Weissman and I have discovered a bond: an insane love for Andrea Feldman, the inimitable blond star of Andy Warhol's Heat. "Ma! All I want is your money!" he bellows, invoking one of Feldman's signature screeching demands from that film. We've reached the topic of Feldman via Sylvia Miles, her Heat costar. In The Cockettes, dedicated hat-wearer Miles recalls the group's infamous off-Broadway stint in New York. "I love Sylvia Miles," Weissman says. "She's one of the smartest, wackiest people, and she has an incredible memory."

"And she's known everybody," Weber adds wryly. Seated at a meeting table in Weissman's informal business office on the second floor of a church near Dolores Park, the duo are a study in complementary contrasts. Weber is soft-spoken, while Weissman has a booming voice. Throughout the interview they pass a cell phone to each other with Olympic-relay speed and efficiency.

Miles is just one eccentric to testify in Weissman and Weber's documentary. With typical quick wit, John Waters outlines the Cockettes' links to his and Divine's mayhem. Society dame Denise Hale, in fur and pearls, attests that the troupe put on the show to see in early-'70s San Francisco. But the film's most colorful talking heads are the Cockettes themselves. Rumi, Marshall, Jilala, Dusty Dawn, and Kreemah Ritz. Sweet Pam, glowing with health as she claims that the Cockettes practically brushed their teeth with LSD. Fayette, her voice so sultry she makes the phrase "go west" sound hot. Scrumbly, an old-fashioned gentleman with comic Chaplinesque style. Goldie Glitters, still the proud possessor of "a face that sunk a thousand ships." And Reggie, who hurls disdain at the wars and banks and malls of today, then issues an invitation: "Just give me a torn dress and a hit of acid and let's go to the beach."

There's an ironic contrast between The Cockettes' DVD-ready formal structure and the antinarrative, anarchic spirit of its subject matter. But the movie transcends packaged nostalgia – partly because Weissman and Weber make still photos come to life through pans and dissolves, partly because, during four years of research, they've uncovered a bedazzled treasure chest of rare film footage. Clips from the act of artistic terrorism Tricia's Wedding (a twisted sister of Waters's Diane Linkletter Story) are outnumbered by scenes from an unreleased movie about the Cockettes' tragicomic escape to and from New York.

The New York footage came from an unlikely directorial source: Maureen Orth, a Vanity Fair senior editor who wrote disapprovingly and cluelessly about Andrew Cunanan's druggy gay decadence in the recent book Vulgar Favors. The Cockettes offers the strange spectacle of the conservatively attired Orth happily reminiscing about an orgiastic, gay-dominated clan who, in Fayette's words, "expressed themselves through their look [because they were] so stoned they became nonverbal."

In a paradise ruled by but not restricted to the gay gaze, Cockettes founder Hibiscus (a.k.a. George Harris III) has the aura of a silent film star. On celluloid, his considerable allure – which once tempted an avowedly hetero Robert Altman, then a magazine photographer, into considering a visit to what Altman calls "the lavender garden," according to commentary on the wall of Weissman and Weber's Cockettes exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – is both moving and fitting. The Cockettes drew inspiration from pre-talkie motion picture glamour, twisting it into revelatory new forms. When the documentary introduces Harris via an actor's head shot, he's a twinkie, a teen Prince William. The very next still image of a pre-Hibiscus Harris is iconic. He's sticking a flower into the gun of a U.S. soldier at a protest outside the Pentagon. That flower soon bloomed into the Dionysian antithesis of the Vietnam War: the Cockettes, an outgrowth of Kaliflower, the San Francisco commune where Harris became Hibiscus under the ever watchful eye of his mentor Irving Rosenthal, author of the 1967 novel Sheeper.

The sad truth behind Hibiscus's silent-film allure in Weissman and Weber's documentary is that it's a product of his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1982. (The Cockettes does contain a few brief tape recordings of his voice.) His final recorded performance might be on the printed page. In an essay in the 1995 anthology Out in Culture, Mark Thompson interviews Hibiscus a year before his then-undiagnosed illness proved fatal, discovering a personality trapped between eras. "I'm afraid I'll slip and say something that will outrage a million mad queens," he says, before reaching the punch line with a grin. "But then, there aren't many mad queens left anymore."

Faeries in the libraries

If Hibiscus is The Cockettes' silent film star, the movie's invisible hero is the late Martin Worman, whose unpublished Ph.D. dissertation at New York University (titled "Shamans and Show Queens") provided a glimmering trail for Weissman and Weber to follow as they investigated the Cockettes' explosive, scattered journey. "Martin had done about 100 hours of interviews with key people," Weber says. "He also appreciated the spiritual aspects of what the Cockettes were about, which helped influence our direction."

Before last June an authoritative account of the Cockettes didn't exist. The group rate an enthusiastic page or two in Waters's first book, Shock Value. In The Irrepressible Bambi Lake, local self-made legend Lake takes an occasional break from groupie catastrophe accounts to provide her own skewed vision of the Angels of Light, Hibiscus's post-Cockettes theatrical venture. In Flight from Neveryon, author Samuel Delany cites a Village Voice obituary for Hibiscus as the first time he saw the term "gay cancer" replaced by "AIDS." The most Cockettes-centric book to date is a paper-doll collection published by Last Gasp in 1971. "When you cut out the dresses and put them on the Cockettes, they don't fit," Weber says. "Which is probably appropriate."

