JET left us nearly two years ago. It has taken that long to come to grips
with his loss. This section will answer the question that I have heard some
Angels ask, "What was his significance?" A great deal as it turns
out.
JET at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Cockettes and Angels of
Light, January 4, 2020, Victoria Theater
The Art of Free: Remembrance of JET
This is a revised version of the obituary I wrote
immediately after Jet's passing in November 2024 and which
we sent to various libraries in the search of a home for
Jet's archive. (See "Jet at Stanford" for that story.)
James “Jet” Tressler, an artist and influential figure in
San Francisco’s counterculture and free-theater movements,
died of natural causes in November 2024 at the age of 80.
This section of the Digger web will be a lasting memorial to
the legacy he has left all of us who knew and loved him.
Born in Miami in 1944, Jet devoted much of his life to
radical art, communal living, and the Digger ideal of Free.
He was not simply a participant in the cultural upheavals of
the 1960s and 1970s; he helped shape new forms of theater
rooted in communal life and offered freely to the public.
Through his work with the Diggers, the Kaliflower Commune,
the Angels of Light, and the Noh Penny Opera soup kitchens,
Jet found his own way of bringing together theater, food,
political conviction, and community.
Jet’s artistic and
political awakening came at a time when many of his
generation were turning against the Vietnam War and
questioning conventional American values. In 1966, he joined
the Diggers in San Francisco, who were working to create a
Free City of communal families based on mutual aid. Jet
helped cook the famous Digger stew served every day in the
Panhandle. Those communal meals became a lasting part of his
life. The Digger meaning of Free—“no buying, no
selling”—became a principle he carried into nearly
everything he did afterward.
At the Kaliflower Commune,
Jet worked with Ralph Sauer and George Harris, known as
Hibiscus, within the communal world established by Irving
Rosenthal. Together they explored a form of theatrical
self-presentation that came to be known as genderfuck.
Hibiscus went on to found the Cockettes, a flamboyant
theater troupe that combined drag, surrealism, and
countercultural rebellion. Their performances brought queer
identity and gender play into public view with humor,
spectacle, and a refusal to apologize. In doing so, they
became part of the larger movement toward gay liberation and
greater queer visibility.
Even as the Cockettes became
well known, Hibiscus continued to imagine a free theater
called the Angels of Light. Jet’s criticism of paid
performances helped persuade Hibiscus to leave the Cockettes
and pursue that original idea: a troupe committed entirely
to free theater. Following the Digger tradition, the Angels
of Light served free vegetarian feasts to their audiences.
As Jet later wrote, “The theatre that grew out of our
communal life embodied our dreams, our fantasies and wishes.
We were so moved by the Cockettes’ joie de vivre that we
wanted our own version, our own leap for the aesthetic brass
ring.” The Angels of Light were both a theater company and
an experiment in communal life—a chosen family whose members
understood art as something to be shared rather than sold.
Jet’s commitment to communal meals continued long after the
Angels of Light disbanded. He was a gifted and dedicated
cook, and with Ralph Sauer he produced weekly free vegan
meals at Hamilton Methodist Church and later at CELLspace in
San Francisco. In the 1998 film Les Diggers de San
Francisco, Jet was interviewed at one of the Noh Penny Opera
free dinners. Dressed in high drag with his face painted, he
spoke about the Diggers’ original vision—a vision that,
through those meals, was still being put into practice.
In
his later years, Jet worked to preserve the history of the
Angels of Light. His films include the 1972 Kaliflower
Intercommunal Carnival, at which the Angels performed
“Peking on Acid,” as well as the 1973 performances of “Deep
Frieze” and “Comets You Are.” The films capture some of the
strange beauty, humor, and theatrical freedom the Angels
brought to the stage. Jet preserved them so that people who
had never seen the troupe perform could still encounter its
work and perhaps find something useful in its radical
spirit. His film archive is now preserved in Stanford
University Libraries’ Special Collections, where it will
remain available to future generations.
