The Downtown Pop Underground

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Agosto Machado was a Chinese-Spanish Christopher Street queen and Zelig-like figure who witnessed the rise of the underground theater and film movements, the 1960s counterculture, gay liberation, and punk rock. [more]

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After becoming well-known as a Beat-era poet, Allen Ginsberg became heavily involved in the downtown’s activist and arts scenes during the 1960s, when Hibiscus (George Harris III) met Ginsberg and the two became lovers. [more]

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Douglas Colvin (Dee Dee Ramone) was the Ramones’s bassist and boyfriend of the Cockettes’s Pam Tent, who connected him with others in the downtown arts scenes. [more]

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Best known as the star of several John Waters films, Divine also appeared in several Cockettes shows, as well as Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars (along with Lisa Jane Persky, who also performed in the 1976 production at the Truck and Warehouse Theater). [more]

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An early member of the Cockettes in San Francisco, Fayette Hauser relocated to New York City and performed with fellow Cockettes Pam Tent, John Flowers, and Tomata du Plenty in the drag group Savage Voodoo Nuns, which opened for Blondie and the Ramones. [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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Joey Freeman was embedded in the social networks that linked the downtown’s overlapping arts scenes; he was an assistant to Andy Warhol who was responsible for a teenaged Chris Stein opening for the Velvet Underground, and later collaborated with Stein and members of the Cockettes on a public access television show. [more]

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Lendon Sadler grew up in Atlanta and visited New York City as a teenager before moving to San Francisco, where he met Hibiscus and joined the Cockettes; he then settled in downtown New York after the Cockettes' debut in the city. [more]

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Before moving to San Francisco, meeting Hibiscus, and joining the Cockettes, Pam Tent lived in downtown New York—where she met future New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, and eventually resettled with a new boyfriend, Dee Dee Ramone. [more]

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Tomata du Plenty was a former Cockette who formed the punk band the Screamers in Los Angeles after settling in downtown New York during the mid 1970s. [more]