of adamant black militancy. Then on top of that, you had a layer of very bizarre, extreme homosexuals who wanted to dance and spread glitter everywhere. We existed together in a space because that space was available to radical thinking. The Black Panthers were trying to run a community bakery to distribute food on their floor. Gregory Pickup, who made Pickup’s Tricks, used the top floor to make his movie, which had several of the Cockettes in it. So literally, there was an idea that if there was one radical arena, it could support another radical arena. It seemed kind of improbable, but at the time, it was a space available to us and to the Panthers.
We did a Greek show called Myth Thing. We did a Western show and a Christmas show, which featured a storybook set. We did a show called Heaven, I mean, for no reason, which was about Heaven, about fairies and devils. We did a show specifically geared towards Halloween. Whenever Halloween was coming around, the shows would be a big chance to sort of not necessarily adhere to a script but to create an environment that was full of ambiguity and gender fluidity, and also to kind of flesh out what we were learning as musicians and as dancers and as costume makers. The grand scheme was also to present something spectacular to the alternative, radical community, and it was all driven and given life by alternative sources. Most of the sets we made from salvaged cardboard that refrigerators came in. Most of the costumes would be made from materials we found at Goodwill. The point in the back of my mind, at least, was always to have people say you did that all on a budget of like zero, practically.
The idea of doing something without charging money was one we wanted to put forward, because it meant people had to step out of the capitalist environment they had been in for their entire lives. When you said there wasn't any charge, people really wouldn't believe that. People didn't necessarily believe that there was something you could call socialism, and it did get called that, but at the same time, there was a very strong, again, strong urge to underscore the fact that we were outside of society.”
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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.