Jet was also a
prolific visual artist. Working under the name Jilala, he
created what Irving Rosenthal called “psychomagnetic wave
drawings” for the Kaliflower newspaper and the Free Print
Shop, designed elaborate sets for the Angels of Light and
his own films, and produced a large body of oil paintings,
many featuring homoerotic imagery. Jet’s paintings, which
could not be accommodated by Stanford’s Special Collections,
will be exhibited here as part of this memorial.
Jet lived
according to his belief in art, community, and defiance. He
challenged convention, made a life outside the mainstream,
and remained faithful to the ethic expressed in the words,
“This is the moment, this is the dream.” Jet lived that
moment and pursued that dream, leaving behind films,
paintings, performances, shared meals, and a community
shaped by his imagination and generosity. He is survived by
his chosen family, collaborators, and admirers, who will
honor his life in San Francisco with theatrical tributes and
communal feasts. It is a fitting farewell for someone who
spent his life bringing people together through food,
theater, freedom, and a generous measure of glitter.
JET and Dante Alighieri at the Stanford Special Collections Library in 2019
when we went to browse the Irving Rosenthal Papers.
JET's collage of the posters he designed and printed for the Noh Penny Opera
Free Kitchen
Jet's Psychomagnetic Wave Drawings
Jet discovered his artistic bent in the Sutter Street
Commune where he designed the first posters for the Free
Print Shop and then the first pages of Kaliflower. Writing
in the Tenth Anniversary issue of that publication, Irving
Rosenthal wrote the following:
After Geoff Smith joined
the commune, Mutty introduced me to Jim [JET], a man who had read and liked Mutty’s copy of
Sheeper. He was one of the tallest, strangest, and strongest
creatures I had ever laid eyes on. He was eager to move in.
From the very beginning he was my right hand man in coping
with the frequent crises which erupted in those early
fermenting days. … He was also like an interior decorator
gone mad. Every other day he would completely rearrange a
room’s furniture, rugs, fans, screens, lamps, drapes, and
light bulbs — so you would walk into a room and think you
had made the wrong turn. He often wore lipstick, fingernail
polish, or huge clip earrings — mind you this was in the
pre-genderfuck days — and all these hippy cowboy and Hells
Angel types would drop by — and this immense exotic creature
like Punjab in Orphan Annie — but with an Afro and wearing
lipstick — would come in with a tray full of coffee cups.
Jim designed our first Free Print Shop posters and later
projected our deepest and softest dreams into Kaliflower by
means of his psychomagnetic wave drawings. He was the first
commune member to learn how to make bread.
— from: “Back in 1966, I was living on the Lower East Side …” by
Irving Rosenthal, Kaliflower N.S. 2, November 30, 1977.
This section will present Jet's early drawings, which were
more than intricate designs. They contained messages,
visions, of the new society that was being born.
Jet's 'mythopoetic communal memory rendered as queer baroque scripture'
Jet’s essay on the Angels of Light is less a chronological account
than a work of mythopoetic remembrance — a self-consciously baroque
meditation that transforms communal theatre into cosmology. Written in
an incantatory style that blends Beat prophecy, queer theatricality, and
religious symbolism, the piece converts lived experience into archetype:
performers become angels, productions become rituals, and the principle
of “free” emerges as a condition of artistic and spiritual power rather
than mere economics. Names surface without orientation and events unfold
outside linear time, reminding the reader that this is memory operating
as theatre rather than documentary history. Yet precisely in its excess
the essay reveals the internal world of the Angels — their aesthetic
philosophy, gender radicalism, devotion to beauty fashioned from
throwaway materials, and the emotional aftertone of a collective that
understood itself as both revelation and ephemeron. Read as primary
testimony rather than narrative record, Jet’s text stands as a rare
movement self-scripture, illuminating not only what the Angels of Light
did, but how they imagined the transformative possibilities of
performance itself.
