The Cockettes – T-Shirt
In early 1970s San Francisco, drag didn’t ask permission — it exploded. The Cockettes were a glitter-soaked, gender-bending, LSD-tinged performance collective that rewrote the rules of drag, theater, and queer visibility all at once. Mixing beards with sequins, opera with rock, Broadway with bathhouse energy, they rejected polish in favor of excess, sincerity, and radical joy.
Performing at the Palace Theater and beyond, The Cockettes blurred every boundary they touched: male and female, amateur and art, politics and pleasure. Their shows were chaotic, communal, messy, and deeply intentional — a direct response to a world that demanded conformity. Long before drag was commercial, competitive, or carefully branded, The Cockettes treated it as liberation theater: drag as protest, drag as play, drag as collective freedom.
Their influence rippled outward — shaping modern drag, queer performance art, glam rock aesthetics, and the idea that chosen family could be both creative force and survival strategy. They helped define San Francisco as a queer cultural capital and proved that being too much could be a political act.
