The Cockettes

I saw the film The Cockettes after a long, seemingly endless stream of disappointing documentaries. It was such a great pleasure to finally see these filmmakers take a veritable goldmine of fascinating material and do it justice. While including enough supplemental material to keep the interest moving, this film really sticks to its guns and offers a satisfying glimpse at the rise and fall of The Cockettes.

I was also really impressed with the quality of archive footage that appears in the film. At first, I had to lean into my screen and ask myself if these were re-enactments. Really, truly stunning.

I think the best measure of this film is the sense of loss one feels when the credits roll~ a mourning that one wasn't there to experience the subject firsthand and be in on the party. But what a wonderful hour and 40 minutes!

Perhaps I was expecting more from the documentary. Don't get me wrong, it captures the era and the craziness of the time, but sometimes it goes flat. A little more gay wit should have helped here. The directors have captured the idea behind the Cockettes in their heyday in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, behind the happy facade of the parties, the theatre performances, we never get to really know most of the people who created the scene.

The main character, and the "mother" of the Cockettes, Hibiscus, is an enigma. He's obviously so high on LSD and other drugs of the period to make any sense at all. Hisbiscus did have a vision, but carrying it to the stage was another story. Most of the skits kind of fall flat. I guess that in order to have appreciated the group at the Palace Theatre in San Francisco in its prime would have required tons of acid to view what went onstage as probably Hibiscus conceived it.

The people that survived the Cockettes talk to the camara and tells us what it was like. It's great seeing the survivors as they look now and they looked then. Director John Waters is very effective in telling us his part of the story. The fabulous Devine, who only appears briefly in the film is a welcome distraction since she was the queen of all queens!

The Cockettes were way ahead of their time. When you see today's drag queens, they pale in comparison to that group which were probably the idea for most of the ones around today.

Go see it and enjoy a bygone time that will never be able to capture again.

This film aptly tries to place the cockettes at the burgeoning of the gay sexual revolution. Apt, since other "revolutions" were in full swing at the time. But, as the film suggests itself, most of what they did was old hat to the rest of the world, that is, New York.

Most of these guys, and few gals, were just a bunch of talentless gays that wanted to take drugs, screw and make jerks of themselves on stage (Mick Jagger are you listening?). The few "talented" ones did make a mediocre impact on the arts, but for the most part the phenomenon was forgettable.

Amazingly, the cockette phenomenon lives on as the "Midnight Rocky Horror Show" crowd.

If you want to see the (mostly) gay side of the sex, drug era as pertains to the theatrical "arts", this is an amusing excursion.

Documentary about a late 1960s-early 1970s San Francisco theatre group called the Cockettes. They all lived together in a commune and were quite a mix...gay, straight, bi, men, women. They all wore incredible, colorful costumes (most of the guys were in drag) and put on musicals that were very mean, vicious, explicitally sexual...and hilarious!

This is a truly incredible movie about an unjustly forgotten group. The movie includes some footage of the actual stage shows they put on along with interviews of the surviving cast members. It gives a view of the 1960s in San Francisco that I've never seen. Just absorbing from the word go. A must see!

Highlight--their parody of Tricia Nixon's wedding is hysterical.

See it!!!!!

I really enjoyed this film. It's odd that I would because I have almost no interest in hippies or drag queens. But, something about their DIY (do it yourself) aesthetic really resonated with me. They wanted to be "stars," so they dressed up in crazy outfits, dropped acid, and put on "shows" consisting of whatever interested them that week. If they wanted to make a film about Trisha Nixon's wedding, they grabbed a camera, dressed up, make makeshift sets, and shot one. This film was really inspiring to me as an artist.