The ANGELS OF LIGHT
illuminated
February 28, 1978
condensed
revised October 1989
San Francisco Free Press 1990
For all my Fallen Angels
BEFORE the FIRST
SHOW:
Once upon a stage great billowing black
plastic banners were put up, written in white paint, the 'ancient names' of
the angels of JHVH and even darker minions, those bowing to RA and bearing
cats they came into being — a raffish horde of holies children of atomics we
sprang forth a spray of dust and aquamarine sequins we came into being from a
flash of moonlight caught in a facet of an Eisenberg brooch.
The Haight Street Commune was known wistfully as the "chateau" as it was
smack dab in the blue roar of the intersection and marauding junkies we
believed ourselves to be glamourous denizens of a city bereft of smoky
and veiled beauty, the glaze we wished to pull over audiences' eyes came
from real life we wore black and kohled our eyes, and the nervier of us
shaved our brows, the ultimate initiation into the shamanhood we Drag
Kings were being led into by our rhinestone talismen. When you shave
your brows you lose your sex and become Venusian instantly as you cloak
your true birthplace with new brows, ones that are permanently wrinkled
with the tilt of surprise, going into welfare psychiatrists and for a
very free performance receive your scholarship to study magic under the
best in the West.
And so it came to pass that the Cockettes were going to do a show called
PEARLS OVER SHANGHAI at the Berk Community Theatre but as it was coupled
with Captain Beefheart, and as he backed out because at a press
conference party at which I attended someone asked to eat out his ass.
Well Beefy flipped and the Cockettes were out an auditorium and evryone
was over-rehearsed and all the sets and costumes were all ready to burst
so with a little wand waving we just hit the streets, heading for
Chinatown (naturally) and all of us in High' Drag floating down Grant
Avenue unannounced, having arrived unbeknownst to the Cockettes were the
Angels for there born on a cool evening in American China was the nest
for these heavenly hybrids, we sang and cavorted around and then
Scrumbly's Pinkerton appeared to Sylvester's Butterfly, and there
hatched our revolution.
We were acid babies whose acid visions were being turned into stale
rehash of the 30's musical so apart from the decision for some to go
free, aesthetics was the major consideration. We wanted to go wild. We
wanted Pan, not Carmen Miranda. We wanted to change the course of stars
with our rare dances, we wanted to free Loie Fuller into the 70's and
make Art really Nouveau. We wanted to become a native Noh, a form to
express the dark beauties of witchy wonder I warlock wish for words to
remember what whirled us together, what constellation fell into place so
that our suns and moons would appear on stage simultaneously.
When ARTHUR moved in, I put the words IO PAN above his door in the
chateau, and I do not practice, but believe, because he is the one whose
hooves inspired our early beauty for his manly thrust was animal and
noneother. How jealous I was when another, lesser I thought, swooped
him. IO PAN!
The chronology of the events which lead to today are as jumbled in my
mind as the acts of those crazy plays. In my mind I see actors entering
and exiting our front door, suicidal clowns, drugged mimes, and wierd
combinations of the sexes too intricate to describe. Insane hippies came
to us believing us to be real angels, real interceptors between man and
God. We were baffled by our appeal, the mad way we rearranged our
personalities daily with cloth and glitter, seemed to them the
manifestation of the hundred-faced Vishnu and in truth our faces were a
hundred fold and our dress was the very sky lifted in the morning to
show our love to strangers with a Dawn — we were imps, fairies, sprites,
satyrs, and our Satyricon was in chapters enacted only on full moons
when we herbal actors planted seeds of enlightenment in the brains of
thousands. Our meals were divided among the vegetarians and the ones
who, insensate, ate raw flesh and threw it from the stage one terrible
Halloween, the meat eaters continued to do pay shows after the schism
and the vegetarians went Free, never signing their work again, a
collective signature was sufficient praise and connection how anonymous
this God of Glitter, who only shines.
