[Photo of Fayette: Clay Gerdes]
by Linda Kelly
I had the absolute joy of interviewing Fayette Hauser in March 2022. Below is the article as it appeared in the print edition of Haight Street Voice #11. After that, you’ll find the full transcript as well as the audio of our incredibly fun, enlightening, and inspiring conversation about the Haight, sexual anarchy, freedom of expression, psychedelics and so much more — then, now, and beyond. Dig!
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So magical to have tea at the Russian Embassy [we love you Jim Siegel!] with founding member of the experimental, avant-garde, psychedelic theater group, the Cockettes, Fayette Hauser. From 1969-1972, she and her colorful cohorts shook-up and shifted the future of sexual expression and art in the Haight-Ashbury — and the world.
Haight Street Voice: Sounds like the Cockettes were a group of people who came together and everybody had their own integrity and were ready to bring that with all of themselves.
Fayette Hauser: Everyone had an artistic responsibility. We were all committed to a vision that we were exploring. And somehow the threads of all our different visions were woven together via Hibiscus. The organic trajectory of how the Cockettes came together was really important because it was definitely meant to be. The type of artists that we all were, the type of artistic experiences that we had, what we knew. We were not novices. We had all been in SF at least a year before that and we were well on the road in our artistic paths, whether it was in art or literature or music,we had all those elements together. We were ready!
HSV: Do you feel like you paved the way to where we are now?
FH: I think we changed things because of what we created in the Cockettes in such a short time. We were only together 3 years, but we were so tight in our group consciousness that what we created was so different, and the way we looked, our visual language. Before 1969, you can’t even find a picture of anybody that looked like us with our abstract collage, surrealistic influence, inspirational homage put together in a really particular individualistic way. It’s now a trend.
It’s fabulous that there is such a focus on the counterculture in our culture now. There’s a question that comes up: “How were you so happy?” They want to know how we did it because people are not happy. We were happy! For the Cockettes and the counterculture, it was group energy. Doing things on your own is difficult, but once you get into a group — that’s why kids want to be in bands, because it’s a group energy.
HSV: How have psychedelics enhanced your life?
FH: Psychedelics … it’s the keyhole journey that puts you into your positive future. And the expansion of consciousness is the most important thing. There is no other reason for us to be on the planet other than to expand our consciousness. Absolutely!
AUDIO of our full conversation … all the bloops and blips and goofs!
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Fayette Hauser: [Talking about my interview with Peter Coyote …]
… There’s a connecting story [with the Cockettes and the Diggers] because in his biography […] he talks about — because Link [Martin of the Cockettes] because Link was the political member of the group. He had been a Beat poet, even though we were all about the same age, but he hung out with the elders, just like I did with Nancy [Gurley, girlfriend of James Gurley of Big Brother and the Holding Company], he hung out with elder Beat poets, so he had a political bend.
Link would get everybody together in a van or whatever kind of transportation and go to the draft board, and then go to the guys in line and say, “Come into the truck … and we’ll give you a blowjob, and take a picture with a polaroid and you can have the polaroid and show it to the draft board to say that you’re gay and get out of the draft.”
And Peter [Coyote] was there, because the Diggers were there working anti-war — trying to get people out of the draft, so he saw it happen. He wrote about it in his bio. And also, his commune was Olema in the country and we would go there, Marshall and I went there and hung out. Ask him about Olema. He’ll tell you a big story about that. Because he went back to the earth.
HSV: Well, they all did, right?
FH: Yeah, the early tribes went back to the earth. Either that or they went to the eastern religion. They went to Tibet, Morocco, those place.
HSV: Or they drank themselves to death like Kerouac — or that was earlier, actually.
FH: Well that was — the Beats drank. They weren’t psychedelicized — until Ginsberg did it. He was the crossover. [laughs]
Well, so, yeah, Peter would invite — he loved the Cockettes and he says so in the conversation because we were intellectuals. Everybody was an intellectual then. You know you had to be really smart to stay in the community and the society because it was so heady, it was so intense.
HSV: Were they mean? I mean I’m educated but not really, I mean I got a degree at SF State in Journalism studying with Ben Fong-Torres, but I’m not an intellectual.
FH: Yes you are. You wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t. I don’t mean that everybody was like high-end, PhD intellectual. I mean it was people who were aware.
HSV: Infinitely curious …
FH: Curious, aware, and after people got psychedelicized, everyone — we were all studying because your mind was so blown and you wanted to organize those thoughts, you know?
HSV: Timothy Leary told me when I met him in New York when I was 24 … I said, “I’m not intelligent, really.” And he said, “Yes you are. Intelligence is the ability to see the relationship between things.”
FH: Yes, right.
HSV: Connecting the micro-dots, I call it.
FH: Connecting, yes. It’s totally true, right.
HSV: The patterns and all of that. Which is what I do because I really don’t have a plan but I love talking to people about how they got where they are, which is why we’re here right now.
FH: Right, right. And that’s actually what you see when you get psychedelicized. You can actually see the dots connecting and it’s so mind-blowing. So people want to learn more about … everybody was carrying books and they were carrying The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the occult was hugely popular. This house — the Family Dog lived here and they had their own magician. Martune lived in the tower and he was fabulous. And he loved women, oh my god! He loved women, yeah. He was always surrounded by women and he must’ve loved that.
HSV: I heard, I think Jimmy [Siegel] told me that Nancy Gurley threw you smack-dab in the middle of Janis Joplin and you were terrified?
FH: Oh! [laughs]
HSV: That’s the story he told me. And you were like, “Oh my lord!”
FH: Kinda.
HSV: But you got your 101 in Colorado.
FH: Yeah, I met Nancy. She picked me up hitchhiking in Aspen. Aspen was like a hippie destination, you know, summer, nomadic, gypsy destination.
HSV: This is ’67?
FH: ’68, yeah. And I didn’t even think — cuz I was in New York for the Summer of Love, and went to the Pentagon and all that kind of thing. But I thought the Summer of Love was over so the whole thing was over. I had no intention of going to San Francisco. And then a friend of mine had set up an art camp in Colorado and so I thought, “Oh, yeah!” Cuz I wanted to go to Europe. I wanted to go to Paris.
