Starting his career in New York City, he moved to San Francisco, where in the early 1970s he founded the psychedelic gay liberation theater collective known as the Cockettes.

In 1966 he performed in an Off Broadway play titled Peace Creeps by John Wolfson, with Al Pacino and James Earl Jones.

The rest had their guns pointed out into the crowd, when all of a sudden a young hippie stepped out in front of the action with a bunch of flowers in his left hand.

The Cockettes decked themselves out in drag outfits and glitter for a series of legendary midnight musicals at the Palace Theater in San Francisco's California North Beach neighborhood.

They quickly became a "must-see" for San Francisco's gay community, with their outlandishly decadent productions like "Journey to the Center of Uranus", "Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma" and "Gone with the Showboat to Oklahoma".

In the early 1980s, he and his sisters Jayne Anne, Eloise and Mary Lou and brother Fred, formed the glitter rock group "Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets", supported by musicians Ray Ploutz on bass, Bill Davis on guitar and Michael Pedulla on drums.