Dear Shaded Viewers,
Once upon a time last century, there were the Cockettes. Bud Lee documents and remembers.
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They were a fusion, a crossbreed of everything culture was going through in the late and
turbulent sixties. After the tragic deaths of JFK and Martin Luther
King, Vietnam and LSD, our country was literally turned upside down
and forced to examine itself.I was fortunate enough to have been there
with my cameras, Leicas, M-4s and an (even then) old Rolli.
I had already covered the Newark riots, the Detroit riots, the Black Power
conference, Martin Luther King’s funeral, shooting for Rolling Stone,
Esquire, Life, even Town and Country and Connoisseur Magazines. I’d
been named Military Photographer of the year in ’66 and in ’67 news
photographer of the year for Life Magazine.
I’d tried unsuccessfully in Hollywood film and marriage and was looking for something
different, vital, cutting-edge and exciting when I met Maureen Orth in
’69.In 1970, Maureen brought me to the Palace Theater where the now
famous Haight-Ashbury survivors and cross-dressers calling themselves
The Cockettes were. They were the new ‘Hair’, the hottest, trendiest
group.
I was seduced by their innocence and their charm and was
mesmerized by their lifestyle – not afraid to show their “cock and
balls” to the whole world.
Remember we were living in a world of sexual denial. I’d rarely seen my father naked and never my mother. We were champions of Puritan respectability and virtue. The penis and
testicles did not exist in our world, not even in sex manuals. Nipples and navels were still being airbrushed out of photographs. Then in a flash there were the The Cockettes with their in-your-face sexuality,
unashamed and out of the closet to stay.
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Text Bud Lee , images sent by Daniel Lismore
