Photo by Gerry Visco / flickr.com/photos/gerryvisco/
“Sex was like a handshake back then,” Rumi Missabu of the famed gender-bending performance troupe The Cockettes tells me, seated in my living room over a plate of pasta primavera. We were watching his interview in the German documentary called Free Love. That’s some warm handshake!
In those golden olden days, you didn’t need much money without health insurance and student loans to pay off. Rent was dirt cheap, and artsy types didn’t have to slave at 9 to 5 gigs. Hash was in the brownies, acid in the Kool-Aid, and everyone was feelin’ pretty damned groovy. Shortly after the summer of love, Rumi (born James Bartlett) hitchhiked up to San Francisco from L.A. and stumbled upon the gorgeous, charismatic Hibuscus in Golden Gate Park, who cajoled him to join the Cockettes, that psychedelic group of outrageously costumed performers. Their violation of gender stereotypes inspired the term “gender fuck,” because some of their drag queens had beards, often sprinkled with glitter. But their cast of characters, which eventually grew to several dozen, was totally equal opportunity, including biological females like Dusty Dawn, Fayette and Harlow, and then there was Ocean, an infant. The core group of biological men had names like Pristine Condition, Goldie Glitters, Kreemah Ritz, Tahara, Gary Cherry and Scrumbly. Though most of the men were gay, that didn’t stop them from rolling around with a few of the women once in a while. There was something terribly subversive about their blend of the counter-culture anti-war movement, open homosexuality and free love, and extreme show biz parody.
Today Rumi is one of but a handful surviving original Cockettes, but when you party too hard and live life on the edge, shit happens. He was visiting New York the first few weeks of April, staying part of the time in my messy Upper East Side apartment, his spangly, purple harem outfit and Cleopatra gown hanging in my closet, a few wigs dangling over the nightstand. He’s a drag queen but no diva and never hogged the mirror, though I came home one night and found him wearing a Missoni-style sweater I’d knitted by hand. It made me look fat, so I gladly gave it up.
Rumi was here to premiere the newly released re-mastered DVD of the film Elevator Girls in Bondage, the campy cult flick in which he stars as Maxine, the head of oppressed elevator girls played by over-the-top drag queens united in a Marxist revolt against the oppressive owners of a sleazy flop house. Interesting sidenote: the 1972 film was financed by the proceeds of an angel dust lab.
On April 15th and 17th, Rumi played host at Bleecker Theater and Monkeytown, selling and showing the film, following a live “freak show” of performers of various genders and persuasions including Max Steele, Farrad, the Dazzle Dancers, Rose Wood, Robert Oppel, Don PV, She-Dick, Glenn Marla, Joseph Keckler, Darlinda Just Darlinda, Tigger, Sequinette and Donna Persona.
I’d contacted Rumi in mid-2008 for an interview. He tours world-wide arranging Cockette shows and as archivist and spokesperson for the group, was donating original materials to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. I’d admired the Cockettes since high school, thanks to Tricia’s Wedding, a film they’d cleverly released to spoil the wedding day of President Richard Nixon’s daughter. In their version, Tricia was played by a drag queen and the nuptials ended in an LSD-fueled orgy. During their short intense life from 1969 until 1972, these gender-bending revolutionaries were celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Diana Vreeland. “We were freaks drawn together like magnets,” Rumi says. After he quit the Cockettes and joined spinoff group, the Angel of Light, Rumi lived on the Lower East Side and hung out with Andy Warhol superstars Jackie Curtis and Taylor Meade, but eventually made his way back to San Francisco. Prior to his stint as a Cockette, he interned as a male groupie, getting friendly with Tina Turner, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and Alvin Lee of Ten Years After. Back then, male groupies didn’t get too much action. If he didn’t score, c’est la vie.
Just before Rumi was leaving for home, I brought him over to meet rabble rouser/photographer and archivist of the Lower East Side, Clayton Patterson. They compared notes from the trenches. There was the time Rumi threw poet Allen Ginsberg out of his apartment. “He was playing with himself in soiled underwear and he was pooping glitter,” Rumi said. “He was a pervert!” Then Rumi fondly remembered the practical joke Hibiscus liked to play at the Cockette board meetings. Some of the members had become overly money-mad. Hibiscus thoughtfully offered to bake them homemade bread for a snack. What he neglected to tell them was the glaze was made from his own semen. He was one of those early proponents of DIY. The other Cockettes all oohed and aahed over the bread’s delicious taste. Those, he remembered, were the days.
