Discussed: clothes, The Cockettes, Angels of Light, angel dust, qualuudes, rats, welfare, HIV, The GTO’s, NY, LA, SF, FL, funding art, The Trucks, Divine, Jonestown, etc.
Introduction by Rachal & Roxann Spikula. Interview by R&R, Jason Wade, and Adam Keith.
The gleam in Billy’s eye casually transmits a lot. It’s the look of a visionary who’s seen some wild times and never stopped creating. His brand of wearable art is a vibrant chaos of assemblages from multiple eras.
Bowers’ iconic 1970’s designs had far-reaching appeal. He appeared in publications like L’Uomo Vogue and Playboy and was featured by Italian fashion label Fiorocci. Billy outfitted Alice Cooper, The Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, and (inadvertently) Salvador Dali, to name a few. He styled a scene in That Boy, Peter Berlin’s 1974 gay erotica classic. Still, he remained on fame’s periphery, working on his own terms.
Bowers’ early life and art melded in the LSD spiked cauldron of late 60’s California. Legendary SF acid-drag theater troupe The Cockettes were central to his creative development. The group materialized during this time amid a convergence of freaks who flooded SF, moved into massive old Victorian houses and created a network of communes. Their experimental lifestyle challenged every social convention. The Cockettes coined the term “Genderfuck” and gave birth to the “glitter beard.” This iconic look was a playful collision of gender presentation that is almost nonexistent in popular contemporary drag.
The Cockettes’ performances and everyday interactions, the commune interiors and the stage, all shared blurred boundaries and costume was everyday dress. Members scoured thrift stores and junk shops, procuring discarded antique materials like velvet, lace, and lavish accessories. In Billy’s hands, these materials became a flashy detournement of Victorian era adornments that simultaneously documented and defined the blooming vortex of gay liberation and underground culture.
Billy’s imaginative works continue to stitch together elements of culture’s swirling deluge, pulling from and reindexing his life experiences into wearable shrines. They gleefully display imagery from numerous eras of the gay underground.
His work is visually chaotic, yet has a meticulous quality that suggests a hidden, cool objectivity hard to detect in his warm presence and charming Texas drawl.
We met with Billy at his apartment and during a Castro art vendors’ fair this Fall.
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We just ran into somebody who was talking about the Zebra Killer(s) in the 70s, in San Francisco.
Oh yeah!
What was that like?
I was in a commune when it was happening. I lived on Upper Market, way Upper Market. I always thought about it when walking out of the door, that I was gonna get shot. It was big news. I didn’t watch TV then, but I knew because everyone talked about it.
You were living at Mukluk Manor? What was that like?
It was great. There were 14 of us living there, and there were always about 20 people there because of boyfriends, etc. It was two stories, on Duboce Park. There were about five communes. We all put our food stamps money together once a week and went and bought vegetables. We were the party commune. I don’t know why, but we always had the parties. There were about five of the Cockettes that lived there. There was a lot going on all the time. I was living there when the Cockettes went to New York.
Were you bummed to come back here after that?
I didn’t. I stayed. I only worked on costumes and sets, so I wasn’t in any of the shows in New York. I just helped with the makeup and the production and things like that. The Cockettes bombed! You know that, don’t you? They boooombed. It was funny. I went to LA with one of the other Cockettes, Reggie, on our way there. That’s when I sold all my clothes to that store in LA, and the Rolling Stones saw my clothes in the window. They bought three or four or five jackets.
The person in NY who was supposed to be in charge of getting the theater together didn’t do his job, so when [the Cockettes] arrived the place was gutted. Instead of having a rehearsal they had to put in the lighting, put in the sound system, kill all the rats, and clean it up. The Cockettes all went to New York on a big jet, and they brought the sets with them. Our theater [in SF] was small and the stage in New York was huge. The set looked like a little cartoon! It was one of the reasons why it flopped. And the sets were just cardboard. It fell over a couple times during the show.
NY was expecting real singers and real dancers. Nobody could sing but Sylvester, and this other guy, John Rothermel. The audience was only there for 30 minutes and they ran out. All these big columnists like Rex Reed were there. Yoko Ono and John Lennon were there, Angela Lansbury... There was such a build up for weeks before the show. “The Cockettes are coming, The Cockettes are coming!” And then we came and were awful! It was a scream.
But the parties were fun?