My room became a set, a perfect, ever shifting array of a hundred
textures, scraps and bits of the garbage, throwaways, thrift store
bargains and thefted things, most prized as they were acquired at the
risk of reputation and freedom. Some say my rooms are glittering traps
to dazzle and so hypnotize unwary youth and then drawing them bedward
while they are in the spell of color and sweeping design, — but no, I
rarely found physical love, — but tried to transmit that if you squint
at the set it would transform into Scherazade's Story Chamber, pillared
and hung with silk, those flags and banners that were my wings whose
breadth never found its way into my camera's eye, never its promise
fulfilled. Opium genius of calm seas of art too splendid for film, but
is the food of dreams. The Divine Protein.
NATIVITY
I remember especially well one night, Christmas Eve, to be exact, when
by cosmic command performance we put together a pageant to be shown on
the steps of Grace Cathedral at Midnight Mass. High blown dream to crash
the establishment's moment of transubstantiation with a living host of
angels, played by our own children, with Leonce, our physician, as true
shepherd and Hibiscus on mescalin was Mary to Cuban Miguel's swarthy
Joseph, erotic Triangle in heaven brought to earth as surely as meteors
fall from God's Burning joints, JA! I came as the Star, six points of
long fiberglass 'angel hair', dangerously beautiful with glued-on stars
for this tawdry Bethelehem by the Bay. A Policeman came up to me and
asked if I thought I were Jesus but the REAL fireworks started when
Tahara brought incense burning in an abalone shell, up to the High
Altar, — well, the Priest freaked! and called the cops and promptly
shooed us away after we sang a few traditional carols but always I will
remember that cold clear night, and Hibiscus, his face reddened by the
drug, flush with divine connection. He knew he was the Bride of Heaven
as surely as any Mary and that in giving his Genius freely was the
Christ made manifest in acts of goodness, mitzvahs that will long live,
wafting as if feathers in interstellar space.
That evening we all walked home, through North Beach, winding our ways
back to the Haight, but as we walked and sang those moldy hymns,
Scrumbly who had been one of the Kings that night and who, in the
Cockettes, was King, spoke to me, King of Rags, about "free'' and how he
knew it was only right that these arcane regions of the mind from which
we were drawing our art could only go free as any witch will make a brew
for love for free because otherwise the brew is powerless.
It was Sunset Boulevard, it was the Folies Bergere! It was Heartbreak
Hotel, Emerald City — it was a dark room with candles in circles strange
lettering in old books, but how lacking in essential evil it all was,
how like a theatrical presentation of murky evil — all our whores were
saints. Christ protected whores above all because they were the metaphor
on earth for his Law of Love. Who among you · will cast the first
sequin?
That show at Grace Cathedral caused cardboard haloes to be made, all
blue and silver each as coordinated as a Dutch dish the wings had
thousands of chicken feathers glued onto wire and paper. We were the
Right Brothers, a ragtag chorus as multipliedly married as any Mormon
and more Catholic than any Catholic. We were the vanguard of a new loose
mentality, where to change sex roles was easier than sneezing, and less
a sign of illness but the root and cause of joy. That show was one of
the few I actually appeared in. My spiritual Iwo Jima.
Before the Chateau became Angel House, much dust was raised and voices
grew shrill as magically by force of decision a split occured dividing
the ones who felt it an imperative to be free and never to bind
themselves in Mephistophelan contracts, blood is always spilled that
which angels mix with their makeup, how natural we look as fantastic
creatures because then we are ourselves as if in reverse. We have
stripped away our earthly camoflague, revealing tendrils and
protuberances, scarves of skin folding into itself a spectrum and how
ground-up prisms made our lipsticks in those first shows. We dabbled and
we diddled, we drank and we smoked and ate too much but in the hallways
were the sets, the refrigerator boxes whittled down into Chinese cities
or vistas of seasons changing, forests and endless cabaret backgrounds
of palms, alternately silver or gold, and some with crepe paper
shredded, endless evocations of Stork Clubs gone mad and racy. Dark
lover in the 8th row, did you applaud at us when were three Lola-Lolas,
three hoopskirted madmen with their pianolas in full view of man and
God.
