It was the fall of 1970. Rex Reed and Truman Capote were missed
at the opening night post-opera ball of Beverly Sill’s Manon.
They, along with Mrs. Johnny Carson and Mrs. Sam Spiegel, were
squeezing their way through the sold-out crowd at a Chinese movie
house in San Francisco, where a group of flamboyant, radical hippies
in wigs and petticoats, was about to take the stage for a midnight revue.

“This is the most outrageous thing I have ever seen!” said Truman.
And the world agreed. Journalists flocked, to witness first hand, the
dazzling curiosities, whose antics and lifestyle were to set the
fashion world on its ear and usher in the glitter-rock era.
Rolling Stone Magazine was the first to deliver the tidings to a
whole generation of kids who teetered on the brink of self-discovery.

Captured on film by some of today’s most well known photographers,
Annie Lebovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Robert Altman, Gilles Lorraine and
Charles Gatewood, the Cockettes piqued the country’s imagination with
a new androgynous look, which reached as far away as Paris Match and
the European press. Catapulted into a ‘media frenzy’, the Cockettes
skyrocketed to underground stardom.

Midnight at the Palace is set against the psychedelic backdrop of
the raging sixties and seventies, a time of intense personal and
political evolution. Racial unrest and rioting in the streets over
the Vietnam War had set the climate for civil disobedience.
LSD was spearheading the golden age of self-exploration, and the Cockettes
were on the cutting edge of the counter culture, leading the way for
revolutionary changes in sexual identity.

Midnight at the Palace is more than my story. It’s a story about an
exceptional moment in San Francisco, the outrageous characters that
were drawn into it, and the circumstances that catapulted them into
the national spotlight. It will go behind the scenes of a remarkable
world where reality is completely transformed through glitter, makeup
and thrift-store castoffs. A world where people lived their fantasies
and their lives just spilled onto the stage and where some very audacious
individuals happen to get more than they bargain for.

“What’s so marvelous is that they look happy, truly happy,”
 said Vogue Magazine editor Diana Vreeland.
“And that’s so rare these days, don’t you think?”