Rumi Missabu, Avant-Garde Drag Performer Who Glittered, Dies at 76
Rumi Missabu, an avant-garde drag performer who was finest referred to as a member of the anarchic, glitter-encrusted, hippie-drag troupe referred to as the Cockettes, which bloomed briefly on the flip of the Seventies in San Francisco, died on April 2 at his house in Oakland, Calif. He was 76.
His loss of life, from issues of persistent respiratory illness, was introduced by Griffin Cloudwalker, a good friend.
For a second, the Cockettes have been the bohemian darlings of San Francisco. Their members have been a various collective that included Rumi, a voluble drama pupil from Los Angeles. Like many within the group, he glided by his adopted first title solely. And like so many within the late Sixties, he had fetched up within the Haight-Ashbury district, drawn there by the alluring swirl of non secular questing, political activism, experimental theater, free love and psychedelics.
The Cockettes lived communally within the derelict Victorian homes there and devoted themselves to self-expression. Their our bodies have been their canvases, which they bedecked in feather boas, tutus, corsets, Victorian petticoats, Edwardian frock coats, wigs, wings, headdresses, ribbons, sequins, rhinestones, satin, face paint and an abundance of glitter.
Their chief was a younger actor named George Harris III who had made his method from New York Metropolis to San Francisco in 1967, the identical yr he was famously captured by the photojournalist Bernie Boston at an antiwar protest, tucking flowers into the barrels of the rifles held by the army police. In San Francisco, he remodeled into Hibiscus, a show-tune-loving mystic with flowing hair and a glitter-coated beard — “like Jesus with lipstick” is how one Cockette described him. He gathered his pals first into avenue theater, then onto the stage of the Palace Theater in North Seaside, the place the Cockettes made their debut on New 12 months’s Eve in 1969.
They named themselves simply earlier than that present, as a spoof of — and maybe in homage to — the high-kicking Rockettes, and poured out onto the stage that evening in a chaotic, campy cancan that led to a joyful nude scrum, with the viewers becoming a member of them onstage to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Girls.”
They turned regulars on the Palace, showing month-to-month, and commenced, kind of, to plan their reveals: In “Gone With the Showboat to Oklahoma,” Rumi performed Belle Watling, the madam from “Gone With the Wind”; “Pearls Over Shanghai” was about three women kidnapped by a brothel proprietor named Madame Gin Sling, once more performed by Rumi.
“It was extraordinarily experimental theater,” Fayette Hauser, an artist and photographer who was one of many few feminine Cockettes — and whose visible memoir, “The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy, 1969-1972,” was revealed in 2020 — mentioned by telephone. “We had themes. There have been no scripts. No rehearsals. Everybody was very individuated, and we expressed ourselves in drag. Excessive drag, we referred to as it.
“Rumi, particularly, had a whole and superb sense of self, which I admired,” she added. “He knew who he was and needed to place it on the market. It helped that he had educated as an actor, in contrast to most of us.”
He additionally carried out, invariably and reliably, on acid, although not each Cockette was tripping onstage, Ms. Hauser mentioned — herself included, as a result of LSD made her nonverbal.
By 1971, the Cockettes have been stars of the underground press and attracted audiences past their counterculture friends. One Friday in September, Rex Reed, the syndicated New York-based arts critic, introduced Truman Capote; Johnny Carson’s former spouse, Joanna Carson; and some San Francisco socialites to see a present that evening referred to as “Tinsel Tarts in a Sizzling Coma.”
Writing about it the subsequent week, Mr. Reed summed up the night as “a nocturnal occurring comprising equal components of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Road, Harold Prince’s ‘Follies,’ and film musicals, the United Fruit Firm, Kabuki and the Yale varsity present, with numerous angel mud thrown in to maintain the viewers good and stoned.”
The filmmaker John Waters, interviewed in “The Cockettes,” a 2002 documentary directed by David Weissman and Invoice Weber, mentioned their reveals have been “full sexual anarchy, which is all the time an exquisite factor.”
The primary Cockettes efficiency consisted of simply 10 males, three ladies and a child. Rumi, who a long time later appointed himself the archivist of the group, estimated that in later productions the solid stretched to greater than 100 individuals — together with Sylvester, who would go on to take pleasure in success as a disco singer, and, for a number of performances earlier than the group break up up in 1972, Divine, Mr. Waters’s longtime muse. Lots of the Cockettes, together with Rumi, appeared in “Elevator Ladies in Bondage” (1972), an underground movie a few employees revolt in a seedy resort.
As early as 1971, nevertheless, the group was splintering into factions: those that needed to make the reveals extra skilled and people, like Hibiscus and Rumi, who needed to maintain to their improvisational and free-ethos origins. When the Cockettes have been invited to carry out in New York within the fall of 1971, Hibiscus and Rumi opted out. Poignantly, the Cockettesbombed there.
“This can be a drag present to finish all drag reveals,” Mel Gussow of The New York Instances wrote in his overview, “the sort of exhibition that murders camp.”
Rumi, in the meantime, had joined a bunch of like-minded performers, convened by Hibiscus and referred to as the Angels of Mild, who staged happenings within the Bay Space earlier than bringing them to New York Metropolis theaters, together with the Theater for the New Metropolis, within the early Seventies. Hibiscus died of AIDS in 1982.
Rumi careened out and in of the Angels of Mild, and out and in of New York, earlier than making his method again to San Francisco later within the decade After which he roughly disappeared, working money jobs as a home cleaner and occasional caterer. He had no checking account and no authorities identification, save for an outdated library card.
When a bunch of Cockettes held a Twenty fifth-anniversary reunion in 1994, he resurfaced. For the subsequent three a long time, he carried out on his personal and in revivals of the Cockettes’ reveals and have become a mentor to younger homosexual performers.
“I got here in out of the chilly,” he informed Daniel Nicoletta, a photographer, who started documenting his reveals.
Rumi was born James Allen Bartlett on Nov. 14, 1947, in Los Angeles, the eldest little one and solely son of Ruth Irene (Brown) Bartlett and Earl Oliver Bartlett, an auto mechanic and fuel station proprietor.
He started appearing in highschool and studied drama at Los Angeles Metropolis School, residing together with his highschool good friend and theater pal Cindy Williams, who supported the 2 of them by working as a waitress. (Ms. Williams would go on to co-star with Penny Marshall within the long-running sitcom “Laverne & Shirley.”)
On acid one evening, Rumi noticed a low-budget exploitation horror movie, “She Freak,” which sparked one thing in him. He took a Greyhound to San Francisco, moved into an empty water tower with three roommates and tumbled proper into the Haight scene. He christened himself Rumi, for the Thirteenth-century Sufi poet and counterculture favourite. His adopted surname got here later, though pals don’t bear in mind when, or what impressed it.
Rumi is survived by his sisters, Mary Bartlett Dobyns and Debbie Mitzlaff. In 2015, he started donating his archive to The New York Public Library.
Rumi carried out till he couldn’t, flying to New York, oxygen tanks in tow, to stage productions at venues like Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. The performances have been elaborate and demented, all the time free and for one evening solely. His final present, at Judson in October 2019, was a Kabuki extravaganza referred to as “Demon Pond,” tailored from a Japanese play of the identical title. Rumi didn’t carry out, however he directed and narrated the play, which concerned, amongst different issues, a lovesick dragon and an apocalyptic flood.
“The present was about tenacity and redemption,” mentioned Mr. Cloudwalker, his good friend, “and it was an important swan tune.”
