Experience the prismatic solo performance of award-winning actor Tina D’Elia as she takes to the secret queer underground you’ve never seen in SF’s most iconic neighborhood: the Haight-Ashbury! Audiences will meet Peggy Caserta, a successful out lesbian business owner on Haight Street, inventor of the bellbottom jeans, and Janis Joplin’s laid-back lesbian lover.
HSV recently had the pleasure of interviewing Director Seth Eisen of EyeZen.org where he shared with us what inspired this project, “OUT of Site: Haight -Ashbury, a performance-driven queer history tour.
Seth Eisen: [After our little preamble upon meeting for the first time]: All conversation is interesting!
Haight Street Voice: Okay you’re lucky number 84, and here I am with Seth Eisen. I’m the only one that’s gonna hear this — unless we become famous and everybody wants to pay us for it.
Seth Eisen: We already are famous! You are, for sure, watching your videos. You’re amazing! You’re so great at interviewing people! You really put people at ease. I get it. I understand. Like when I saw you I was like, “Okay! Next level!”
HSV: Really?
SE: Yeah, oh my god! No one’s said that to you before?
HSV: No, I mean they’ll say, “you did that really well” but somebody who understands like you …
SE: Oh, it’s tricky interviewing people.
HSV: To me, it’s really …
SE: But it’s fun!
HSV: So fun.
SE: Oh my god, I can’t even tell you, interviewing Peggy [Caserta]?
HSV: Oh, I love Peggy. She’s a dear friend. Well, you know, you heard it.
SE: I heard it! It was one of the dreams of my life. I left that and I was in a state, for days!
HSV: Oh yeah, like with the Weir thing too, it’s …
SE: Yeah!
HSV: This is a person that’s part of history, who was there.
SE: Yeah, sure.
HSV: And for her, this point in her life, it’s a joy for her!
SE: Yeah!
HSV: To share her thing
SE: Of course!
HSV: And be appreciated.
SE: Of course, and it’s so from the heart, yeah.
HSV: Okay, where were we?
SE: Well, I was mentioning that I’ve been coming up to the neighborhood. Okay wait, maybe I should back up first and talk about the project …
HSV: Yeah.
SE: Okay, but then I do want to talk about the homeless youth in the neighborhood.
HSV: I would love it.
SE: And especially the queer homeless youth in the neighborhood, and the tradition of that since you’re talking about renaissance.
HSV: Please.
SE: I’ve been thinking a lot about this, you know, about queer youth coming to the Bay Area, and the history of that.
HSV: Yeah.
SE: And also, so when we did our photoshoot for the project we got to use the 1506 space, and our actor went in and our photographer we’ve worked with for years – so wonderful to actually like, you know, start to bring the Peggy character and the other character to life.
HSV: And Mnasidika …
SE: And Mnasidika. And it was just like, “Oh my god, this is happening! And then, you know, it’s hard to not notice the homeless people on the corner, you know? Not only not notice them but to just, like, this is part of neighborhood.
HSV: It is.
SE: And, you know, it bothers me. It hurts me that …
HSV: There are some of them want to be there, you know that, right?
SE: Sure, yeah.
HSV: Some of them aren’t drug addicts. They just don’t want … you know, maybe they’re transitioning or something. Maybe they want to do this for a year and then they want to go back to regular life. But even [whispering] like that guy right there with the hat on, he’s out there every day, but he’s alright. You know what mean? Anyway.
SE: Well, I think maybe we’re talking about two different things.
HSV: You’re talking about the ones who are down and out.
SE: I’m talking about the ones who are down and out and I’m also talking about the queer youth that escaped their family who didn’t accept them, who came here in the ‘60s thinking this was going to be an oasis, like “Oh my god, I get to be gay, get to be who I am!”
HSV: Right.
SE: And then suddenly there’s no place to find work.
HSV: Right.
SE: You know, except to sell yourself or to, you know, do sex work or to sell drugs or to whatever …
HSV: Primarily that area was Polk Street, no? Now that was pretty much where they landed, right?
SE: Uh … not necessarily. I mean, Polk and Tenderloin, yes, but also mid Market Street, there was a whole hangout at the shoe store there, right around there.
HSV: Yeah.
SE: But, you know, everyone I’ve interviewed about this project says that, like, whatever it is, it’s all over the City. It’s not just located in one neighborhood or another.
HSV: Yeah
SE: But let me just backtrack a little bit and talk about the …
HSV: I’ll have a bit of my bagel (laugh)
SE: Yeah, please! I love lox and bagels. Makes me feel at home.
