Before George Harris III became part of the La MaMa family and later formed the gender-fluid theater troupe the Cockettes, the future Hibiscus put on shows with his family in Clearwater, Florida. George—who was also called G3, along with other nicknames—was the oldest of six siblings: three girls and three boys, sort of an avant-garde Brady Bunch. In the early 1960s, the kids formed the El Dorado Players, a theatrical troupe that put on shows in the Harris family’s cramped garage, where the backstage door led to the kitchen. They placed lawn chairs in their driveway and sometimes rented klieg lights to announce the latest premiere of their homemade shows. “Hibiscus had real leadership qualities,” said his youngest sister, Mary Lou Harris. “He came out of the womb as the grand marshal. He was just like the leader of the parade.” She compared her brother’s methods to a Hollywood studio system in the way that he conceived and cast his DIY theatrical productions, then put his family to work. George also got help from his mother, who wrote plays and music in college, and his father, a natural theatrical performer and drummer. “Just look at those Busby Berkeley movies, he was our idol,” his mother, Ann Harris, said. “We all liked Busby Berkeley. I made sure they saw those thirties movies and things that I loved, like Fred Astaire. I would take them to the movies and show them what I liked.” From these beginnings to the very end of his life—Hibiscus was among the very first who succumbed to the AIDS epidemic, in 1982—his colorful productions were a product of, and collaboration with, a family that cultivated his offbeat aesthetic.

From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

When the family was living on El Dorado Avenue, eleven-year-old George Harris III (soon to be Hibiscus) hatched the idea to start a family theater troupe after learning that his mother had written two plays in college—Bluebeard and The Sheep and the Cheapskate—that had moldered in a trunk for years. Bluebeard was based on the classic story about the bloody nobleman, but in Ann’s version the wives were turned into furniture, instead of being murdered by Bluebeard. The Sheep and the Cheapskate was a generation gap play that took place in the 1920s and dealt with new ideas about liberty, freedom, and self-expression—topics that grew more timely as the 1960s wore on (the play would later be performed at La MaMa). “There were two ready-made little musicals that Mom had written,” Walter said, “so we put them on in our garage on El Dorado Avenue.” After that, George and his siblings began staging Broadway shows like Camelot. They didn’t have a script for that musical, nor had they seen it, but the kids reconstructed the show based on the liner notes in the original cast recording. “For Camelot,” Jayne Anne recalled, “my brothers put horse heads on the front of their bicycles and did jousting.” Walter said, “We sprayed cardboard with silver paint to make armor. We came at each other on our bicycles and tried to knock each other down.” Little did the family know that what they were doing was exactly what was going on in the downtown’s underground theater scene, a world the whole family would be immersed in by 1964.

From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

When Ellen Stewart learned of the family’s garage theater in Florida, she inaugurated a “Young Playwrights Series” at La MaMa. George Harris III and the rest of the kids mounted Ann Harris’s Bluebeard and The Sheep and the Cheapskate, which they revived at La MaMa. “And there we were,” said Walter Michael Harris, “not only doing the ones we did in Florida, which were two that Mom wrote in college, but Mom was also inspired to create some more shows—working with my brother George and me on the book and the music.” This started a family tradition of writing about whatever was going on in their lives. “Our Macbeth parody, titled MacBee, spoofed the Mad Men era of advertising,” Walter said. “We all had some experience with this world, as we were constantly auditioning for TV commercials. We kids were all traipsing up and down Madison Avenue with our headshots and our portfolios, looking to find TV or commercial work, and so our show MacBee was about that.” They enrolled in acting classes—learning Method acting and discovering how serious and ridiculous it could be—which inspired their satirical musical, There Is Method in Their Madness. It received a positive review from Village Voice theater critic Michael Smith, and the El Dorado Players continued to thrive on the La MaMa stage.

