SCRUMBLY
COCKETTES, ANGELS OF LIGHT, PERFORMER
I became very interested in the Cockettes in 2012, when I met original member Rumi Missabu. The LGBTQ History Project and I have documented his story, along with other Cockettes members, for over a decade. The Angels of Light also sprang out of the Cockettes: Bambi Lake, Tahara, Gregory Cruikshank, Beaver Bauer, and more. Go to lgbtqhp.org and search “Cockettes” or “Angels of Light.”
We now bring you a feature from deep in our archive: a never-before-published interview from about 2019. Scrumbly was a key member of the Cockettes. The Cockettes were a theater troupe formed in San Francisco that debuted on New Year's Eve in 1969. Their first performance was an informal group of friends getting onstage at the Palace Theater, dancing to the Rolling Stones' Honky Tonk Women.
They were the first bearded drag queens to receive national press. The term “gender fuck” was coined about them. They performed plays titled Pearls Over Shanghai, Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma, Journey to the Center of Uranus, and countless others.
The Cockettes opened the door for bending gender and breaking the binary barrier. The gay liberation revolution and civil rights movements made this possible. It was the perfect combination of the right time, place, and people. Of course there was also glitter and magic. They performed and changed the world. After a poorly received performance in New York City, the Cockettes faded away in 1972.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was going to San Francisco State in 1966. I was majoring in music. I was singing. I was a vocal music major—took everything, including composition. I was in the chamber choir, all this kind of stuff. I had a group of friends who had come up from Riverside in Southern California. We were all going—well, my roommate was going to San Francisco Art Institute. I was really naive. He was Black.
I wanted to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at San Francisco State. They said, ‘Well, what are your qualifications?’ I said, ‘Well, my roommate's Black… Some of my best friends are Black.’
I started to look like Jesus, so all these cute Catholic girls got crushes on me. I went Downtown a lot, and I first met this guy from the Mattachine Society, and he said, ‘Come over, and we'll talk.’ I said, ‘How do I find, you know, gay people?’ So he told me where they would hang out, where to look, and I met somebody. They were, like, very old school gay. I was more of a beatnik than a homosexual.
Well, officially, homosexuality and sodomy were still illegal, and prejudice was still running really high. Although some visibility was starting to happen, the police were only meeting it halfway with resistance—they weren't really aggressive. But there were some, just like in New York; there were occasional raids on the bars because they were full of people hooking up, guys hooking up with each other.
Fast forward to the late 1960s: I met Hibiscus, and he started coming over. Hibiscus wanted to do the first Cockettes show; he invited all of us, and most of us were in the New Year's Eve performance. We were known for dressing up way before that—dressing up all flagrant and crazy. We'd show up at a party, and somebody would say, ‘Here comes Bush and Baker,’ which was where we lived. This was all pre-Cockettes—we were a community of freaks who liked to dress up; we'll call it that for now.
On New Year's Eve we had our first actual ‘get up on stage in drag and dance around’ show, and it was the first Cockettes show. Hibiscus invited us all to join him. Hibiscus and others from Irving Rosenthal’s commune were there. Irving didn't like it because we charged money to get into the shows, and to Irving, everything had to be free. Hibiscus, of course, lived at Kaliflower, the commune headed by Irving Rosenthal. Irving wrote a poetry book called Sheeper. People in that commune were not supposed to take part in anything even slightly commercial. They did have a ‘drag room.’ We went over to the drag room, dressed up for New Year's Eve, went off and did our bit, and that was the first Cockettes show.
There weren't any plans. It was all spontaneous. We were just a group of people that happened to go to the same parties. We also liked to go to the Stud bar several times a week and dance; it was a traveling party. We would still go to rock concerts and so forth—making the scene. We started to be in the in crowd. We didn't really think of it that way or anything, but people thought we were pretty spectacular.
Brent Jensen, he was important. John Rothermel really was a big deal. He became one of those stars along with Sylvester. Sylvester later had a hit disco song called You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). I mean, we were all stars, but they eventually had more to do because they just were really good. Daniel Ware. He was really important too. Everybody gravitated toward each other, and everything was all mixed up. We were really all a part of this. I don't think I was a part of any particular clique. I was in the biggest commune, the Cockette commune, but there were other Cockette houses too, with groups of Cockettes living in them. Rumi was roommates with Johnny and Miss Bobby, and Martin Worman and John Rothermel were connected. Oh God, I forgot about Kreemah Ritz. Yeah, put him in there. He's definitely one of the important ones. One of the regulars.
We would pick our theme, and then people would decide what they wanted to do within that theme. They would organize the number, choose the music, and plan any setup that went with it—the staging, the costumes, the people, other people involved—sort of like each person could direct their own piece. So it was more like a themed variety show. Most of these productions blended in a kind of way—like a band organizing a set list so one number leads into the next in a poetic rather than logical way. So that's how the early shows came together.
Later in 1970, tension grew in the group. When Sylvester was doing his number, Hibiscus walked out for about the fourth time on stage wearing his zebra head; Sylvester said, ‘That's enough.’ Then there was some argument with Miss Bobby and Hibiscus, where they actually struck blows, and Hibiscus didn't know—Bobby was this young queen, and I just, you know, they just lost it, and Hibiscus was a big, old drama queen. We love Hibiscus, but I'm telling you, everyone has their idiosyncrasies.
Hibiscus was very dramatic. He would bang his head against the wall for half an hour. Sometimes it's just, ‘Oh, oh, oh, it's terrible.’ Of course, he was also capable of being extremely positive, exuberant, and wonderful, which he was most of the time. But either way, they had a big falling out, and it didn't seem worth trying to patch it up. So the rest of us let it go, and we let Hibiscus stay out of the Cockettes, at least for this one show. Then he decided, ‘Well, I should be doing this...’ He was very conflicted because the ‘free theater’ thing came in, so he decided to go back to that. He’d met some other people we also knew quite well, Rodney Price and Beaver Bauer, and a few other people, and with others he started the Angels of Light. I always went and saw their shows. I didn't actually work with them until after the Cockettes had disbanded. I worked as their music director, and also wrote songs.”
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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.
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