Koret Auditorium, SF Public Library, July 28, 2026
The Angels of Light Free Theatre was a queer performance collective that emerged from the Kaliflower Commune and became part of a network linking hundreds of communes throughout the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their shows featured extravagant costumes and sets, live music, and free food for the audience. But the Angels were more than a performance collective: they were a creative family who lived communally, making theater and daily life inseparable. This combination of performance, communal life, and gift-giving placed the Angels within the tradition of the San Francisco Diggers, whose radical anarchist social vision helped shape the counterculture of the late 1960s.
This event at the San Francisco Public Library brought together Angels of Light veterans Beaver Bauer, Tahara, and Greg Cruikshank for a discussion moderated by August Bernadicou of the LGBTQ History Project. Presented in conjunction with the publication of Devour Me Again: Collected Poems and Song Lyrics by Bambi Lake, the event combined personal testimony, communal history, reflections on free theater, and a sometimes difficult assessment of Bambi Lake’s life and legacy. The discussion was less a chronological history than a collective act of remembrance, with the panelists moving between political context, theatrical practice, communal life, humor, affection, disagreement, and grief.
Cristina Mitra, program manager of the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, introduced the evening as a celebration of both the Angels of Light and Bambi Lake. She described the audience as “a room full of friends, lovers, just family in all kinds of ways,” establishing the program as a gathering of an extended community rather than simply a formal historical presentation. August Bernadicou framed the discussion in explicitly contemporary terms: “The world’s falling apart, and we need to know history.” He characterized the Angels as a troupe devoted to “free theater, communal living, and dedicating themselves to their craft.”
Gay liberation, antiwar activism, and the search for an alternative life
The opening discussion situated the Angels of Light within the political upheavals of the late 1960s. Tahara recalled arriving in San Francisco from Texas during the Summer of Love and becoming involved almost immediately in early gay liberation activity in Berkeley. He described participating in a provocative street performance outside the student union and, a week later, a public “kiss-in” involving men kissing one another. The response to the first performance, he remembered, was stunned silence. For Tahara, these actions marked “the beginning of gay liberation in Berkeley,” occurring in the same period as similar movements in New York and Los Angeles.
Greg Cruikshank placed his own development within the antiwar movement. Arriving in San Francisco at approximately sixteen, he had already been active in Students for a Democratic Society. Young men faced the possibility of being drafted for Vietnam while being denied the vote until age twenty-one. He remembered protest as a unifying force and cited the influence of figures and movements including Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Mario Savio, the Black Panthers, and the Free Speech Movement.
For Greg, joining the Angels was therefore not simply an artistic choice. It represented an alternative to incorporation into the social and political establishment and to becoming “fodder” for the war. The Angels “romanticized” the possibility of another way of living and, in his words, “gave us a sanctuary.” The formulation is important: the troupe was not only a performance collective but also a refuge for young people attempting to escape war, compulsory masculinity, family expectations, and the prescribed course of adult life.
Beaver Bauer’s discovery of a creative family
Beaver Bauer gave the most extended account of what joining the Angels meant personally. She described herself as “a lost kid” who had dropped out of college and could not imagine how she fit into the available world. After meeting Rodney Price on New York’s Lower East Side, she hitchhiked to San Francisco with two friends and her dog, arriving with almost no money and no stable place to live.
Hibiscus (George Harris) was the main catalyst for the formation of the Angels of Light. Beaver described her first encounter with Hibiscus as transformative. Seeing him coming down the street, she remembered feeling “like the air around me changed,” as though there were “crystals in the air.” Hibiscus immediately invited Beaver and her friends to become the “Flory Dory girls” in a show. Beaver recalled: “I was ready. I signed up. I wanted it all.”
What she found in the Angels was “my creative family”—a setting in which drawing, costume, dance, scenery, performance, and self-invention could be explored without rigid boundaries. One could decide, “One day I’m going to be this,” and the next day dress as something else. Drag and costume were therefore not simply visual embellishments; they were techniques for discovering previously unexpressed dimensions of the personality.
Beaver described this process as one of transformation:
“It was really a lot about transformation and the ability to transform yourself, learn from that transformation, and share it with other people.”
The aspiration was not merely individual self-expression. By performing transformation publicly, the Angels might encourage audiences to recognize their own freedom to change. Beaver also emphasized that the distinction between theater and daily existence disappeared: “The area between live performance [and the] street was seamless. There were no edges to it.” The Angels became, in her assessment, “the singular most complete expressive voice I ever had.”
Free theater as an anti-capitalist practice
When asked what issues mattered to the Angels, Greg identified their refusal to charge admission as foundational. The goal was “to make free theater and not charge at the door.” Free performance constituted a direct alternative to the establishment because it demonstrated that “there could be something for nothing.”
Greg stressed that the Angels wanted the audience to be astonished not only by the spectacle but by the fact that the spectacle had been produced and offered freely. “You could do a lot with the back of a refrigerator carton and some glitter,” he said. Beneath the extravagant theatrical surfaces was a social invitation: audiences could imagine joining an alternative community and separating themselves, at least partially, from the mainstream.
Beaver expanded the meaning of “Free” beyond admission prices. The Angels taught free classes in their studio and welcomed people into productions if they appeared consistently and rehearsed seriously. Members exchanged instruction in tap dance, African dance, mime, Bharatanatyam, martial arts, and other forms. The company’s openness was not synonymous with carelessness: rehearsals were long and disciplined, and people were expected not to arrive intoxicated.
She associated these activities with the principle of selfless service—serving others without claiming personal credit or directing attention toward oneself. Programs often omitted dates and individual credits. Beaver explained that the members “weren’t there to seek individual fame,” and she found the resulting anonymity liberating.