From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

After staging their DIY productions in Clearwater, Florida, the Harris family decided to dive into show business by moving to New York. “I recall sitting around in a room, with Mom and Dad having discussed it,” Walter Michael Harris said, “and they decided to put it to us kids, and they asked us what we thought.” Mary Lou recalled, “We had those pivotal moments where somebody would say, ‘It’s time to jump.’ We always did, and I feel like we always jumped to the right place.” In January 1962, Big George moved to the city ahead of the rest of the family to check out the situation. He got his Equity card right away with a play called Wide Open Cage and, purely by chance, met Ellen Stewart. They became close, and she helped find the first apartment his family would move into—a cramped walkup apartment on First Avenue, just around the corner from La MaMa. “Thanks to Ellen,” George said, “I had a place to live, current New York credits, and introductions to playwrights and producers.” The next person to move to New York was G3, in 1963. “My brother George came back and forth a few times,” Jayne Anne said, “and then when I was eight, going on nine, I remember getting on the train with him, and it was a twenty-four-hour ride. We ended up in a car full of nuns who took us under their wing because we were in coach and they had little rooms.” By 1964, the rest of the family was in New York. Eloise Harris’s first sight after arriving in the city was steam coming out of the sewers and a massive Camel cigarettes sign that blew smoke rings into the air. “Imagine taking your kids and moving to the Lower East Side with the idea that everybody is going to be actors, and then everybody just went ahead and did that,” said Eloise. “No one was thinking, like, ‘How are we going to make money?’ There was no real plan.” Ann Harris recalled that they just decided to do it. “I mean, with no knowledge of anything except suburban life,” she said, “and this was the nitty-gritty city in the East Village.”

From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Eventually, Ellen Stewart found the Harris family a larger loft apartment around the corner, right next door to Café La Mama, at 319 Ninth Street. Eloise and Mary Lou’s sleeping loft was in the living room, with a white picket fence around it, and the girls would roller-skate through the long apartment. The kitchen had a piano that was constantly being used, along with a set of drums that Walter and Big George played. Ann made their thespian hub run like clockwork—walking the kids to school, shopping for groceries at the A&P, and on weekends dragging bags of clothes and costumes back from the laundromat as the kids jumped in the piles of warm fabric. “Fortunately, we had ready-made theater friends in Ellen Stewart and Joe Cino,” Walter said, “because Dad had already been doing shows in both of those places. Judson Poets’ Theatre was another one. In those days, there was a Holy Trinity of Off-Off-Broadway: Caffe Cino, La MaMa, and Judson.” Of the three, Stewart was most involved with the Harris family. After Café La MaMa moved to its Second Avenue location, Stewart kept that East Ninth Street location as a rehearsal space and opened it up for the Harris family to use. “Ellen was lovely,” Ann effused. “There were some really beautiful people who really latched onto us and showed us the way, because we didn’t know anything about what to do. You could go over to Judson or Caffe Cino and mount a show. Joe Cino didn’t care what you did. He just gave you a date.” Walter added, “I think we were a little bit of an anomaly at the Cino and at La MaMa, because we were so young. Here’s this family with kids who were all involved in whatever these artists were up to, in these magic places.”

From Chapter 7 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

The Judson Poets’ Theatre show Gorilla Queen was a bawdy, campy, satirical riff on old B movies that featured two members of the Harris family: George Harris, Jr. and his son, a pre-Hibiscus George Harris III. “I met the Harris family at Judson,” Agosto Machado recalled. “I feel very blessed to have met them. There was so much love with that family, and the parents were so nurturing.” Jayne Anne Harris appeared in the Judson production Sing Ho for a Bear, an adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh with music by Al Carmines, and she also did a few Happenings there. “There was nudity,” she said, “there were people running around, there was all kinds of stuff going on.” One Happening involved a red team and a blue team that performed different dances to the Righteous Brothers song “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” as a man roller-skated by in a yellow dress. Walter Michael Harris also performed in a Happening that was organized by director Tom O’Horgan. “The whole point of that Happening was to have what Tom called a kinetic sculpture,” he said, “or human sculpture with music and other stuff.” O’Horgan collected musical instruments from around the world, and he gave Walter some Tibetan chimes for him to play as he walked around in a funny hat; the two would later work together in the 1968 Broadway debut of Hair, which O’Horgan directed. “Once we did an Easter sunrise morning Happening in Washington Square Park,” Kornfeld recalled. “During the middle of it, Andy Warhol arrived and he drove into the park in a white limousine. He drove right into the center to upstage it, so we embraced it. It was all part of camping, making an entrance.”