Oh yeah. I went to a party with The Kinks. Rod Stewart had a big party there, too. And because we were the Cockettes we were invited to all these parties uptown with all these really rich swanky people with furs and diamonds. We even went to a roast and Milton Burle was there, and Jerry Lewis. We went and raged, it was great. We had a ball.
Most of the Cockettes stayed at the Albert Hotel in the East Village. Everyone was all shooting heroin, which probably didn’t help the production part of it. [Laughs]
I stayed in New York and sold my clothes at a place called Norma Kamali. She’s a big designer now, but this was in the 70s at her first little store. I sold all these hats, and chubbies they called them — little coats that John Rothermel and Sylvester wore onstage. Norma Kalami and Betsy Johnson, they were like the hip designers of the Lower East Side. I stayed there, and that’s when I met the manager Barbara Brown, who had a store in Boston.
The guy from the L’Uomo Vogue spread billed as my work partner, Paul Gaherty, he was her lover, but she was married and lived in Milton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. She was friends with Aerosmith. She was filthy rich. She’s the one that got us into Andy Warhol’s loft and got us the L’Uomo Vogue spread. Barbara was always on quaaludes. She bought me and Paul gobs of cocaine, gobs of quaaludes. She just had the gift of gab and lots of money, and she would put her foot in the door. She was great. I don’t know what happened to her.
Her husband was in politics. She would wear these antique white furs and jewels, and long skirts. She was on quaaludes and cocaine. She would drag him through the balls, and she would come home totally a mess. I remember during Christmas time she had nine Christmas trees flocked black and hung upside down from the ceiling in the living room. It was great. She got us on TV three different times.
It was pretty obvious she and Paul were having an affair, but I didn’t bother to ask or even care. I just said give me more quaaludes. And when she gave us quaaludes she gave us jars! I was delighted. And gobs of cocaine. It was great.
What were your clothes like then? Were you doing assemblage stuff?
They were similar but more funky. You know those tablecloths that had fruit all over them? I made fruit jackets and vegetable jackets and lace dresses out of lace curtains. Real antique junk stuff. But for Alice Cooper they wanted specific things. He gave me $180, and he wanted a plastic suit with the money encased in it. He wore it to Rose Kennedy’s charity ball and didn’t give a cent.
When Salvador Dali painted Alice Cooper’s portrait I made [Alice] a leather top hat and a white leather cape with real stuffed rats. [The rats were] eating bats that I had to lacquer and sew into their mouths. I sewed red jewels into their eyes. The rats came from the College of Boston and I had to stuff them. When Dali painted Alice he stole the jacket. I didn’t even know who he was at the time, but I saw him walk away with it. [Laughs]
Bergdorf Goodman is another place that carried my clothes. It’s a big store that’s still there, uptown by the Park. It’s where all the blue haired ladies go. You know the Audrey Hepburn movie where she goes shopping for diamonds? It’s in there.
Did you ever go down to The Trucks when you were in Manhattan?
Yeah, I went to The Trucks! Of course I did! I lived there! I went down there all the time. Well, only at midnight. That was the time to arrive. It was in the meatpacking district of NY, and we cruised and got in the trucks. They would leave them unlocked parked in a parking lot, and you’d crawl in and have sex in the back.
Did it smell really weird?
It smelled like amyl. [Laughs] I think they probably cleaned them out every night. That was a great time in NY.
I only stayed in NY for about four or five months, and it got so cold that I said, forget this. I’d get out the door and go half a block and my moustache would be frozen. I came home, but I still sold clothes to all these stores there. I would make them here at the commune and send them to her and she would sell them to stores. In London, too. It lasted about a year, and then I got over it.
You were saying you were more busy than you’d ever been.
Oh yeah! It was ridiculous. She would make all these appointments, and I’d have to fly to New York and meet with these people. Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin...
So you went to NY around the time of the Cockettes’ show there, then came back to SF, then moved to Key West?
I came back from NY to California. And then right when John Lennon was shot I went to Key West, Florida.
Why’d you go to Key West initially?
Well, before that I was selling angel dust — a lot of it. The chemist was one of our really good friends who lived in Oakland. They cooked in Oakland and me and Teddy would distribute ounces. The chemist would have us go down South and buy the chemicals. One of them was a chemical they use for cleaning swimming pool bottoms. It had a beeper inside of it so the cops could trace it, and we didn’t know. The beeper went off and the police came to our apartment! We had to hide in the attic.
