The Downtown Pop Underground

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Romanian immigrant and poet Andrei Codrescu moved to downtown New York in 1966, where he worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop and encountered other writers such as Ted Berrigan, Susan Sontag, and Allen Ginsberg; he later moved to the West Coast, where he lived in a commune with Hibiscus after he left the Cockettes and formed Angels of Light. [more]

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Ann Harris began collaborating with her six children in the early 1960s after her oldest son—an eleven-year-old soon-to-be Hibiscus—hatched the idea to start a family theater troupe after learning that his mother had written two plays in college that had moldered in a trunk for years; by the early 1970s, she was writing songs for Hibiscus and his sisters in the Angels of Light. [more]

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Eloise Harris, the fifth child of the Harris family, got her Equity card at the age of nine performing in Invitation to a Beheading at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and later joined her brother Hibiscus in the Angels of Light. [more]

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Hibiscus was a gender-fluid performer and founder of the psychedelic drag troupes the Cockettes and Angels of Light who was among the very first who succumbed to the AIDS epidemic, in 1982. [more]

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Jayne Anne Harris, the oldest of the Harris sisters, appeared in the Judson production Sing Ho for a Bear, an adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, among many other productions; in the early 1970s, she joined Hibiscus’s Angels of Light. [more]

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Marsha P. Johnson was a street queen and early gay liberation activist who performed with Hibiscus’s Angels of Light; Miss Marsha’s impromptu banter with the audience always brought down the house, and she became a second mom to Hibiscus’s sisters. [more]

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The youngest of the Harris family siblings, Mary Lou Harris appeared in several Off-Off-Broadway productions in the 1960s before teaming up with her sisters and brother Hibiscus to form the Angels of Light. [more]