From Chapter 9 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

A hypermasculine man with the build of a football player, Norman Marshall was the last person one would expect to be involved in Gorilla Queen, whose cast included a young George Harris III, soon to be Hibiscus. “I’m so butch that this reviewer said that I was ‘the male version of Nick Nolte.’ Anyway, here I am playing Queen Kong—in the middle of all this silliness, craziness—and I had a great time.” Like many Off-Off-Broadway actors, he had never been in a play or had any theatrical experience before he walked into Judson Church for an audition. “I just decided, ‘I think I’ll try acting.’ I had no idea what the hell it was all about.” Tony Zanetta—an Off- Off-Broadway actor who began working with David Bowie as his tour manager during his Ziggy Stardust period—recalled, “Gorilla Queen’s writing was so insane. Insane. It was really out there. Taharahnugi White Woman sent my twenty-year-old self into hysterics.” That character was played by a man dressed in a sarong, and during one gag he shocked another character by showing his hairy chest: “What’s the matter? Ain’t you never seen a white woman before?” Director Larry Kornfeld said of Gorilla Queen, “Campy, hell, It’s downright homosexual!” Musing on the ways that intellectuals and theorists have followed the lead of the downtown’s underground theater movement, Kornfeld observed, “Binaries were being used in those productions, and they were being torn apart, deconstructed. Deconstructing binaries—gender binaries, racial binaries—was starting way back then, through performance. Theorists always came second.”

From Chapter 13 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

After working with Andy Warhol on his early films, Ronald Tavel began staging his scripts with John Vaccaro’s theater company, Play-House of the Ridiculous. After another split—this time with Vaccaro—Larry Kornfeld agreed to stage Gorilla Queen at Judson Church. The show was about a tribe that worshipped an effeminate creature named Queen Kong; like Pomegranada, it was an entertaining comment on society. During the gorilla’s entrance, for example, Queen Kong swung on a rope and struck a swishy limp-wrist pose. “It was the funniest thing you could see,” Kornfeld said, “and it was high camp. A big gorilla suddenly doing a very fey limp wrist move? Only at Judson.” Gorilla Queen debuted in the spring of 1967, with George Harris Jr. playing the lead ape role, Brute, who served as a kind of narrator. His son George III was a member of the Glitz Iona tribe, a kind of Greek chorus that would fall silent during a scary scene, or move about and screech when something provocative was said. “What a sweet family,” said Norman Marshall, who played Queen Kong. “They were all lovely people. Hibiscus, or George Harris III, he was very, very young. I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and he seemed like a child, sixteen or seventeen. His father and I, and Jimmy O’Bryant, we were the only straight guys in the play, and we became very good friends.”

From Chapter 13 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

George Harris III had lived a fairly apolitical life until he appeared with James Earl Jones and Al Pacino in Peace Creeps, which awoke him to the horrors of the Vietnam War. He drifted away from the New York theater world and began to be more openly gay and free, taking different lovers, including Allen Ginsberg. George accepted a ride to San Francisco in a Volkswagen van driven by Ginsberg’s longtime partner Peter Orlovsky, who took a detour to the antiwar protest in Washington—where George was famously photographed placing flowers in National Guardsmen’s rifles. This act was influenced by the street theater that surrounded him in downtown New York, and it effortlessly displayed the idea that love can overcome political tyranny and break the war machine. The next day, G3 excitedly called home to tell his mother that photojournalists snapped pictures of him. “George loved having his photograph taken,” recalled Jayne Anne Harris. “So it was probably a combination of things. He probably saw the cameras, he of course was a bit theatrical, he was probably high, and he believed in peace and love.”