HSV: Me too.
SE: So how this project came about is we were – already, we had been doing theatrical projects in a theater, in a more traditional space for years, and they’re always about queer history, LGBTQ history, right?
HSV: Uh-huh.
SE: And so, you know, we had thought, “Wouldn’t it be so amazing to make the work more accessible” because even dancers don’t come to theater. Music people don’t often necessarily come to theater. And then people who are not necessarily into theater don’t come to theater. So how can you bring it to a wider audience is the big question, right? And so we were like, “Well what if we bring it onto the street somehow? What if we connect it to the neighborhood?” And then this study came out, which is the historic context statement. I don’t know if you talked to Donna Reeves?
HSV: No.
SE: I actually had an incredible conversation with her about this statement that she did, which is all about the minorities in different neighborhoods that the National Park Service funded to be able to tell more of the history of the minority people within neighborhoods but also connected to the architecture.
HSV: My dad and brother are both architects in the Bay Area … so yeah, go ahead! I can identify!
SE: Yeah! So it’s like “Okay well what do the buildings themselves have to do with the history of the people.
HSV: Right. It’s part of the character.
SE: Right!
HSV: It IS a character in the play, really.
SE: Exactly! Yeah. Exactly. So I just thought, when I read these historians, Shane Watts and then Donna Reeves who were commissioned to do the one for San Francisco, the LBGTQ historic context statement for the Bay Area. And it goes all the way back to the Ohlone period all the way forward to the present. And tracking queer people and our history through the City. And I opened that thing up and I went, “Oh my god! Here’s … this is the most inspiring thing I’ve read in years.” And I’ve been studying queer history for, like, 30 years and trying to make theater performance art, you know, etc, etc. – creative projects around it to kind of bring those histories up because often they’re hidden, they’re lost, they’re …
HSV: …Not even tapped into at all.
SE: Right. Except for the ones that we know about, which are important, like Harvey Milk, you know, where would we be in the movement without – especially in the Bay Area – without Harvey’s piece in it.
HSV: Check this out: Norm Larson was gay – isn’t that interesting! The guy that owned that corner …
SE: … is the guy who ends up buying that building and then donating it so that it can be a national treasure!
HSV: Amazing!
SE: It’s incredible!
HSV: So that’s part of the story for sure!
SE: Totally. So I love that the nexus, the center of this piece that we get to … the homebase of it gets to be, you know, in this historic building that was owned by a gay man! And not just any gay man, it was somebody who was really involved in the neighborhood and was complicated (laughs) is a good word for it!
HSV: Oh yeah.
SE: Apparently he was a really great landlord. Many loved him. I heard many, many people showed up for his memorial when he passed.
HSV: Oh yeah.
SE: And I know that there was also a lot of, you know, people who didn’t love him or, you know, that would have hard feelings about him being a gay Republican. So how would that work today? And I know that Republicans are not the same today as they were in the 1980s
HSV: Right.
SE: But um, and, you know, no judgment around the politics of it, I just think it’s actually really interesting, and what I’m interested in is not just telling one story, I’m interested in telling a more complicated, complex story. You know, the fact that there were a lot of Jewish people, this was a big African American community, a lot of people that were displaced, you know, from the Fillmore came here. We’ve heard some incredible stories. Like one of the people that we interviewed to inform us about the show was a guy who’s lived here for 35 or 40 years and, you know, he was telling us what it was like when he came here in the early ‘70s. His landlady was this woman, Dottie Ivory, who’s a African-American blues singer who owned a blues bar down in Hayes Valley.
HSV: Oh wow.
SE: And she owned this place here. It was originally a convalescent home for older people. It was called like, the Capri House.
HSV: Here? On Haight Street proper?
SE: On Ashbury, just right around the corner.
HSV: Really!?
SE: Yeah. So they rented – this group of gays of the moment, they were pretty radical gay guys and women …
HSV: And what year are we talking here?
SE: ’71 or ’72 or ’73 – something like that.
HSV: Okay.
SE: They lived there for a bit, for years. When I first heard this story I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s really interesting,” you know, the intersection is what I’m really interested in. It’s like how all of these different communities coexist, you know, who are the queer, bi ? folks in the neighborhood.
HSV: How do you find that? I mean, I’m not gonna ask a street kid
SE: How do you find out if they’re queer or not?
HSV: Yeah, like I don’t wanna …
SE: I don’t know! Well that’s …
HSV: I’m open to it.
SE: Let’s pose that question as part of our conversation. How do we … cuz I’m really curious about it too because when we were doing the photo shoot, our photographer who lived in the neighborhood for years and years, he said to me that he spent a lot of time talking to the people on that corner. And he found out, in his eyes it was 80 to 90 percent of them were queer, were queer identified.
HSV: Wow.
SE: And I was like, “What?” That I’ll have to explore a little bit more. But it connected me to, you know, what we were saying earlier about queer youth coming here. People don’t get it, you know. One of the impetuses I think for this is that you hear about, as you well know, the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, but it wasn’t really a sexual revolution for queer people. We were still being beaten up by cops, we were still, you know …
HSV: Did you talk Peggy about that? I’m sure you must have.
SE: Oh yeah. But Peggy had a whole other view of it because …
HSV: She was a badass businesswoman.
SE: Businesswoman, yes! She wasn’t thinking about
HSV: Janis Joplin was in love with her so …
SE: She wasn’t thinking about the queer community in that same way.
HSV: Yeah.
SE: She was an out lesbian but she didn’t … people had a different view of identity, and that’s one of the things that I’ve learned …
HSV: And coming from New Orleans or Louisiana, right, I mean I think she just had a different …
SE: … a different take on it.
HSV: It wasn’t on her forefront.
SE: Right.
HSV: Her thing was to come out here and make some money
SE: From what I understand she’s very much lesbian identified, but how much does that really play into the story? The story is really about a survivor, about a fierce businesswoman, someone who was constantly remaking herself, you know?
HSV: I don’t know if you read her book but …
SE: Totally.
HSV: Severely raped, many, many times, uh.
SE: Yeah, it’s harrowing.
HSV: And it’s heroin.
SE: Yeah, yeah.
HSV: She’s the heroine of the heroin harrowing.
SE: Yeah. And I’m really excited about that. So anyway, one of the things that we tied into it in the story about Peggy is there’s a lot of queer history that I discovered in digging deeper, of like the 7 or 10 gay bars that were right here on Haight Street.
HSV: Trax…
SE: Well, there’s Trax, but how about all the other ones that are nameless, which I can list the names for you of.
HSV: Yes!
SE: That a lot of stuff was happening at. Like there was this place called Gus’s Pub that was just right here where Goorbin’s hat store is.
HSV: That’s gone now.
SE: Yeah, it was in that place.
HSV: Oh wow.
SE: And then across the street there was another place and then there was all this back and forth and then the kind of more radical queers who were on the frontlines who were really interested in intersectionality and all of the things that were happening: women’s rights and free food movement, and anti-war, you know, war objectors and the civil rights movement – those are the people – and they were kind of anti-capitalist too – they were [laughs] kind of fighting with the other queers across the street! They were like, “We just wanna fit in!”
HSV: Wow.
SE: “We just wanna, you know, assimilate. So that’s really the story that we’re trying to tell.
HSV: So this is all ’69 into ‘70s, right?
SE: Yes, well, mid-60 … 1965 through …
HSV: Okay, so during the big counterculture boom, right?
SE: And it went on through the ‘80s but we’re not telling that story.
HSV: Yeah, okay, perfect.
SE: So I think it’s really interesting that, you know, we mentioned Norm, it’s like Norm is one player of a much bigger, complicated puzzle. Because, you know, then I was hearing about the tenant’s rights guy who lived right up the street from Norm whose name I’m forgetting right now. I have it written down. Who because of him …
HSV: Tsvi Strauch? Have you talked to him?
SE: No. So this guy only conversationally [looking him up on phone]
HSV: I still use pen and paper, I’m a luddite.
SE: Did I write it down? Sorry.
HSV: Take your time, I’m finally relaxing.
SE: I’m gonna find it and I’m gonna get it to you.
HSV: We have plenty of time.
SE: So that’s a really interesting history too of the more radical politics of gay people, who a lot of them, not all of them, many of them died of AIDS. They were really on the front lines of really fighting the good fight for the liberation of all people. And that’s not just an idea of gay people. Many people in the different movements had those ideas, that none of us are free until all of us are free.
HSV: Oh absolutely.
SE: I don’t know if you’re familiar with that famous letter by Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, who wrote this beautiful letter that said, you know, “Stop scapegoating women and queer people” …
HSV: Wow.
SE: “ … because your abuse of them is fucking all of us up.” I can share the letter with you.
HSV: Yeah, that’d be great.