Rodney fled from Hunce to our basement, an illegal act, for after he and
Hibiscus fucked there, the landlord appeared with the police, tearing
down Rodney's instant decor of silks and veils. How tragic and
theatrical for so great a Queen to be manhandled by the gendarmes Piaf
in Paris, addicted to beauty and beauty alone.
Haight Street Commune is become so enlarged in memory, a haven after the
Cockettes fled, so many came to us — Marquel, strangest of Shiva's
devotees, was there too, squestered in her lair, posing in front of the
mirror, crying, making magic. She, shall we say, practiced. In a
Cockette show she played a man, and bought a very costly, humanhair
moustache. Reminding me of Johnny Dancer (AKA Java Jet, Bambi) bought a
bevy of expensive orchids for a show when we didn't have money for food.
It was important that our Art Rises Up from baser materials as Roses
bloom from shit.,
We were priests of puzzles, the jigsaw of earth's throwaways flew
together as if Wizards were making electrical casts to force the pieces
to fit, to make complete these shredded images which fill our mind and
set forth the illuminated record. Feathers must be gathered at closed
zoos, in the dark of night, you go up to the pheasant cage and make
fox-sounds — the ensuing panic will provide you with enough plumage for
a score of Gibson Girls. In my mind is a forest of memories, the cones
are sticking in my ears — I am resinous with promise of untold tales.
FALLING AWAY FROM EARTH
Pride wrecked Satan's fun and others who imagined themselves as the
source of power, for we knew in those early days that great buildings
downtown into Golems and Leviathans and we were shuddering in our
prophetic wisdom and so Ralph, Master of Wok, the Walk and Wiggle was
surely Boas to my Jakim — Pillars to a cardboard Temple he cooked a
decade of banquets for genius to be properly fortified and not
pernicious anemia sadly mistaken in some quarters as inspiration. He
pined, he panned, he Pan to my Devil in this Faustian operetta Vivian
Vance as Buddha I worship his talent to amuse, bemuse, confuse how his
scarred from suicide attempts arms infused true primal magick forms,
great Pampas as proper plumage for the True King of this bedraggled
thirteenth tribe.
He now has his toe and each finger in a different color pot of free and
not-so theatre and he has a book of splendid designs, but back back in
the early days he tambourined his way through bars and hearts. He made
potatoe-print patterned sheet-robes for his Chieftain costume, made
necklaces from found objects, poked holes through shells for to have
that Tiffany-Natura-ethnica elegance even though we lived in poverty.
His mode is will be, Platonic, Romanic, those simple bands of perfect
Grecian form, shank of bull or He-Goat among us, born with a vestigial
Horn in his forehead and with him are we not in Arcadia Again, and we
his delighted nymphs? Keep well-fed or will bite.
He and Tahara and Hibiscus formed such an Electric Triangle of Camp,
their key to survival amidst the 'suits ' or worse yet, Serious Hippies.
Our humour was born of a form of religious hysteria, chassidic queens or
medieval nuns, earthquaked and its Goose Cooked our audiences knew they
were witnessing the Local Shamans on a night out.
PHANTOMS and PUSSYCATS
Histories, diaries and letters do not exist to attest to my words but
filmic record does exist showing brief flashes of very special
presences. Do channellers form theatres? We did.
Those painted faces, puttied noses, grin out of the film's frame,
midnight madnesses, rehearsed and dysfunctional mayhem, circus of MGM
gone to heaven, tip and tap toeing up staircases — once, Beaver, in the
'Greek Show ' fell from our Mt. Olympus, rather pickled, down, down,
bruised but On with the Show, one of the best, for sheer innocence,
Rodney as Apollo, Ralph as Zeusie, Ruby as Narcissus (his blond
frailness wrapped in pink taffeta before a mirror made of tacky aluminum
foil. Hibiscus was Isadildo in this show, the mirror of his life, this
role, and even went so far as to have a school of dancers on stage
called the Isadorables.