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Ann Harris remembers Jackie Curtis as a ubiquitous presence around the neighborhood. “My older kids ran into him around town,” she said. “Jackie was definitely around.” George Harris III, later Hibiscus, was Jackie’s classmate when they both attended Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, a special high school for performers in midtown Manhattan. (Jackie, Hibiscus, and actress Pia Zadora were all in the same math class.) Along with Hibiscus’s brother Walter Michael Harris, Jackie Curtis was cast in a 1965 La MaMa production of Tom Eyen’s Miss Nefertiti Regrets, as the love interest of Bette Midler, who had just arrived from Hawaii. One day, the temperamental Curtis stormed off the set, and Eyen asked Walter to take the vacant role. He was already the drummer in the offstage band that performed the show’s music, so he would run back and forth performing various duties, like singing a lover’s duet with Midler. “Bette played the Nefertiti role and I took on Jackie Curtis’s role, Tobias, an angel sent by the god Ra to be Nefertiti’s downfall,” Harris said. “I was about fourteen. So I got to sing and perform with a nineteen-year-old Bette Midler and played drums for the other people’s songs when I wasn’t onstage.”

From Chapter 17 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

“There was always this sense that something could go terribly wrong at the Factory,” recalled Robert Heide, “like the time Dorothy Podber came up there and shot a stack of Marilyn Monroe silkscreens with a gun.” In the fall of 1964 she walked into the Factory with her Great Dane named Carmen Miranda, motioned to the Monroe silkscreens, and asked, “Can I shoot those?” Andy Warhol said yes—assuming that Podber was going to take a picture—but she instead pulled out a pistol and shot a hole through the canvases. On another occasion a young man came to the studio with a gun and played Russian roulette, fired some shots that missed, then left (a nonplussed Andy said nothing). George Harris III first visited the Factory after he met Warhol in the back room of Max’s Kansas City, but Harris misread the situation and thought it was a date. After he arrived Warhol sat passively while some of his male friends tortured the young man. While Harris begged them to stop, they extinguished cigarettes on his skin and roughed him up—refusing to let him leave and keeping him at the Factory all night. “So when Valerie shot Andy,” Heide said, “it was almost inevitable, because of the people that were surrounding him.”

From Chapter 18 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Even though Walter Michael Harris maintained his underground theater roots during his time in Hair at the Biltmore Theatre he was uneasy about being in a Broadway show. One day he called in sick, hopped on a plane, and headed out to San Francisco. He felt a bit hypocritical being paid to play a hippie when he really wanted to be more like his brother, George, and be a hippie—so he quit the show. “I went into Hair as an actor,” he said, “but I came out as a hippie, and it was George who inspired me to come West.” Before forming the Cockettes, George Harris III, aka Hibiscus, initially lived at the Friends of Perfection Commune—informally known as Kaliflower—which was run by Irving Rosenthal, a writer and editor who was part of the Beat scene. “Hibiscus had been a lover of Allen Ginsberg and various bohemians,” recalled Cockette Lendon Sadler, “and Irving immediately fell for him.”