SE: It’s really powerful, because it’s also that moment and you kind of get, oh wow! You know, who is this for? It’s for everybody but there’s also like for a younger generation that may not know about how difficult it was for a woman to actually own a business and to go down to Levi’s and go, “Oh, can I have this?” [bellbottoms].
HSV: I know! Well if you don’t ask for it who knows if you’re ever gonna get it.
SE: Right!
HSV: That’s what I love about Peggy cuz I kind of have the same attitude. This just brought up something in my head. Do you ever have a sense of fear when you’re out there doing this, like there’s gonna be that retaliation?
SE: Definitely.
HSV: The type that raid the capital building …
SE: We’ve definitely encountered that in the other tours where people are just – just raging people who are fucked up for different reasons. Often times it’s just mental illness, in every neighborhood of the city.
HSV: Yeah, and fear of not understanding something.
SE: Yeah.
HSV: That’s really what it is.
SE: And, you know, there’s certain trigger points. Drag queens seem to really trigger certain people. People come here wanting something different but they’re all so scared of it. Doesn’t matter what community you come from. So we’re kind of teetering on that edge
HSV: Yeah.
SE: So the story with Peggy was of course really compelling and one of the reasons … well, what we did in the other tours is we found 10 incredible stories and tried to tell them all. And this one, I’ve been working with this playwright, Michelle Carter, and one of the things that we decided early on was why don’t we just focus it on two people who are polar opposites but who kind of – one person who’s a lesbian but, who cares? It’s my life and that’s Peggy’s story. But then this other person who is Hibiscus who is a really significant character who was part of the Cockettes.
HSV: I do not remember the Cockettes but Brian Rohan who just recently passed away was a dear friend of mine and he had all sorts of things he wanted to utilize – footage of them, and … they were just really rebellious dancers?
SE: No, they were …
HSV: I’ll do my homework.
“The Cockettes were an avant garde psychedelic hippie theater group founded by Hibiscus (George Edgerly Harris III)[1] in the fall of 1969. The troupe was formed out of a group of hippie artists, men and women, who were living in Kaliflower, one of the many communes in Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Hibiscus came to live with them because of their preference for dressing outrageously and proposed the idea of putting their lifestyle on the stage.” — Wikipedia
SE: They were radical theater makers but they were what we would consider performance art today. They were doing it before it was called performance art. They were taking the politics of the moment, the feeling of oppression, the feeling of “you can’t control our bodies and our sexuality.” And it was not just queer people – it was men, it was women, it was gay, it was straight.
HSV: I love that.
SE: It was led by a queer sensibility and by a queer person or queer people, but it was for everyone. It was meant to be inclusive. They were right here in the Haight and there was this guy who came from the New York scene. And okay, get this, this happened in history and I think you’ll love: So this kid, his name was George Harris, he lived Florida, he was also from the South, which is kind of interesting with Peggy (Caserta, from Louisiana) and his family was very theatrical and he had this kind of theatrical bent from the time he was really young. And his family saw it. By the time he was 8 he was already writing plays for the whole family. They got connected to the theater in their town and he was writing the plays, directing the plays [laughs] at age 10. By 13 he was a star in the town and he was like, “Fuck this” and they went to New York. His dad went. They end up in the downtown, more contemporary theater scene. Those people are just really more experimenting. Well, all six kids, mom and dad, bring the kids to New York, they live in a 1-bedroom apartment and they’re making shows. And they’re in that scene. By the time he hits 18, he’s already been kind of famous, and he’s like, “I wanna get the fuck outta New York!” So he’s friends with Allen Ginsberg, he’s friends with Irving Rosenthal who starts the Kaliflower Commune here in San Francisco. Those guys are from the Beat generation, and Allen’s like, “Well, I’m going to San Francisco, you can hitch a ride with my boyfriend Peter Orlosfky. So George, hitches a ride but they’re like, “Oh, by the way, we’re gonna be stopping at this protest, March on Washington, for peace. And he’s like, “I’m all in cuz I’m anti-war.”
SE: It’s the quintessential picture of the young kid at the March on Washington putting a flower into the barrel of the gun.
HSV: I have it on my refrigerator!
SE: Okay! So you’ve seen that!
HSV: It’s the guy with the white turtleneck sweater.
SE: White turtleneck sweater!
HSV: Got it!
SE: Well that’s George Harris. That’s Hibiscus who starts the Cockettes here in the Haight.
HSV: Wow, I always thought he was super hot, like a Nordic guy …
SE: Right? Yeah! And if you look at aerial photos of it, he’s right in the front. There’s like a triangle of people and he’s putting that flower in the gun.