One night, Christmas Eve at the Poet's Theatre, after the show I made a
film of the weary players and myself, in some of my most lush and
natural footage of falling tinsel phantoms, spirits, a pageant of faces
go through an Occult Arch. There is a scene with Harlow with a candle
between her fingers, lit, like witches of old, here on celluloid, and in
color, and in the scene where I fall dead in Hibiscus ' arms, like
Tinkerbelle dissappearing because noone believed in her anymore, after
all Hibiscus had betrayed 'free' for mayonnaise commercials and bit
parts on the LOVE OF LIFE, driving me crazy, as I had deluded myself
into believing that this airy creature would be the vehicle for my dream
of free theatre, even once I tore his room to shreds, hung as it was
with a jungle of branches, dried roses beyond number, rescued from
florist's dumpsters on Polk Street at midnight, or later. There were
torn sequinned gowns everywhere Vaseline jars crusted with· glitter,
sequins, and a streak of white greasepaint, always marvelous as it also
dissolved the eyepiece on my camera. Revlon spells disaster.
Grove Street provided one of our our most picturesque settings, a
Brecthian warehouse, rickety stage, free from censorship here some of
the bawdier material was 'performed' — blow-job contests and lovers
really fucking backstage was not uncommon. This night Allen Ginsberg
appeared as a Yogi Yenta. My dress. Big cut-out six-pointed stars all
over. I sang HIGH AND MIGHTY but this my Gesthemene as were betrayed by
our benefactors who said they were making a free film but actually
'tricked' us by selling the film down the river, calling it TRICKS and
putting it in arthouses on two coasts.
Burlesque is a Gift. Naked Valentine we paused at the ends of acts
soaking in applause, pleasure received. Bozo in the court of Kings.
When Von Sternberg launched his crazy cabaret in his BLUE ANGEL he also
locked us all into an impervious spell, one where rings of fat fraus in
tutus with a sun metronomically flashing light, drawing us into
recreating those gauzy, somewhat sleazy clubs where wretchedly sad
clowns pause for a mie in a dressing room, leaving shortly and slowly,
the eternals of carny life, wooden painted wagons pulled by mares to
Valencia Street, oblong studios, gypsy enclaves, — during the illegal
war in Indochina we did PEKING ON ACID, our watershed performance as it
came after Hibiscus left to seek fame so a new egalitarian mood with no
central Star — each was encouraged to go hog-wild, creatively speaking.
Tahara was the gilt Stowkowski conducting a quasi-Gamalan with Rodney in
his first true Dance, as a Lion (naturally) that became, by act of will
and magic, a Butterfly before our eyes. There was a seed-sowing dance,
performed nude from the waistup in that baseball-diamond-stage — Mary as
a chorusline Ceres, giver and taker of the Seed. Kaliflower's Stevie
made our magical towering wooden clogs for Johnny's Love Dance, after
which he too, changes into some kind of black dragonfly, hung by wires,
spinning in place.
There is a certain period of our history when we were known for smeared
make-up, or as Martin put it, "that falling apart look'' but actually it
was just a rare few, who even BEFORE the show had packed on layers of
faces, the look of a peeling egg-fresco in flooded Florence was Adrian's
face, alcoholic saint of Potomac Street in his nervous ceremonies,
mascara and red circles were cheeks once were. Venus was the pastiest
Geisha of all. Brian and Paul Darling, all prehistoric in shredded
nylons. The procession of the red Dragon, crazy train we made, snaking
around the audience.
Sometimes, in my most paranoic moments I feel like Pandora having opened
an uncloseable box or like Crowley having summoned up a Devil he can't
stuff back into Hell but it passes and slowly I come to terms to what
happened, all the classes, all the 'theatre-training' and tap classes,
how everyone grew up around me, as I stayed small, hoping to hold onto
innocence forever. At a certain point, loving noone less, I stopped
going to the shows under the Angel 'name' as I hoped to discover other
pleasures as profound as those Early Shows, for me a religion, an
elegant chaos of the soul, a sweet dance dreamed up on the spot. A new
song.