They never came back, thank God. I’d probably still be in jail. My lawyer told us to get out of dodge, so I went to Key West, Florida. Someone had just sent me $1,000 from NY to buy an ounce, but that’s the money I used to go to Key West. I was down there working for about three months when someone came to where I worked and said giirl, this guy wants his $1,000! I said ooh, just a minute! I got an advance from my boss to pay it back.
Did they come down there to find you?
Well, the person I burned lived in NY, but he had a friend who lived in Key West. I worked in hotels and gay guest houses there. Key West was a big gay resort at the time, like Fire Island. It still is, but now it’s more for South Americans and rich Canadians. But I guess a lot of fags still.
Did you make clothing while you were down there?
I didn’t do it until I got back to SF. I didn’t do any clothes in Key West because it was too hot. It didn’t even enter my mind. It didn’t enter into my mind to do it in New Orleans either. I didn’t start making clothes again until I came back here. Within a matter of months I was diagnosed as HIV positive. At that time there was this organization that would give you vouchers to create art, and that’s when I started to make costumes. Miss Vera, she was with these artist people, and she was my sponsor. They were funded by U.S.Visual Aid, that’s the name of the organization. That’s how I got enough money to develop all these photographs that I have in my portfolios. All those 80’s and 90’s artists in NY were Visual Aid artists; they were funded by the government. Well, not all of them, but ones like Keith Haring. After he became fabulous he didn’t need it, but they funded him in the beginning.
So when AIDS first came into public consciousness in a big way were you already in Florida?
No, when AIDS hit here in SF I moved to Florida. At that time everyone was dying everywhere you turned. I came to visit after six years of being in Florida and everyone was dead, so I said, fuck this, I’m going back to Key West. It was a blast; that’s why I lasted there so long.
Before you skipped town, when you were selling PCP — was that around the time it was first formulated?
Our chemist was one of the inventors.
Who was using it at that time?
Everyone! Well, not everyone. But it was the drug to do. You know the funky layer at the top of ice when you put water in the freezer? When you cooked it it looked like that. We’d take it out of the freezer and put it on scotch towels and dry it out, then break it up and sell it. You’d crumple it up into joints. Well, not with marijuana, because that was too intense. But parsley, tarragon, anything like that. They’d call them “hog joints.” we would sell each joint for 10 to 20 dollars and grams were like $200. We made thousands of dollars. It was outrageous.
And everyone was doing it. People were falling out of windows smoking it. Or they were drowning because they’d forget to breathe.
Did people ever get violent?
I guess if you smoked too much of it you might. There was this one guy, Reaction, he’d climb houses on it. He’d have incredible strength on PCP. It’s really hard to explain. It was a fabulous high. You’d hallucinate and lay in the bed, and stars would rush by, or planets would rush by. It was really very psychedelic, much more than acid. It was like psychedelic heroin. If you got really high and slipped out of your chair you’d be down there under the table for 30 minutes to an hour, but you’d hallucinate incredibly. We would go to the ocean and lay in the sand and play like we were in Egypt.
Was there much heroin around at the time?
Yeah. Our chemist, he was strung out on it. All his money went to heroin. He had two children, and he was always afraid he was going to lose his children. He ended up getting busted.
Were PCP and LSD the main drugs, besides weed?
People smoked a lot of weed. Quaaludes were big and PCP was really big. And LSD was really big I guess. I only did acid about three four or five times. It was so strong! If I took it at seven hopefully it would be over by three in the morning, but some- times you’d be up for two or three days. It was liquid acid and we’d lay down on the floor and people would drop it in our eyeballs. You’d get high right away and you’d have to have help getting up. It’d just go straight to your brain.
I can’t even take LSD anymore. Last time I took it was in the 90s. I took it once and broke down and said never again. It took me three days to get to sleep.
But you did a lot before?
You know what? I never did a lot. I did a lot of downers. Barbiturates. Reds , yellows, Tuinals, jackets. When quaaludes came along I did hun- dreds of thousands of quaaludes. I sold them in jars of 100 at least. Valium? Of course! The little blue pills. And then the yellow, which were half the strength of the 10s.
Do you remember when you first started to become aware of clothes?
I was living in LA and somehow I met Miss Connie. Miss Connie, Miss Mercy, Miss Lucy–there were about six of them. Frank Zappa had a group called the GTOs, Girls Together Outrageously. Miss Connie was my roommate and Miss Lucy was one of my best friends. So I was always hanging out at Frank Zappa’s with Lucy, who had an apartment in his yard. What was your question?