HSV: You know what’s really interesting that I want to say about this sort of like convergences are happening, and doing this, and we’re at this … all these things are starting to really – the renaissance is rumbling! I mean, we lost Ferlinghetti …
SE: I know …
HSV: He would be so happy that we’re talking about this!
SE: I know, I know!
HSV: I just got goosebumps.
SE: Oh, I know!
HSV: Bobby Weir used to live with Neal Cassady, he was telling me about that. Did you know he lived with Neal Cassady?
SE: I heard that.
HSV: I didn’t even know. They were roommates at 710 Ashbury. Anyway that whole Beat thing, and now, and the theater thing. So he was the beginning of the Cockettes.
SE: Yeah.
HSV: Circling back.
SE: So, yeah, he does that moment, it’s on the cover of Life magazine, right?! And your refrigerator!
HSV: [laugh]
SE: And then, you know, it’s this iconic photo, and he comes to San Francisco. This guy is driven! He meets some people here in the city and he’s ready to make his theater company. And he joins the commune, or he starts living with this guy Irving Rosenthal, who’s connected to the Diggers and who has the kind of old-school Digger download of this is how you live in a free society with everything free, free, free. They’re very strict and they have the first commune – I have to get my facts straight – but I think the first commune is up here and then eventually they move to a different neighborhood. So Hibiscus, he names himself Hibiscus, he’s living with Irving.
So Irving and Allen Ginsberg have a whole thing too because they’re both Beats from New York and they really butted heads a lot. I have this whole incredible essay of them talking about the Human Be-In and – I can send it to you – it’s this whole dialogue about it where they’re like …. And I love it because it’s the gays we don’t really hear about what they’re talking about, that moment, and it’s this thing, the assimilationism versus, “No! We’re breaking free! We’re different. We’re doing our own thing!”
HSV: Interesting.
SE: It’s more complicated than that.
HSV: So you’re saying that Ginsberg was a little bit more conservative in his approach, is that what I’m hearing?
SE: No – the other way around!
HSV: Okay.
SE: Irving was more conservative in his … he was much more – they were both super big advocates and out there in the front lines protesting. I never thought of Ginsberg being the lesser advocate of anti-war, etc, etc – and gay rights. But for Irving it wasn’t enough. He was too mainstream. He was more into his fame and the money that went with that than – according to Irving.
So Hibiscus then lives there in the commune and they’re doing this whole free food thing and basically they get this idea, which other communes had, which is like “We’re gonna get all the gleaned food that’s left over and we’re gonna bring it to all the other communes.” So Hibiscus and his other gay friend are like sassing around and they’re like, “Let’s do it in drag!” So they get this idea and then they become known as the queens that show up with free food in drag. And then they’re like, “This is great! I hear that there’s a free space, there’s a show happening at the Palace Theater in North Beach. Let’s go down there and do a midnight show on New Year’s. Where are we gonna get the costumes? Well, I hear that Irving is out of town. He’s making a film and he’s got all these costumes in his attic locked up. So somebody get us the key!” They get the costumes and then history is made.
HSV: Oh my god!
SE: And then they gather all their friends, a lot of them were from – I can give you the addresses here cuz I just took a picture of it this morning so I wouldn’t forget, but … the addresses were. The first Cockette house was 2788 Bush Street, Baker and Bush. And then 946 Haight and then 1965 Oak Street. So that’s all just right around here. And this is them in front of the house on Haight Street. So that’s them, some of them in ’71. Now this is from a new book by one of the members of the group called Fayette Hauser.
HSV: Yeah, I was reading something about …
SE: About her?
HSV: Yeah.
SE: So she’s … that’s her right there. She’s in the photo right there. And there’s Hibiscus in the back. So Hibiscus met these freaks, and Fayette told me, she’s like, “It’s lower Haight and they come up there and she said she’s sitting on the stoop and it was like, they just got it! They were all dressing up and like, “Let’s make a scene! Let’s bring the politics to the street, to people’s homes. Let’s involve people in it.”
HSV: Again, my little mind, that seems so dangerous. I mean I lived in New York but it takes a lot of fucking guts to do what they did.
SE: Yeah! It does!
HSV: I just respect what they did so much! Intense!
SE: Yeah.
HSV: God bless them.
SE: Yeah. So those are the two stories. There’s Peggy’s story, which is a really different story than that.
HSV: Totally.
