"The party was fashioned after the movie Hellzapoppin. People still talk about that party. Nobody expected it. It was a revival of the old-time Hollywood shindig, the good old LA publicity stunt. People like that because it makes them laugh. Guests were greeted at the door by two men in gorilla suits. The Cockettes, a troupe of drag queens from San Francisco, wore full beards streaked with glitter. They were the cigarette girls and they sold cigars, cigarettes and vaseline..." - Alice Cooper
"I can describe them only as a nocturnal happening comprising equal parts of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, Harold Prince's 'Follies' and movie musicals The United Fruit Company, Kabuki, and the Yale Varsity show, with a lot of angel dust thrown in to keep the audience good and stoned" - Rex Reed.
"The mirror cracked, however, when the curtain went up. In front of an audience that included the likes of Anthony Perkins, Gore Vidal, Angela Lansbury, and Anthony Quinn, the most anticipated perfomance of the year was a full-fledged debacle. Revealing themselves to be the infantile and orgiastic Haight-Ashbury regulars that they really were, the Cockettes throughly embarrassed themselves by aimlessly romping about the stage, singing and shouting incoherently and having sex. The audience's many celebrities, too shocked by the enormity of it to even enjoy it as a cheap, dark thrill, made lots of little beelines for the door. Needless to say, the great Cockettes were non grata by sun up" - Julian Fleisher
"It was the night the Cockettes were in town, a cross-dressing theatrical troupe from San Francisco and they put on a big show on the Lower East Side. They were celebrating after the show in the back room. They were all carousing about, being loud and drunk, and they got up on the table and started doing a striptease. They were these very queenie guys, but with beards. They had glitter and lipstick in their beards and hair. They were dancing around with their slips and their panties and bras, and after they stopped, Eric (Emerson) got up on the table in his shorts and his T-Shirt and he whipped off his T-Shirt then he whipped off his shorts. He was completely naked and he said If you want to strip, strip-don't just pretend, , and his dick is like a two-foot long schlong hanging right over my meal. He jumped up on my table. It's not my kind of meal. I think it was the last time I ate there. I stuck to the chick peas." - Bob Gruen, Photographer.