HSV: Simone de Beauvoir and that sort of … ?
FH: Oh I wanted to be a painter and a dancer, that kind of thing.
HSV: Now let me ask you this, Fayette: were you already dressing … you know, were you dressing the part of the artist, like “not normal” as it were?
FH: Oh no. No, I was never normal, and that was a problem when I grew up.
HSV: Well, you were a little model at the age of 3 …
FH: Yes, I was a child model, which my mother loved. My mother, you know — but then I kind of turned away from that kind of … my mother wanted a product that she could promote. [laughs] She would’ve been the worst stage mother, you can’t even imagine!!! So yeah, but thankfully that didn’t work out! [laughs]
HSV: So you didn’t — or you did like the attention you just didn’t like mom’s … whatever?
FH: Mom was a very, very large control freak, and also very narcissistic like a lot of women were in that day. I mean, I know so many women my age that had that same kind of mother. It was a bizarre kind of turn for women trying to be their own selves but at the end of the day they would end up being narcissistic and so self-involved. And they did not treat their daughters well, because their daughters were like competition in some strange way.
HSV: Right.
FH: I mean that didn’t turn around until the late ‘60s. As a matter of fact, Nancy when I met her she was 30 at the time, so she was like 10 years older than me and she had a 2-year-old, Hongo Ishi Mushroom Man was her son. And she talked to him like she was talking to a real person. She didn’t talk baby talk, she talked as an adult.
HSV: Oh I know! I’ve always done that with kids.
FH: I had never seen that before. This was 1968. I had never seen that before. And I thought, “This is the modern woman”, and it was true. Because even when I was 3 and a half I had no say on anything. But Hongo at 2 and a half had control over his life and his mother gave him attention and spoke to him in a real way. I mean it was really an awakening for me to see the way she treated her child, really.
HSV: How did you make the crossover then from this sort of weird, restrictive — cuz I grew up with a very open, you know, my parents let me be who I was.
FH: Well my father was from an artistic family. His mother was an opera singer at the Met and his father was an artist. And they both did very well but I never met my paternal grandfather because he died when he was only 43 before I was born. And my paternal grandmother died about 6 months after I was born, so my father was adopted by his stepfather, hence the name Hauser, because his real name — my father’s name was F. Jackson de Praun and yeah, so — my grandfather was French-Canadian and had a French background and was F. Antoine dePraun, and there’s so much work out there by him. I inherited 2 pieces of his and now I really try to hunt for it. So I’ve got a bunch of his artwork. And he was really good! He’s in the Smithsonian American Art wing.
HSV: So romantic!
FH: Yeah! And the National Gallery. He’s collected all over the place. Especially in the east coast, primarily in the east coast.
HSV: So did you have these sort of childhood, “Oh, my grandfather! He’s always painting, and he’s and artist and I want to be …”
FH: Well my father promoted the arts and my brother wanted to be a musician — it came right down to my brother and I, but my mother was really kind of bourgeoise and she wanted, you know, “What are they wearing?”
HSV: Right.
FH: And I didn’t want any of that. I was not at all … my mother wanted a mini-me and that is not what she got!
HSV: Okay, so we’re jumping all over the place, but … So what happened when you came out here and the Cockettes were going on? Was she still around or did she experience all of that?
FH: [laughter] Oh yes!
HSV: Oh my lord. Give me a little piece of what was going on there!
FH: Well, my dad, whoever we were performing, he came to everything. He loved it. He was absolutely thrilled when we were performing. So when we first went to New York at the Anderson Theater, there’s my parents sitting in the audience, and after the show they stayed, of course, and I was backstage taking off, you know, getting changed or whatever. And I come out and Goldie Glitters is sitting in front of them. Goldie was huge. Goldie was sitting in front of them and regaling them stories of the Cockette house and my dad was smelling away, because he loved all that but my mom was in near tears. But, you know.
But my dad came to everything, absolutely everything. And I wanted to go to art school and that was fine. I went to, I mean, Boston University was an expensive school. It wasn’t cheap even then. Now it’s super expensive, but it was expensive then. I mean I got a scholarship but we had student loans. My dad was adamant about sending us to college. And he had grown up … his parents had a townhouse at 80 MacDougall.
HSV: Okay! I lived on MacDougal. I lived there for 10 years [actually more like 8 or 9]
FH: Okay, so the MacDougal-Sullivan Quad?
HSV: Know it well.
FH: Okay, so that’s where my grandparents lived. So my father had a half-sister named Bonnie and she lived in Eugene at the time. She grew up so progressively that she — she was 20 years older than me.
HSV: Eugene, Oregon?
FH: Eugene, Oregon.
HSV: Wow, okay.
FH: She lived in Eugene, Oregon with 8 kids.
HSV: Whoa!!!
FH: And she was like a hippie. She had the same values that I did. She ran the crisis clinic … so she was more like a role model mom for me than my mother was. My mother was far in, you know …
HSV: I’m sorry, you said that was your aunt?
FH: My aunt.
HSV: Okay.
FH: My aunt — my father’s half-sister.
HSV: Got it.
FH: So she was 15 years younger than my dad and exactly 20 years older than me. But she lived the same way I did. Her house was … she had 8 kids and it kind of was run like a commune! [laughs]. I mean it was fabulous, you know? She was fantastic. I absolutely adored her. So I did have women in my life who were more progressive.
HSV: So you came out here in 1968 …
FH: Right. So I came out here because of Nancy. I mean she gave me the total skinny on everyone in particular and the scene in general. It was really like an education.
HSV: So here you are sitting in Aspen, Colorado …
FH: …yeah.
HSV: And you know that she’s with this guy that’s in this band Big Brother and the Holding Company…
FH: No! I didn’t know anything about him.
HSV: Oh! Cuz I’m picturing you in Aspen, listening to Big Brother going, “Oh my god! I’m gonna go there!”
FH: No. I go to Aspen and this art thing that my friend had set up in a barn, it was still much like school. And I went to the woods and set up a tent in the woods. And then I would paint during the day, like Cezanne or something [laughs]. You know, I was painting outdoors. I was so happy.
HSV: Are you smokin’ weed? Are you doing drugs?
FH: Naw, not at the time. We …
HSV: Drinking wine probably here and there, no?
FH: Well, yeah, I mean I would hitchhike into town every few days and there was a house that somebody had rented where everyone congregated. And they would also congregate in the town square. Because Aspen was nothing like it is now. It was like a little funky ski resort but in the summer it was just for hikers and hippies, you know, so the hippies ran the town in the summer.
So anyway, I met Nancy and I met her towards, I’d say it was like September or something, and I had already been there a few months and so I wanted to be with her. And it started to get cold. So there was a big brick hotel in the center of town that was like a bunkhouse and everybody rented rooms. So I packed up my tent and moved into town so I could spend more time with her. And every morning she would throw the iChing, she taught me the Tarot, I mean …
HSV: I mean at this point you’re — you said 10 years younger, so you’re 20?
FH: Yes. And she was like a teacher, it was incredible.
HSV: Well, a mentor, yeah.
FH: Total mentor, yes!
HSV: You were her protege … not really, it sounds like you were absorbing. It wasn’t like she was on purpose teaching you?
FH: Yes she was!
HSV: She was, okay.
FH: She was a teacher, yes. She was definitely a teacher, and everybody in the community once I got here, everyone looked up to her. She was really an icon in the community.
HSV: And she was already married to James?
FH: Oh yeah. And I mean, I did an interview with James that I have on tape, too, and all of the Big Brother family were all from Detroit. And he told that they had this — it was called the “On the Road triangle”. And they would go San Francisco, New York, Mexico. Like that, and spread the weed around. Get weed, take it, spread it around.
HSV: That sounds like the Pranksters.
FH: Right!
HSV: That was their route.
FH: That was the On the Road triangle. They would all do that. And he met Nancy. He said there was a big building that had a big courtyard and all the beats and, you know, the early motorcycle people and all that, lived there. And that’s when he met Nancy. So they already were already married when they came out here. And they lived — those people originally lived in North Beach because they were like, late Beat that became the counterculture — bands and everything.
HSV: Jerry Garcia used to hang out in North Beach too.
FH: Oh they all did. North Beach was where the scene was.
HSV: He wanted to be an artist.
FH: Yes, right! It’s amazing how music took over when it wasn’t that … it was all literature in North Beach with City Lights and Ferlinghetti and doing readings. There were so many poetry readings. North Beach was a very big literary scene and then all of a sudden the music came along.
HSV: It is very interesting. I wonder what the spark was, or the liaisoning between the two was.
FH: Well, I know that when I was in Boston, well, I knew a lot about music because my brother was a musician and he was very early on listening to blues. I mean I had like an education via my brother in our youth.
HSV: My grandma used to play guitar, and I grew up with a piano, so music is everything to me.
FH: Yeah! So I was hip to a lot of things that the average kid wasn’t.
HSV: Back in that time, yeah, especially!
FH: Yeah. But when I got to Boston, it was all about the folk scene. So it was all about music.
HSV: Well folk is, you think of Woody Guthrie — that is poetry, that’s telling a story with words but then putting a little guitar underneath it.
FH: Right.
HSV: That’s probably where, Woody Guthrie I would think was part of it.
FH: Oh definitely. They idolized Woody Guthrie. But then Tim and I would go to New York to go to the Village and I was like 16, 17…
HSV: Wait, who’s Tim?
FH: Tim is my brother.
HSV: Okay.
FH: Tim Hauser.
HSV: Okay.
FH: And founded the band, Manhattan Transfer.
HSV: What?
FH: That’s Tim Hauser, yeah!
HSV: See, I didn’t get that far into my research on you!
FH: Okay, yeah!
HSV: That’s great!
FH: So he was a very serious musician and he was listening to all these groups. He was way into these groups. So we would go to … I remember one, we went to see the Kingston Trio because they were like a harmony group and he had started a group when he was in college that was like a folk trio. So we went to see them in Forest Hills at the tennis stadium. And then we went into the Village and we went to Gerde’s Folk City to see Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or one of those guys.
HSV: I just talked to Jack last night! He’s my dear friend!
FH: Oh my god!
HSV: I’ve known Jack 35 years!
FH: He’s still alive!
HSV: That’s the 3rd person we know.
FH: Wow!
HSV: Oh no, he’s gigging! He’s 92 years old. He’s great!
FH: Oh god bless him!
HSV: Oh he’s doin’ fantastic!
FH: Oh my god! He was an actor and everything. He’s fantastic!
HSV: Oh, Jack is the best guy in the universe.
FH: You promise to introduce me to him?
HSV: We can go up there. He lives up in Marshall, it’s up by Pt Reyes.
FH: Oh god I would love to.
HSV: After my birthday and everything.
FH: When is your birthday?
HSV: Sunday, March 27.
FH: Oh my god! Okay.
HSV: My party’s on Saturday but my birthday is Sunday — but that’s a whole different thing.
FH: Okay, I’m gonna be with Shannon Gaines from Vaudeveer. Is that party at night, Saturday night?
HSV: Saturday 5-10pm. Down by the docks by the Bay Bridge.
FH: Okay, you’ll have to give me the address.
HSV: I will. I’ll send it to you.
FH: Cuz Shannon and I can come Saturday. Yeah, definitely! Would love to!
HSV: My friends are playing mandolin and banjo, and I’m gonna play a little piano.
FH: Oh good!
HSV: Indoor/outdoor, you can smoke weed and whatever!
FH: Yay! Fantastic.
HSV: Jack can’t come, he really wanted to come but he’s got a gig at the Hopmonk.
FH: Oh my god!
HSV: He might even have a gig where we could figure out to both go see him play, which would be fun!
FH: Okay! Oh my god!
HSV: Okay! [check recorder]
FH: So we go to the Village and Gerde’s Folk City was teeny-tiny and had these tiny little tables, so everybody was really crowded into the space. And then there would be the stage, very small.
HSV: It’s so Beat. Was everybody wearing black?
FH: Oh yeah man. It was totally Beat.
HSV: Snapping their fingers.
FH: Yeah, it was very Beat. And I was into the turtlenecks. I was into my Beat look.
HSV: You were drop dead gorgeous, which you are.
FH: I can show you a picture of my beat look. [laughs]
HSV: You swish into the room, you’re watching this music …
FH: So then all of a sudden Gerde comes out and says, “Oh, I want to introduce you to a new fella in town. His name is Bobby Dylan [pronounced wrong “Die-lan”]
HSV: [laughter]
FH: And Bob Dylan came out and started to sing and he was so completely different from everyone that Tim and I just … [mimics jaw drop]. Six months later he was with Joan Baez and was becoming famous. But for me, he was the crossover. He was the initial crossover because he really spoke the mind of my generation, you know, people that were born more in the ‘50s and the late ‘50s and grew up in the ‘60s. I consider him really the transition artist that took us further because his music was so much the mind of everyone. It was like the collective mind that he spoke.
[Chatter about meeting Dylan … ]
HSV: I’m curious about sexual escapades, and I’m sure you have a lot!
FH: Oh yes! Oh my god. Well, here’s the thing, I mean I grew up at a time when no one said, “Oh I love you”. People didn’t say that. People didn’t express their emotions directly like they do now. Everything was sort of couched in innuendo and nothing was direct. And besides, I went to Catholic high school.
HSV: Ohhh! [laughter]
FH: Right.
HSV: I wouldn’t say “besides” but “because” …
FH: Well, I didn’t go to Catholic grade school thank god, because a those people were so immature. I mean I went to public school and I grew up in the Jersey Shore. So during the summer it was quite fabulous. So me and my best friend, Carol, we both ended up in Catholic high school and I remember the first day, the other girls were so giggly you could tell they were really immature and unsexualized, and we were already way ahead, you know.
HSV: And the kinky Catholic high school girl, probably a little of that, maybe? Brian Rohan is one of the guys we know in common. I loved him. He love my magazine. He believed in me so much.
BANTER!!!!!
To Rohan’s point that all the girls coming to California were Catholic girls, so horny and freaky.
FH: Well that was the thing: overt sex in Catholic high school because then you had to confess to the priest and nobody wanted to do it. So you had to get very imaginative but keep your clothes on. So it was very kinky in that way. And there was a lot of, what I remember, car sex. Oh my god, I still — that’s like the ultimate to me, is car sex. We used to drive to the beach, you know, and park by the ocean and we would call it “whale watching”…
HSV: [laughter]
FH: … and have car sex. And if that isn’t the sexiest thing, I don’t know what is. So I grew up with car sex. That’s my favorite.
HSV: Let’s bring back the car sex, y’all!
FH: Yes. But this is when it was Impalas and Bonnevilles … they were like floating living rooms where you could really have fabulous sex.
HSV: Oh my god.
FH: Yes. But then when I came here, sex was like a handshake. It was nothing. There was no — there was nothing in between you meeting the guy and then having sex, you know. And it was a shock at first. I was like, “Oooh!”
HSV: Wasn’t there concern about getting pregnant, getting diseases — none of that was on your minds?
FH: No, because the Pill was — I mean, I feel like I … the timing of my birth and the culture was so synched! [laughs] You know I was really fortunate because abortion got legal — well, it was a little later, but still, the pill came out and then I came to San Francisco and everybody was having sex with everybody. But it was lovely, it wasn’t brutal or anything like that because everybody was raised in middle-class America. It was like milk-fed kids that had unusual heads that were unusual but well brought up. So the society, people were lovely to each other.
HSV: I’m just picturing a bunch of horses corralled together and letting them run and really enjoy each other.
FH: Yeah, right!
HSV: But in my mind I’m thinking but wasn’t that hard? Didn’t you fall in love with somebody but they were fucking everybody?
FH: I was in love with everybody!
HSV: Okay, yeah.
FH: And then when we formed the Cockettes, everybody that was in the Cockettes loved everybody in the Cockettes. We became such a tight group.
HSV: You said you shared everything.
FH: Exactly. Crawl into each others’ beds and … I mean it was really great. The support and the love from the group, from the guys in the group, from the women in the group, it was just fabulous. And I kept everything so I go through these old suitcases and I found this birthday card that Dusty Dawn had drawn, a picture of me, and said beautiful things, you know what I mean, and it was just all from a loving space.
HSV: Yeah!
FH: So it was the best of times, I mean it truly was.
HSV: Okay that is a good segue into maybe, from all of the expansion and the liberation of the spirit and this beautiful love and getting away from all the tightness of where you came from …
FH: Right.
HSV: Up to today … do you feel like that explosion that happened in the counterculture and those times that you guys were really exploding and exploring — all of that, like, and where we are today, right now — even though we’re sitting in one of the most amazing houses in the universe — Haight Street today, is it possible that that blossoming … do you happy with where that blossoming has sort of … where the pollen is today, do you know what I mean?
FH: The blossoming really happened in the ‘70s. So many things that are still in existence happened in ’70, or ’72 was really a big year for people to create things. Like Meals on Wheels was created in ’72, so many things! Environmental things, organic food. I mean the Haight, the Cole Street commune was the first people to farm organically in Marin and truck it in and pass it out in the City — the Food Conspiracy. I mean it was such a self-supportive, self-sustaining society.
HSV: And there was Peter Coyote and the Diggers …
FH: Well, the Diggers set the stage for sure.
HSV: Yeah.
FH: Yeah, the Diggers were totally responsible because like in David Talbot’s book …
HSV: I love that book.
FH: Season of the Witch — fantastic — he talks about Aliotto and how they were throwing hippies into jail and sending them home.
HSV: And HALO — Brian Rohan and Michael Stepanian got ‘em all out!
FH: And the Diggers chilled out the city council and said, “We’ll take care of him.” So they sort of took over, fed people in the park, found housing because then everybody started occupying in the Haight, which would have, I mean, these Victorians would have been — they were in the process of being bulldozed. I remember Sutter Street was being bulldozed. And then this whole section of Sutter Street, like up to Fillmore and into the Fillmore were saved because they were occupied by squatting, with hippies! Sweet Pam and Ralph Sauer lived in a squat on Sutter Street.
HSV: So I guess what I’m saying or alluding to, because this is the Haight Street Voice, and I live a block from the Haight and I used to go to the Nightbreak, I used to go to the iBeam all the time, I’ve been hanging out in San Francisco since I was 15.
FH: Yeah you were here at the right time, for sure.
HSV: I figure it was 60 years ago in the ‘60s, and I’m gonna be 60 on Sunday!
FH: [laughter] Fantastic!!! Oh we will definitely be coming to the party!
HSV: I know there’s a magic there in the Haight and I don’t know if I’m projecting it, and also I know everyone in those 5 blocks and it’s wonderful.
FH: Oh there’s definitely a magic spirit there, absolutely.
HSV: It’s like a vortex, there’s an energy, right?
FH: I was just telling James Freeborn, he lives upstairs, and he’s young and he’s always asking me questions. There’s a book called Acid Dreams, which is the most fantastic — it talks about a trajectory of acid through society and what happened, how it happened, where it happened. And I was just telling him there’s a part in the book in the early days of the first initial acid trips here, which is the early ‘60s.
HSV: And it was good acid! It was Owsley’s acid?
FH: It came from Hoffman! The thing with the acid and the drugs was the quality was the most important thing, and it was given away. So it was not about the money, it was about the high. How good was the high was really what you were aiming for.
But … there’s a whole part in the book where somebody got a hundred people into the Panhandle and gave them all a hit of this acid and then said, “Spread around the City. Everybody go to a different part of the City and trip around.” So the spirit of the Haight, the enormous thought forms that I encountered when I first got here were so heavy and intense, were intentional! It was intentionally creative, you know what I mean?!
HSV: Yeah!
FH: There was no happenstance at all. It was an intent. And it was successful.
HSV: Yeah, wow. So Haight Street Voice is “hyper-local with a global perspective”.
FH: Yes! That’s great! I read that, yeah!
HSV: It doesn’t have to be about Haight Street.
FH: Right, it’s about the energy. Right, yeah.
HSV: This is the mama where this stuff got born. So it’s sort of pollinating the rest of the world no matter what community you are. You want to not step over a homeless person you want to help people, say hello, say hello to the postman or woman, it’s okay!
FH: Be kind, yes!
HSV: Be kind!
FH: That was an ethos in the City and people that would come in and they said … Negativity was NOT permitted!
HSV: Would they just shoo them out of the neighborhood?
FH: They would just not bother with them and they would not be welcomed into whatever part of the society. Even on the street if somebody was being really negative or violent — it was so non-violent! Oh my god, nobody put up with it. People would surround somebody who was being negative and intentionally draw them into a more positive space.
HSV: Wow.
FH: I mean, it was very very important.
HSV: That magical. That’s alchemy.
FH: It was serious alchemy. People really understood what energy fields were by taking acid. And they understood how to turn it around and how important it was to create a positive energy field and how that’s how progress happened. That you created an energy field.
That whole thing about Aleister Crowley, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want in the world. That is not what it means. It means that your will determines the future form of the universe, so you have to take responsibility. And everybody felt that responsibility because everybody was enlarging their consciousness through psychedelics.
When I got here in ’68, psychedelics were IT. I mean, I really got here at the right time. ’67, ’68, ’69 into ’70, we would schedule a trip, like it would be somebody’s birthday or there would be something, okay this day we’re gonna go to Mt. Tam and we’re gonna trip with such and so, and we’re gonna collect them, and it would be an effort, that you were doing it on purpose because it was time for another expansion of consciousness.
HSV: Fast forward to today, Fayette Hauser! I mean I’m working with Dr. David E. Smith who was taking care of the people who were having “bad trips”.
FH: Right.
HSV: This is his legacy that he wants to found in one of his buildings, the Haight-Ashbury Psychedelic Center.
FH: This is SO important! Oh it’s so important!
HSV: Because the whole thing is ready to expand again, and this time we have the doctors on our side, and the feds are starting to decrim …
FH: Incredible!
HSV: And Oakland is decriminalized. So the elders, such as yourself and Dr. Dave are saying “Yes!”
FH: This is the only way the human race will survive.
HSV: The brain is ready for the expansion again.
FH: Yes. It’s totally ready for the consciousness to expand because it has to turn around. And one of the key points I think is that the entire world is against the violence of Putin — not to go into that. The entire world is NOT into it.
HSV: That’s why I have that cover. We need to have the flower win over the gun, period.
FH: Right. Yes, exactly. And this is the time. Nobody wants it. I don’t think Putin really expected the entire world to turn against him.
HSV: “Fuck you, asshole!”
FH: He needs to be shunned for the rest of his life.
HSV: Or give him some acid — though I don’t if know if he might go down the wrong road.
FH: Something! Maybe he’d jump off a bridge. [laughter]
But a friend of mine … I was very good friends with Dr. Roy Walford who was a gerontologist but he had also been in the Living Theater and he was one of the group who went into the biosphere. He was the doctor in the biosphere. He was friends with Tim Leary. When they were in the biosphere for 2 years, he would create rituals where they would all do a psychedelic and have a group experience. And he said it’s the only way to survive if people are going to go on these long voyages to another planet. You have to have this kind of group consciousness.
HSV: It’s interesting because I keep calling Haight Street Voice my “spaceship” cuz it’s starting to take off. Don’t really know where the fuck we’re going but there are a lot of cool people on here!
FH: Exactly.
HSV: People are starting to … a little money is starting to come, and people are like, “What’s this?”
FH: Yes! Cuz it’s important!
HSV: Shout out to Facebook, I mean it really has helped accelerate things, you know what I mean?
FH: Yeah, definitely.
HSV: It IS a spaceship. There IS this consciousness.
FH: Oh yeah, and it’s very, very important, this energy field.
HSV: I’m so honored that you’re in here! You are bringing your experience to the party too, and that’s like [mimic explosion] — that’s a great person to have at the party! Get on the spaceship! [laughter] She knows what she’s doin’!
FH: Yeah, our entire group was psychedelicized, definitely. Hibiscus was so out there.
HSV: Give me an example, a specific moment in time in detail. He said something completely weird or …
FH: Well, you would go hang out with him in his room, and IT would be like taking off on a spaceship. You would be on Hibiscus’s trip. And he —
HSV: Was there music?
FH: Oh he expressed himself — he had been a dancer, and then, I don’t know if he got polio or what, but something happened where he couldn’t dance anymore. But his movement, he was constantly moving. And his consciousness was so epic. He would have these big dreams and his fantasies were huge and he wanted to enlarge it even more. So you would go and hang out with him and you would go on a big trip with him.
His body was so expressive. He really translated his emotions through his body movements. He was beautiful. And he was so full of love. He would be laughing one minute, crying the next. He had very big emotions. Melodramatic!
HSV: Was he on a lot of acid, I mean, let’s be real.
FH: Yeah. Not all the time. None of us were on it all the time. None of us were on it all the time.
HSV: He was already on 11!
FH: Yeah, right! Yeah we were all up there on the plateau [laughs].
The organic trajectory of how the Cockettes came together was really important because it was definitely meant to be. The type of artists that we all were, the type of artistic experiences that we had, what we knew. We were not novices. We had all been in San Francisco at least a year before that and we were well on the road in our artistic paths, whether it was in art or literature or music — but we had all those elements together, you know? We were ready! And the one key person, Gary Cherry, was like this Pan figure that would go all over the City and he would connect people. If he said, “You need to meet such and so” then he would bring you together. And he met Hibiscus, and Hibiscus wanted to have a theater, a psychedelicized theater that was really particular to the scene. So it was Gary Cherry that brought him to the house. Gary was an organizer. He was a Libra — Libra / Gemini were the dominants in the Cockettes. But he would organize the acid trips, “Okay! Signing up for the acid trip on Sunday!” [mimics clipboard]. He was like that! [laughter]
And he would create orgies and he was like, “Okay! Invitation to the orgy. Are you down!?”
HSV: Oh I love it!
FH: I know! He was fabulous.
HSV: It sounds like it was a group of people who came together and everybody had their own integrity and everybody was really ready to bring that with all of themselves.
FH: Everyone had an artistic responsibility. We were all committed to a vision that we were exploring. And somehow the threads of all our different visions were woven together via Hibiscus.
But my feeling about psychedelics in the future … the psychedelic experience is going to replace things that really don’t work anymore, like confirmation, bar mitzvahs, rites of passage are going to be an expansion of consciousness at a certain time in a person’s life to show them who they are, where they are in the universe, what their path is, and that would be like a ritual for a young person to put them in the adult world with purpose. And it’s gotta be through psychedelics.
HSV: Instead of: Go to college, get a job, get married, have the kid.
FH: Right, right. Now it’s not even “Go to college”, it’s “Go work. Go make money for the man.”
HSV: No matter if you like it or not or if you’re happy or not. Just go make money. That’s starting to change.
FH: And “You can retire early.” Oh no no no. You’re never allowed to retire early because you can never save money. I mean it’s insane. And children like my niece and nephew, they’re not having it.
HSV: Good!
FH: My nephew is going to be 33 this year.
[conversation switches to Paul Ennis, and that HSV is doing a zoom interview with his niece and great-niece.]
FH: When I looked at that picture [flower in barrel of gun], even before I did the book or anything, and there were different people who said it was whoever. But then Hibiscus’s family said the Hibiscus said that it was him, so I thought, “Well, okay.” And then they said to Bernie Boston who took the picture that it was Hibiscus, George Harris III. But when I looked at it, I just didn’t see Hibiscus there. I thought, it could be, but there was just something about the profile, the mouth, the nose, the structure of his face. Because after all, I trained as an artist, so anatomy I can tell.
[banter]
HSV: What’s up with the tattoo on your ear?
FH: When Nancy brought me here …
HSV: Delivered you here!
FH: Yes! [laughter] There was a house at 83 Noe Street which was a Victorian flat with Patty Cakes, and Nancy was like her cosmic mother, and another woman named Paula. So Nancy brought me there and then I moved in. That was the first place I lived at.
So Paula was married to this guy Arthur, and you should interview him too. He’s still alive. Jimmy knows him. So he was married to Paula Bokar. Patty Cakes, here name was Patty Josephson, Patty Cakes, Paula and I lived at 83 Noe. And Paula had a Packard, a beautiful, late-30s Packard. It was gorgeous, two-tone cafe au lait, gorgeous! So here would be an average day: We would get up whenever, you know, and then we would get dressed up, of course.
That was also the thing, just to backtrack a little. When I was in school in Boston there was an enormous, like a Goodwill, it was called the Morgan Memorial. It’s probably Goodwill at this point. It was huge! Five stories, and the top floor was antiques. We were in painting class, and so what are you gonna paint? A cafeteria coffee cup? So we would go there to find items, fabulous items to put in our still-life painting class. And there was a rack of clothes. Boston goes waaaay back into early America, so there was a rack of Victorian dresses gathering dust. So I found this Victorian dress that fit me perfectly, and it so intrigued me because it was a body consciousness. I mean in the ‘60s it was almost two-dimensional because you’d have these a-line dresses and graphics and the geometrics. But the Victorian, it was so body consciousness for curves. The waist was important — they were so complicated! And you really had to be aware of all these different parts of your body.
HSV: Attention to detail. I’ve always said that.
FH: Oh my god! So much attention to detail!
HSV: People wouldn’t leave their house without their hat and their gloves … they would not go out in yoga pants! [laughter]
FH: [big laughter] In ways, they [Victorians] were repressed. It came out of a repression. However, to look back on it now, it interesting to look at it from another point of view: because of the repression, it was extremely sexy, you know what I mean? It was very specific.
So this was about 1964, so early, early on I was into the vintage but I wasn’t into wearing it as an everyday thing. I remember in New York I found this one dress that was from the ‘30s and it had a big bias cut back crepe skirt. The whole back was lace, so it was backless. It was gorgeous. And so my brother, it was my birthday, and he said, “Let’s go to lunch.” And it was this very fancy popular Italian restaurant in Manhattan. At that time I had my first apartment in Manhattan in the Village, so I got dressed up in this dress and I thought, “I’m gonna go out in the street in this dress?” I got in a cab and we got to the restaurant and I was very self-conscious about wearing this dress. It was very sexy and the whole skirt was very big, and I go inside the restaurant to meet my brother, and the waiters — they were all italian — and they all got up and clapped! They applauded me when I walked into the restaurant because I had this fabulous outfit on! After that, I thought “That’s it”.
HSV: Did you have any theater training?
FH: No.
HSV: So you weren’t used to attention coming at you.
FH: Right. No.
HSV: That’s a very important thing.
FH: I know! No I was not into theater until the Cockettes. I mean I was in the high school play or whatever.
HSV: You were an artist.
FH: I was very much into the visuals. I’m a total visual person. But when I got here, everyone was wearing … they were not wearing trend or style or anything like that. It was all, like Nancy, they were all in velvet skirts and lace blouses.
HSV: The Charlatans and all that?
FH: Yeah! The Charlatans. Victoriana was very popular because this town is steeped in the Victorian era. So I was primed and ready for every aspect that this City had created. I was so happy when I got here and saw that it was alive and well — and throbbing!
HSV: Good word!
FH: I was like, “YES! This is me alright!”
HSV: It’s almost like you stepped back in time.
FH: Yes! It was a future past.
HSV: Thank you! Then you were catapulted into the psychedelic — ooweee! Eclipsed! Pushing you forward.
FH: Yes! exactly. I thought about that often. One of the first things I saw about the west coast was these Irving Penn photos that were in LIFE magazine that he had of the groups. And he had this one of the Grateful Dead and the Family Dog people, and it was the way they looked. It was very future past, and it was completely different. I mean when you’re in New York in the ‘60s, you had Courrèges and white go-go boots.
HSV: What’s Courrèges?
FH: Oh he’s a designer. A French designer who had the metal circles and all the geometric pop-art clothes.
HSV: Like Pucci!
FH: Yes, Pucci is great. Yeah, so all of that was going on.
HSV: Very modern.
FH: Yes. Bright colors and all of that. And here you had this look where the fashion was very detailed and very clean lines. And here you had these people that were more about the organic nature of everything, organic colors, their hair — everything was so different. And that drew me in, too. So when I met Nancy in Colorado, the whole trajectory of my life completely changed.
HSV: I think Colorado is a parallel sister to San Francisco, I really do.
FH: Yes! I think so too.
[BANTER re SF NY creeks being a kid]
HSV: What would like to say to the kids of the Haight Ashbury, or to the young kids who are coming to the Haight — not even the young but the people who are pilgrammaging to this area still today?
FH: Well, a lot of people come in search of what was there before, but they need to create the modern version. You know, the people that come here need to have an intent.
HSV: From inside.
FH: Yes! You can’t just come here and sit on the sidewalk and expect something to happen to you. That’s crazy, and that’s not working for them either. Or just go lay in the park or sleep in the park — that’s not working for them.
HSV: And take lots of drugs with no guidance.
FH: Yeah, no guidance, and not creative drugs, and where are these drugs from and what’s really in them? You know we made our own drugs, for god sakes. Our society was totally self-sustaining and with a positive intent.
People that come here need to know why they’re here. And they need to come with an intent to do something.
HSV: And learn! And read!
FH: Yeah, right!
HSV: Find your passion. Like Bob Weir said, “You found your home. Now keep it clean and make it pretty.”
FH: [laughs] Right!!! Make it pretty, yes, it’s the truth! Oh we were way into beauty. Everything had to be beautiful because everything was beautiful.
HSV: It’s about regaining that respect again.
If you could speak to the Haight-Ashbury, or the Haight area or even just San Francisco herself — I think of her as a girl somehow.
FH: Yes, she is. Very feminine. A lot of earth energy.
HSV: What would you like to say to her, this vagina you fell into.
FH: Thank you for saving me, because I think my life in California saved my life. If my trajectory had gone a different way I don’t even think I’d be around anymore.
HSV: Really?
FH: Yeah, I don’t think so.
HSV: You found your joy.
FH: Yeah. I found my deep joy here, yeah, absolutely. It changed me. Yeah, absolutely.
[BANTER about 1506, Ruby Ray (local artists) gallery, Cockettes, July-August, schedule performances. We could do it for a month or 2 months]
FH: You’re doing really worthy work, you really are. It’s so necessary!
HSV: Thank you. I am very proud of it. Even Ben Fong-Torres gave me a shout-out on Moonalice Radio! I mean, I’m 60 — what am I supposed to do, go out and get a job right now?
FH: Hell, you know how old I’m gonna be at the end of May? God almighty! 77!
HSV: You look incredible.
FH: Oh YOU look incredible! You look fabulous.
HSV: Age is so fucking weird, man!
FH: Well, for people that got psychedelicized, we found ourselves.
HSV: And the joy that you have inside. You know you’re really living your truth. That’s huge.
FH: Yes!
HSV: And studying. Studying was my savior, learning, learning, learning.
FH: Studying is so important. There’s so much to learn in this world, and you come in as a new consciousness, a clear consciousness, and learning is such a big part.
And to make education so difficult … it was so easy, I mean the public school system and the colleges were mostly cheap. Mine school was expensive but still, comparatively it wasn’t.
HSV: And we got to run out and play by the creek! That freedom!
FH: Yes! Such freedom. To think and to fantasize. My whole childhood was one big fantasy to me. And I was alone all the time.
HSV: Me too.
FH: Yeah. So to make it so hard for people to get an education is so disgusting. I think it’s part of a rivaling conspiracy to keep people stupid so they have slaves. It’s awful.
HSV: Yes. But the whole moving to New York, the courage of finding out who I was.
FH: And to me, the opposite because I was in New York, for me to come here was the same with you.
HSV: Do you feel like you paved the way to where we are now?
FH: Oh my god. I think we made a very big — we changed things because what we created in the Cockettes in such a short time, we were only together 3 years, but we were so tight in our group consciousness that what we created was so different, and the way we looked. What we created, our visual language, has become the vernacular for all drag costume theater, whatever, I mean we definitely changed that, you know what I mean?
HSV: Yeah! The vibration!
FH: Because before ’69, you can’t even find a picture of anybody that looked like us, you know, with our abstract collage, surrealistic influence, inspirational homage put together in a really particular individualistic way, is now like a trend.
HSV: I was reading at your show at the SF Library about how the people watching it at the theater were blown away, and by the end of it everybody’s onstage and taking off their clothes! This vibrational, all-inclusive …
FH: We were shocked that first time we went onstage and did that. We were blown away because the whole audience rose up and started screaming! All of us were blown back because of the energy coming smack into us!
It was Hibiscus. I mean, you know, he knew what the energy of this city was because he would take acid and trip all over the city. And there’s that picture of him dancing in the park with the baby, Robert Altman photo.
FH: That captured him perfectly.
HSV: That was at Hippie Hill, wasn’t it?
FH: Yes, absolutely.
HSV: The drum circle.
FH: Yes, you can hear the drums now!
HSV: It’s still going on!
FH: That drum sound, and Haight Street — I mean, it was like a magnet.
HSV: It’s tribal.
FH: Oh, it’s very tribal. Totally. You know they called it the early tribes, and communes were tribes and all that kind of thing.
Hibiscus was not surprised. We were all shocked, and I turned to Hibiscus and knew. He wasn’t shocked. And put the record on, and played it again. It was a 78 record of a classic French can-can.
He knew what to do because he knew what was happening. And it really, really channeled the zeitgeist of the City.
HSV: Could your 18-year-old self ever have imagined what you found, and who you’ve become today? Do you think it existed in your little 18-year-old mind?
FH: Yeah, I think so. And I think that’s why it happened. Because once I saw what was happening here I dove right in. I was totally ready. It was part of my projection into the future and into my future. I wanted to explore. I was into exploration, adventure, transformation — all those things, is what I was seeking. The minute I met Nancy and she told me all these things, I thought “This is IT! This IS it!”
HSV: Hallelujah!
FH: That WAS the particular rabbit hole I was seeking, no question.
HSV: What’s the most important thing we can all do — all of us all over the planet — help keep the show going, to help us all keep moving forward?
FH: Focus on positivity and non-violence. We have to get rid of the violence. It’s too much.
HSV: The Dalai Lama even said it just doesn’t make any sense any more.
FH: Yes, exactly! It’s so stupid.
HSV: We just got through a pandemic and then you’re gonna shoot a gun at innocent children and people?
FH: But Putin is well hated at this point.
HSV: Okay. One last question. As I’m working with Dr. David E. Smith and Sunshine Powers on the soon-to-open Haight Ashbury Psychedelic Center, we’re collecting testimonials because it’ll help decriminalization happen faster: How have psychedelics enhanced your life?
FH: Psychedelics … it’s the keyhole journey that puts you into your positive future. And the expansion of consciousness is the most important thing. There is no other reason for us to be on the planet other than to expand our consciousness. Absolutely.
[BANTER about living in NEW YORK for 7 years … ]
HSV: And then you come back here and you hit the ground running.
FH: Once you’ve lived in New York, yes!
HSV: Yeah man! Your wheels are all tuned up!
FH: Yes! That was the thing in the Cockettes — because of that [New York] consciousness, street savvy because of my art training, I knew how to do things. I knew how to make things.
HSV: That’s sexy and that’s attractive.
FH: Yeah … [sexy yeah]
HSV: Men are drawn — not even just men. It’s attractive.
FH: There’s a picture where I’m dressing Daniel and he’s naked and we were lovers. The other thing about being nude — I mean I’m gonna talk about that in The Body Consciousness [show at SF Library] because once you see so many people nude, there is no perfect body and you don’t have the expectation of perfect bodies. When people are naked all the time, it’s the acceptance, it’s not big deal, you know what I mean? The love comes from a different place than having to satisfy a type or a specificity of physicality.
HSV: I think in today’s world we’re really damaged by that. The youth are really damaged.
FH: The media. The culture. I mean I can’t say enough about the horror of capitalism and how they’ve used people. They use people and peoples’ vulnerability, women’s vulnerability about their body. They make people more vulnerable to sell product and all this other shit.
I think the counterculture — it’s fabulous that there is such a focus on the counterculture in our culture now because … I mean that’s another question that comes up in the Q&As: “How were you so happy?” We were HAPPY! And they want to know we did it because because people are not happy.
For the Cockettes and for the counterculture, it was group energy. Doing things on your own is difficult, but once you get into a group — that’s why kids want to be in bands, because it’s a group and it’s a group energy. But it should go beyond that.
HSV: That’s the way I feel about my magazine. I’m all alone writing and putting it together, but I can step out my front door and see my people!
FH: Right! You’re connecting the dots in such a good way, girl! Oh my god!
HSV: I’m grateful!
FH: You’re doin’ the work! You’re really doin’ the work!
Swoon, right??? Be sure to check out her live, in-person show at the SF Public Library May 26, 6-7:30pm: https://sfpl.org/events/2022/05/26/performance-cockette-tales-fayette-hauser-and-vau-de-vire-society. Check out Fayette’s fabulous website: www.fayettehauser.com and her book site: thecockettes.net. Email Fayette, here: lafayetta7@gmail.com.
