The live shows, with names like "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma," "Pearls over Shanghai" and "Journey to the Center of Uranus," were chaotic and witty costume extravaganzas featuring singing, dancing and in-your-face sexuality. As the Cockettes' legend grew, they attracted fans such as Truman Capote ("The Cockettes are where it's at!") and Rex Reed who, in his nationally syndicated column, called the performances "a landmark in the history of new, liberated theater."

Inevitably, the Cockettes became media favorites, showing up everywhere from Rolling Stone to Paris Match. They made a film, "Tricia's Wedding," a transvestite send-up of then-President Nixon's daughter's nuptials, and appeared in other films --"Elevator Girls in Bondage" and "Luminous Procuress." When they were invited to bring their stage shows to New York, the cream of the city's art and culture scene -- Oscar de la Renta, Diana Vreeland, Robert Rauschenberg, John Lennon, Gore Vidal and Anthony Perkins -- partied with them and showed up in force for the opening night performance. And that was when the party ended.

San Francisco filmmaker David Weissman and his partner, editor Bill Weber, are now in the final stages of completing "The Cockettes," a feature-length documentary on the theatrical troupe that Weissman credits with, among other things, inspiring "the glitter rock era of David Bowie, Elton John, the New York Dolls, and the campy extravaganzas of Bette Midler and 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.'"

"Their influence was enormous," Weissman remarked during the following conversation about the ebullient acid queens of his documentary. "Their whole presence was completely new and garnered a lot of attention. Drag had not received anywhere near that degree of visibility, particularly in a cultural context, outside of the gay community, prior to the Cockettes." And during their star-crossed New York debut, columnist Lillian Roxon, commenting on the troupe's impact on pop culture, wrote, "Every time you see too much glitter or a rhinestone out of place, you [will] know it's because of the Cockettes."

David, can you describe the San Francisco scene that gave birth to the Cockettes?

It was almost perfect -- the Cockettes' first show was New Year's Eve 1969-70. So, symbolically, they defined the cusp -- from the 1960s to the '70s, from the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic, hippie era into the beginnings of the sexual revolution and gay liberation.

How were things changing then in the San Francisco counterculture?

The Haight-Ashbury scene was going through a decline that had started about 1968, which was due to the influx of millions of people from all over the world and enormous media attention, along with an increase in crime and the use of bad drugs -- speed, cocaine, heroin. All those elements combined to degenerate the spirit of what the Haight had been before. But there were still a lot of interesting, creative people living in the Haight, and it remained a counterculture epicenter for the world. Of course, there had long been a gay scene in San Francisco.

Yes, since the 1930s or '40s, perhaps earlier.

Absolutely. But the Cockettes didn't really come out of the traditional gay scene. They emerged largely from the hippie, counterculture world of the Haight-Ashbury. But there was a pretty broad range of gay life here then. Remember, it was before Stonewall, although San Francisco had had its own gay activism -- as early as the mid-1960s there was a lot of activity here. So, in a way the community was already much more receptive and more progressive in relationship to gay issues than most anywhere else in the world, or at least anywhere in the United States. Yet, it was before the official beginning of the gay liberation movement, which theoretically started with New York's Stonewall riots in 1969.

How did the Cockettes begin? Who was the main creative force behind the group?

There was a magic moment when a lot of things came together. It all coalesced at the Pagoda Palace Theater on Washington Square in North Beach, which at the time was running a series of midnight movies every weekend called the Nocturnal Dream Shows. This was started by a filmmaker named Steven Arnold and a guy named Sebastian. They would show very eclectic screenings ranging from Betty Boop cartoons and Busby Berkeley movies to you name it. The audiences were these crazed hippies on acid who dressed up in costumes to attend.

What took place at the Pagoda Palace before midnight?

It was a Chinese movie theater showing Chinese-language films. The Chinese audience would file out at midnight into this massive crowd of crazed, decked-out hippies waiting to come into the Nocturnal Dream Shows. Now, the Dream Shows started as just a movie series, then the Cockettes, whose live performances became part of the after-midnight entertainment at the Pagoda Palace, emerged from the imagination of a man named Hibiscus, who died in 1982.

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