And once it does, there it stays, for the rest of time. No matter how thoroughly you scrub and vacuum, errant pieces of glitter will forever be glinting up at you, like cheeky stars from an upholstered parallel dimension.
No one in history loved glitter more than the Cockettes, a queer performance troupe of hippies and artists who took San Francisco by storm in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Which is why it felt so apt that, when setting out to write a show about them, we found that their legacy has the same kind of staying power. Even after disappearing into the tangled fibres of history, the Cockettes continue to pop up when you least expect them, an indestructible shining speck of chaos. The recent Pee-Wee Herman documentary? He was introduced to performance art by following the Cockettes. A biography of Richard Nixon? Their film spoof of his daughter’s much-publicised marriage, Tricia’s Wedding, was one of the first examples of media trolling. Any disco-themed event you’ve ever been to? Sylvester, the singer behind disco mega-hits like “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat),” got his start as a Cockette. And that famous “Flower Power” photo, of a hippie placing daisies into the gun barrel of military police? The hippie in question is Cockettes founder George Harris III, better known as Hibiscus.
Writing a show about the Cockettes is a process of finding the glitter in their story, combing through the memories and photographs to get at the immutable essence. Brandon James Gwinn and I are both experienced theatre writers and experienced queers, who know our own history and progenitors. So why did it take us so long to learn about the Cockettes? In so many ways, they seemed ahead of their time. Despite the majority of the members being gay men, the group featured both women and straight people, which gave them the ability to truly switch on the gender-blender and pulverise the repressive 1950s stereotypes they’d been raised with. Bearded drag queens featured alongside nursing mothers; both men and women wore outfits that would put contestants on Ru Paul’s Drag Race to shame; and during the brief height of their popularity, American icons like Tina Turner, Allen Ginsberg, and Truman Capote were among the most visible of the troupe’s extensive fanbase. So why aren’t they mentioned in the same sentences as Freddy Mercury, Audre Lorde, even RuPaul herself?
It’s a question with many complex answers, all of which lie beneath a single simple answer: the Cockettes were amateurs.
Watch archive footage of the Cockettes …
That’s not an insult—it’s what they wanted to be, what they prided themselves on being, and what makes them such an exciting subject for a new musical. Like so many young queer people who come of age at a time when the world seems to be crumbling around them—YES, I AM ALSO TALKING ABOUT TODAY—the members of the Cockettes didn’t unite with the goal of staging a coup or revolutionising society. They wanted to have sex, have fun, and express themselves without fear or self-hatred. The Cockettes were formed the same year as the Stonewall Uprising and only six years after the publication of The Feminist Mystique, at a time when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness. When they arrived in New York City, booked off the strength of their San Francisco reputation, their hippie-dippy opening night performance was a legendary flop that torpedoed their growing celebrity. But instead of calling it quits, the Cockettes returned to SF and continued making their own weird, quirky, unashamedly gay art, even after the rest of the world stopped paying attention. Professionals are held to standards that make or break them, but amateurs aren’t out to please anyone but themselves, and the pure joy of the Cockettes and their queer extravaganzas has continued to sustain their admirers for decades.
Midnight at the Palace, our show about the Cockettes and their glitter-lives, is a celebration of the amateur, a love letter to artists who are having too much fun to care if the world laughs with them or at them. During our writing of this musical, that laughter has turned ugly and hostile, as negative forces across the globe try to yank us all back to the bad old days. But glitter is forever, and so are the Cockettes. Their love for the absurd, for beauty, and for each other has outlasted so much of the hate and pain of their time, and our show is a continuation of that love. Let us blind you with sparkles. Let us get stuck in your head. Let us shower you with amateur devotion. Come dance away every midnight at the Palace.
Midnight at the Palace runs from Wednesday 30 July – Sunday 24 August 2025 (not 12th, 19th), 9:30pm, at Gilded Balloon Patter House (Big Yin), 3 Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1HT, United Kingdom.
You can also watch the full-length documentary The Cockettes on YouTube and on several other platforms.