SE: But then there’s this peace, love flower boy who comes to San Francisco, creates a whole theater company, basically, a free theater company called the Cockettes, and then there’s a lot of politics that happen. They kind of get famous, they go to New York, they kick him out, he’s like, “Fuck off! I’m leaving San Francisco anyway.” He starts a free theater company called the Angels of Light, free theater, who are also up here in the Haight. He ends of having the West Coast and the East Coast of them, and kind of let the Cockettes do their own thing. There’s an amazing film you could watch about the Cockettes called “The Cockettes”.
HSV: Well, that’s easy to remember!
SE: That’s by a filmmaker, David Weissman, who also lived up here in the ‘70s and he was somebody I interviewed. He really brought back the renaissance. He kind of helped create the renaissance of the Cockettes in 2002, I want to say? Is when the movie got made.
HSV: The word “renaissance” seems to be coming up a lot.
SE: Yeah. And then another local theater company brought many of their old plays back, the Thrill Peddlers is a theater company. They used to have a building before the rents were so expensive.
HSV: How long have you been working on this project?
SE: A year, yeah. but I knew a lot of this history, some of it.
HSV: And a lot of this will be through grants, and support through SF Heritage and that kind of thing?
SE: They’re not supporting us in that way but they’re supporting us with the space. But from the San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, things like that.
HSV: Right.
SE: But you know, people don’t realize … they think it costs fifty cents to put on a show. To be able to pay people a living wage to be able to do the work that it takes to do this kind of deep research, it’s very costly.
HSV: And tickets sales and managing all that – the business side of it all.
SE: We never make any money on these shows. But I’m just saying we’re lucky that we can pay everyone and survive.
HSV: Right. Let me ask you this. I don’t want to be the spoiler but … how does it end?
SE: How does the show end?
HSV: Yeah, what’s the final scene? I won’t put this in there, I don’t want to be a spoiler. You don’t have to tell me, you don’t have to spoil it.
SE: No, no. I don’t mind, actually, but I guess I don’t want it in print
HSV: So people will just have to go to the show!! What would you like as a human being on planet, what would you like to say to the Haight-Ashbury community and the global community? It’s not just about the Haight, it’s about community in general and taking care of each other and taking care of our neighborhoods. What would you like to say?
SE: I think what’s important now is to sort of realize where we are. We have this incredible opportunity right now – not just with covid but with Black Lives Matter movement happening, I mean a lot of people don’t realize that pre-queer women of color started Black Lives Matter, or most people don’t know that. So there’s always this way that queer bi-pod people get disappeared, get erased, their histories are not there. Do you know about Sylvester for example? Sylvester was the most famous out gay black disco singer of the ‘70s, and he lived here in San Francisco and he was part of the Cockettes. That’s how he got his start was with the Cockettes. You’ll recognize his music, “You make me feel mighty real.”
It’s that connection, that people learn these histories is what I’m hoping, that they learn the history that we were really part of the movement. That queer people are so easily erased, but especially queer people of color are easily erased. That no one mentions that only until recently did people even acknowledge the fact that we’re on unseated territory of the Ohlone People. How did that happen? That was our last show – the last 2 shows talked more about that. But we’re trying to just focus on this moment. So if there’s anything about that moment is that know that we want people to know that there were queer people very involved in the Human Be-In, in the counterculture, in the movement, and to make it a better place for LGBTQ people, for bi-pod people, for the society at large. The thing about the Black Lives Matter movement is that it’s making us way more aware of police brutality. Our piece really talks about that, there was so much of it back in the ‘60s, not just on gay people, but especially on us. So I think it’s important for us to go, “Look how far we’ve come, but look how much work we still have to do until all of us our free.” Right? Truly, so that we don’t see what we see on the street today. And of course, there’s the people that are just fine and dandy as you mentioned just being on the street. But that’s not what we’re speaking to. I mean there are other social issues that we can’t really affect, but what we can affect is bring more awareness to the layers of the history that were here and that were invisible and that we don’t actually see. Did I answer your questions?
HSV: Absolutely! I mean ultimately we’re just saying, “Peace” right? We want everybody to find peace … no matter what color, no matter what …
SE: Probably one clarification I should make is that people in the Cockettes and all those people in those days, gay or straight, they were part of this movement. It wasn’t just the gay movement. When I interviewed Fayette she was like, “What’s this queer thing? Get off my back!” She was like, “We were freaks. Please use that word. I know people are offended by that but, get over it!” [laughs]
HSV: She was straight or … ?
SE: She was a … freak!
HSV: A freak, right! Thank you so much!
SE: Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity!