Though The Cockettes tells the story of the Cockettes, it doesn't have time for their significant relatives. Photographer Steven Arnold is one such figure. Arnold founded "The Nocturnal Dream Show," the midnight-movie event at North Beach's Palace Theater, where the Cockettes debuted on New Year's Eve of 1969. He went on to create the monographs Reliquaries and Epiphanies, trinket-trimmed photographic tableaux that transform the Cockettes' visual chaos into a classical aestheticism. The hallucinogenic peak of The Cockettes comes from an excerpt of Arnold's film Luminous Procuress. "Steven Arnold told a great story about the Cockettes," Weber says. "They all were doing so much acid that they were impossible to direct, and when they left, half of his costume collection, jewelry collection, and a full-sized mummy sarcophagus left with them."

Rosenthal is even closer Cockettes kin, an unconventional father figure whose spiritual and political beliefs the troupe adhered to and rebelled against. His elfin intellectual presence hovers at the edge of the documentary's narrative, shrouding secrets. As an editor at the Chicago Review, Rosenthal published the first excerpts from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, and he is one of the flaming creatures in Jack Smith's 1962-63 movie of the same name, which was banned as "obscene" in New York and denounced in the U.S. Senate. He is also the instigator of what The Cockettes deems "the Philosophy of Free": a belief that food, theater, and other art shouldn't cost anything.

"We met with Irving, which surprised a lot of people because he's reclusive and not very enthusiastic about journalists or filmmakers," Weissman says. "He declined to participate for a variety of reasons, some of them predictable given his philosophical history." Noting that Rosenthal attended the Castro preview, Weber draws a connection between the Cockettes' and Smith's revolutionary drag: "The drag for the first Cockettes show came from Kaliflower. Why Irving had a room full of drag is good fodder for speculation – I'm sure some of it came from Jack Smith."

"There's influence that's direct and influence that is ephemeral," Weissman adds. "In a sense Flaming Creatures was a Cockettes movie eight years before the Cockettes began. Whether the other Cockettes saw [Flaming Creatures] – well, it did play 'The Nocturnal Dream Show' once." Smith's movie isn't explicit so much as convulsive; politicians saw porn in it because it takes gender and sexuality and detonates them. The Cockettes moved that detonation from the movie screen to the stage a few feet below it, changing two dimensions to three. Or four or five or six, factoring in the drugs of the day.

At the tail end of the Cockettes' story one finds Sylvester, a dead ringer for Tina Turner at her prime (though cast as Coretta Scott King), serenading the newlyweds of Tricia's Wedding. "We came across early recordings of Sylvester in 1970, on the piano at home, singing blues standards like "Stormy Weather" and show tunes," Weber says. "He does a version of "God Bless the Child" that sends chills down my spine."

The Cockettes begins and climaxes with the fateful November 1971 trip to New York set in motion by an ecstatic nationally syndicated Rex Reed review. A variation of the review can be found in the 1974 essay collection People Are Crazy Here; Reed quotes Truman Capote to add authority to his rave, so perhaps it was inevitable that Gore Vidal would criticize the Cockettes so loudly that others could record his wrath in New York on opening night. Far from home, the Cockettes had become the ball in a literary grudge match between bitter elder statesmen. Once upon a time they were a ball of a different sort – a celebration that didn't need the status of an East Coast invitation.

Folies de San Francisco

Today, at the corner of Powell Street and Columbus Avenue, the metal skeleton of the Palace Theater still stands, shabbily attired in chipped drywall and random sheets of cheap pulpy wood. The marquee of the Cockettes' old theatrical home is blank. Where once there was a dramatic entrance, now there are posters advertising Deuces Wild and the latest album by Fat Joe. "Someone bought [the theater] and without any permits totally gutted it," Weissman says. "The owners were going to make it a Rite Aid, but they were stopped by the neighborhood. Why can't North Beach have a movie theater, with the kind of people who live there?"

Their performance mansion is in disarray, and many of its original inhabitants have died, but in the decades since the Cockettes' final performance, their spirit has been renewed in myriad forms, big and small, global and local. Glam rock borrowed their glitter, and the Radical Faeries continued their tradition of queers with beards. Here in San Francisco, Klubstitute and the Sick and Twisted Players have allowed the show to go on – at least sporadically. And the most renowned S.F.-native drag performer of recent years, Justin Bond (a.k.a. Kiki) is accompanied on piano by a Scrumbly-esque sidekick, Herb.

The Cockettes are history. But there's a sweet justice to their Castro homecoming, the second installment of which begins this Friday, when the finished version of Weissman and Weber's documentary commences a three-week run. The craziest theatrical troupe in San Francisco's history gave their first performance at a movie theater in the city. This week, thanks to The Cockettes, they'll be invading a local movie palace again.