From Chapter 20 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

In 1971, prodigal son Hibiscus returned home with his boyfriend Angel Jack (born Jack Coe). They arrived at the door of the Harris family’s East Ninth Street apartment wearing long hair and white robes, looking like two apparitions through the peephole. “He was screaming, ‘HONEY!’ ” sister Jayne Anne Harris said. “So I knew it was him.” No longer the preppy-looking teen who left the fold in 1967, he was now wearing outlandish Angels of Light costumes all the time. This was no shock, for she and her sisters were used to crazy clothes growing up in New York’s avant-garde theater world. “Regular life moments in those days looked a lot like theater,” recalled Mary Lou. “No one walked around in regular clothes.” Hibiscus hit the ground running, recruiting his sisters and mother into the Angels of Light. “It was like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes in Arms,” Jayne Anne said, “when they do the show in the barn: ‘Let’s put on a show!’ That’s what it was like.” Their brother was a one-man Off-Off-Broadway Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio system, and whoever happened to wander into Hibiscus’s view was cast in a show. He had an eye for spotting talents and skills, whether it was tap dancing, crooning, or ballet dancing. The entire family knew how to sew costumes, build sets, and other theater basics, and their mother also taught the kids how to tap dance. Ann Harris had learned tap routines while attending the Dan Harrington School of Dance as a kid in the 1930s, until her father pulled her out because the costumes were too skimpy. “But she remembered every single dance,” Jayne Anne said, “and taught all the queens in the West Village how to tap dance. The Vietnam War was still raging, and we just did these colorful, happy midnight shows, and whoever came was in it.”

From Chapter 26 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

The Angels of Light’s secret weapon, Miss Marsha, regularly whipped audiences into a frenzy. Marsha P. Johnson was a street queen and early gay liberation activist who wandered into an Angels of Light show and decided to jump onstage. Hibiscus extended an open invitation to join them anytime, for Miss Marsha’s impromptu banter with the audience always brought down the house. “After a while, Hibiscus just stopped writing for her because she’d never get to it,” Mary Lou Harris said. “She would just get a huge cheers and standing ovations.” The Harris sisters described themselves as straight girls who were socialized as gay men. “The queens were kind of my role models,” Eloise recalled. “Marsha was very motherly, even though she was kind of living on the street. She was kind of our nanny.” When Hibiscus or their mom went out, Miss Marsha would take them out for ice cream or babysit them at home. They would take turns pretending to be Barbra Streisand or Judy Garland, and also sang duets à la Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell performing “Two Little Girls from Little Rock.” Miss Marsha also appeared with the gay theater group Hot Peaches, who were part of the same circuit as the Angels of Light. While there was certainly competition among these groups—and among individual queens such as Miss Marsha, International Chrysis, or Flawless Sabrina—for the most part it was a healthy competitiveness. “There were rivalries, there was bitchiness,” Mary Lou said, “but that sort of propelled them forward to get better and better—to try to one up each other. I think it ultimately led them to creating bodies of work that led them to become important figures, which in turn led to the laws and freedoms that are just beginning to bloom today.”

From Chapter 26 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Angels of Light shows were hallucinatory homages to 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals, a cinematic tap-dancing fantasy world in which Angel Jack and Hibiscus subbed for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Their first show was Studio M, a lovingly produced family affair that was performed on a small semicircular stage that ratcheted up the dazzle factor. For each show they put on, Hibiscus created elaborate storyboards, his sisters joined him onstage, and their mother composed the songs. “I wrote almost all the music for the Angels of Light,” Ann Harris said. “George would say, ‘Oh, I need a sheik scene, with a sheik in it,’ and then I would come up with a song.” The Angels of Light show Gossamer Wings featured a massive storybook whose pages turned, moving the action forward from the Ice Age to the 1970s. Many of their shows dealt with environmental disasters that were occurring with an alarming frequency during that decade. “Who cares if the birds don’t sing as long as the cash box rings?” they sang in “Disposable Everything.” Ironically, these shows indirectly benefitted from the consumer culture–driven economy of abundance, which produced the junk they used for their shows. “You could find plenty of things in New York that were beautiful, beautiful,” Ann Harris recalled. “That’s how people did those shows, with costumes from fabric found on the street.” When the family discovered that a factory was throwing out piles of feathers, for instance, Ann and the kids used them for another one of their productions, Birdie Follies (which featured their friend Agosto Machado).

From Chapter 26 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore