The Cockettes...at the library?

Photo: Mary Ellen Mark

In the SF Examiner:

....San Francisco’s famous bohemian counterculture has been mythologized by the face-painting, flower power, LSD-driven, sexual liberation and hippy spectacles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

Arguably, there was no group that lived and performed this tinselly state of mind quite as exuberantly or flamboyantly as The Cockettes, an avant garde, psychedelic theater troupe that lived communally in the Haight-Ashbury in what was known as “The Cockettes Freak House.”

Over three years, from 1969 to 1971, The Cockettes gained national recognition for their unrestrained will to fabulousness — and their signature look: men with glittery beards in tutus and tiaras and hyper-accessorized old Hollywood glamor costumes assembled out of thrift stores....

The installation at the library.

I saw the group's fine show in days of yore, which I blogged about in 2005: Sylvester and the Cockettes.