Dec 6
Angels, Cockettes & more – Tahara shares personal gay history at Queer Arts Featured talk
Jim Provenzano READ TIME: 1 MIN.
You may know about The Cockettes from the David Weissman & Bill Weber film, or from other historical records. You may have also enjoyed some of their revived Thrillpeddlers shows at the now much-sorely missed Hypnodrome. The performers whose heyday peaked in the early 1970s, were known for their festive costumes, sometimes drug-addled performances, and general queerness in abundance.
Next week, Tahara, one of the original Cockettes and Angels of Light (a similar spinoff performance group), will share personal stories about the early gay revolution days in the 1960s and ’70s in Berkeley and San Francisco.
In conversation with August Bernadicou of the New York City-based LGBTQ History Project, Tahara will discuss the ways that artistic rebellion and fearless identity connected on stage and in the streets to transform society and instigate a movement that forever changed culture.
“One month after Stonewall, I and a group of radical students and gay men at the University of California, Berkley came together,” Tahara said in an interview with Bernadicou, one of many on the Project’s website. “It was the peak of the 1960s: women’s lib, Black liberation, gay liberation, and the Vietnam War. Protests were going on. We decided to start a theater troupe called Gay Liberation Theater.
“I had seen Hibiscus, who would later found the Cockettes, in the streets dressed in costumes and dancing and singing. He never spoke. He just danced and sang. His robes and feathers inspired me, and I started making my own costumes. I had not officially met him yet, but I started moving in that direction, wearing costumes like him.”
The talk at QAF promises more stories.
‘The Gay Liberation Movement,” Tahara in conversation with August Bernadicou, Dec. 14, 6pm, $10, Queer Arts Featured, 575 Castro St.
RSVP: https://partiful.com/e/sV1BoP5rUWqZAfyaIyM4
