By Fayette Hauser

If you love to Trip or even if you’ve never tripped and wished you had, you will love this book. This is a lush, luxurious photo history of the infamous, omni-sexual, balls-out and tits-up-to-the-world counterculture group The Cockettes.

Too Much is Never Enough

As they say, the picture tells the story so here is a 352 page photo book with the work of 26 photographers who chronicled The Cockettes from both the inside and the outside, in our whiplash three year ride, onstage and off, including where we lived, the stages we played on and the characters we became.

Sylvester

Sylvester James  was our Shining Star. Sylvester was gifted with a superb voice and his  performances onstage were mesmerizing. His Joie de Vie shown through his entire career. Sylvester was a generous soul, a truly divine person to be with and we were lucky to be able to allow him to channel his inner Billie Holiday on our stage. 

The Cockettes envisioned a multi-layered and conceptually modern  visual language of High Drag that has infiltrated fashion houses worldwide and even now, 50 years later, our influence can be seen on runways everywhere. We had one of everything in our group which made our collective consciousness very powerful. Our sexuality was highly diverse, cubistically including every sexual proclivity imaginable and then some and we had great fun with each other.

The Cockettes were anti-tradition, anti-theatre, anti-art, anti-fashion and anti everything else. Wild on psychedelics most of the time, we were The Fool who holds the mirror to reveal to you who you really wanted to be, in glorious over-the-top Fantasy Fashion. We unleashed a Revolution in self-perception and self-realization, mostly through our original ideas of Drag. High Drag to be specific. We re-invented the term Drag to include everyone who wanted to reveal their inner, most fantastical self, on their body.  The Cockettes were a product of the fertile and fluid counterculture which produced the most radical ideas of the modern age, only now finally being absorbed into world culture.

Hibiscus

George Harris III came to San Francisco from New York, to become transformed, via psychedelics, into the Magical Creature Hibiscus. He was beautiful in body and soul. He would say, “Theatre is the blood in my veins!” He brought his dynamic, original theatre vision into our house of artists and transformed our lives to become The Cockettes. Our lives were never the same and I’m eternally grateful to him. 

Author

Fayette Hauser

The beauty and bounty of drag, performance art, rock ’n’ roll and hallucinogenic heaven collided every time Fayette Hauser got dressed. As one of the treasured few biological females in the celebrated Cockettes, Hauser stepped out, showed off, got wild, and lived in Technicolor with the likes of the Family Dog, Janis Joplin, and Andy Warhol. She has a voice that can only sound right, stories that will bend your mind, and style that turned trends into law.

Hauser grew up on the East Coast and came of age as the fertile Underground of the 1960s was blossoming. She is a graduate of Boston University, College of Fine Arts with a BFA in painting and sculpture. Fayette co-founded the pioneering, experimental theatre group The Cockettes in 1969, San Francisco. Now living in Los Angeles, she writes, lectures, and travels sharing her photographs, stories, and thoughtful insights.

What People are Saying

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Remembering the Cockettes, Trailblazing, Trendsetting 1970s Drag Queens

“To commemorate the collective’s 50th anniversary, another former Cockette, Fayette Hauser, has authored a flamboyantly illustrated coffee table book, The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy (Process Media). The book is more than a paean to a wild yet touchingly poignant bygone era; it’s a virtual encyclopedia of the antecedents of high drag.”

– Maureen Orth
Vanity Fair

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They were like hippie acid-freak drag queens which is always a wonderful thing.

– John Waters

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Bedazzlers: The Cockettes in Print: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy 1969-1972

 “As told by original Cockette Fayette Hauser in a magnificently assembled 352-page tabletop-sized book overflowing with enough eye-popping color and black and white photos to induce hypoglycemia”

– Jason Victor Serinus
Bay Area Reporter

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Loved tripping down to the Palace and sneaking in with Bill Vehr to see The Cockettes, and Fayette Hauser’s gorgeously euphoric book brings it all back home.

– David Johansen
New York Dolls

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The Cockettes were recognizable by their threads, which took inspiration from drug-fueled visions, foreign cultures, bygone eras and personal fantasies, amounting to hallucinatory ensembles that served as embodied rejections of mainstream America.

– Priscilla Frank Huffington Post

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“Outrageous, inventive, and exuberant, the theatrical troupe of men and women known as the Cockettes were progenitors of “acid drag,” a mix of LSD-fueled hippiedom and gender-bending radical performance.

– Walker Art Center