This discussion revealed a significant tension that reappeared later in the treatment of Bambi Lake. The Angels’ collective ethos discouraged personal ownership and individual fame, while Bambi, according to the panelists, possessed an intense lifelong desire to become famous. That difference was not directly analyzed during the event, but it provides an important context for understanding Bambi’s later ambitions and frustrations.
Kaliflower, Irving Rosenthal, Hibiscus, and the underground commune network
Asked about Kaliflower and its relationship to the Angels, Tahara gave an informal history of the post–Summer of Love communal milieu. He described the Haight-Ashbury scene as having collapsed or gone underground as the original street culture deteriorated. Many people moved into more stable communal households.
Tahara connected Hibiscus to Irving Rosenthal’s commune and printing operation. He described Irving as a former New York Beat associated with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, as well as the author of Sheeper. Irving brought a printing press to San Francisco and began publishing a newsletter for the commune community. Tahara also connected Hibiscus’s theatrical development to Irving’s unfinished film Ona Toy and to the influence of filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith. In Tahara’s account, the film’s costumes and theatrical play helped stimulate Hibiscus’s experimentation with drag. Tahara’s remarks conveyed the essential relationship between Beat culture, communal living, underground printing, psychedelic experimentation, and the emergence of the Angels’ theatrical aesthetic.
Beaver later returned to the larger intercommunal network. She described the Free Food Family with Hunga Dunga Commune distributing food to the communes according to need rather than strictly according to each household’s contribution. Communes pooled resources and experimented with vegetarianism, veganism, and alternative food practices. The Kaliflower Commune distributed the intercommunal newspaper of the same name by hand. Kaliflower carried a heterogeneous mixture of information—recipes, sexual advice, practical hygiene, and reviews of Angels performances. Beaver called it “a really, really profound way of sharing.”
Tahara summarized the period by saying that after the Summer of Love, San Francisco “went underground.” For artists, he said, it was “like being in Paris in the ’20s”—an intensely fertile and magical creative environment.
Creativity, collective intimacy, and the effect on audiences
Beaver described the Angels as a place where she could exercise every part of her creative imagination. A member might paint scenery, choreograph a number, invent a dance, write dialogue, construct a character, and perform. “What a lucky thing to be able to make things up for your life,” she reflected.
She believed the shows used comedy, irony, exaggeration, and absurdity to communicate meanings deeper than their surfaces suggested. Their “over the top and preposterous” quality did not make them frivolous. Rather, ridiculousness provided a means of delivering poetic and political messages without being preachy.
As evidence of the performances’ emotional power, Beaver recalled an audience member attending Holy Cow with the ashes of a deceased friend. The person later told her that the performance had created an extraordinarily happy moment. Beaver was deeply moved by the idea that the show could become part of someone’s grieving and remembrance.
Greg emphasized that the force of the Angels came from the combination of their individual energies and from the fact that they knew one another as family. An audience was not merely seeing a theatrical production but witnessing “something very intimate.” The boundary between observer and participant remained porous: someone might join a show or become drawn further into the communal world surrounding it. He summarized what an Angels performance communicated as “a sense of community, a sense of creativity, and a sense of magic.”
Revolution as living outside prescribed boundaries
Asked what “revolution” meant within the Angels, Beaver answered in personal and cultural rather than narrowly institutional terms. Revolution meant “living outside the lines of life that were set down to us.” Relationships did not have to conform to inherited definitions; they could become “anything” and still be “valid and beautiful and wonderful.”
She also celebrated the Angels’ resourcefulness. They were “scrappy,” making spectacular theatrical worlds out of scavenged materials: “You didn’t have to have a lot of money. You didn’t have to have all the resources in the world. If you had a desire to do it and the energy to do it, you could make it happen.” The transformation of cardboard into India became a metaphor for the larger project: “Anything could become anything.”
The communal household extended the same principle into daily life. Members dumpster-dived, shopped at thrift stores, and maintained a communal drag room. Before performances, people from throughout the city might arrive to borrow clothes, including people the household did not know. Garments circulated freely and did not always return.
The house also fed approximately thirty people on some evenings. Members and visitors sat in a circle and took turns serving food to one another. Beaver described caring for others as “a real point of pride.” The free theater, communal wardrobe, shared food, and open household were therefore not separate activities. Together they constituted an integrated practice of collective life.
Family, belonging, and the costs of leaving conventional life
Greg returned repeatedly to the importance of substitute family. Many members had taken a major step by coming to San Francisco and joining the counterculture. In doing so, they risked losing relationships with families who would not accept them.
The Angels provided an alternative kinship structure: “You had a community, and you had a good time. You had an abundance of food, and we had family, and we nurtured children.” For a time, this world existed outside the establishment while sustaining “an amazing amount of creativity and humor and love.”
This description complicates conventional accounts that treat the Angels principally as a drag or theater troupe. The panelists represented them as a household, a school, a family, a free cultural institution, and a refuge. Their performances were public expressions of relationships and practices already being enacted in everyday communal life.
Ralph “Fifi” Sauer and the role of humor
Beaver and Tahara paused to remember Ralph Sauer, known as Fifi, as one of the Angels’ most inventive and comic performers. Beaver described him as even funnier at home than onstage. He knew show tunes, created masks and costumes, and devised absurd visual effects, such as appearing with numerous arms attached to his back and a baby-bottle nipple on his bare stomach.
For Beaver, this exemplified the Angels’ ability “to take everything and give it a little turn.” Tahara credited Ralph with appearing in women’s clothes while retaining a beard and mustache even before Hibiscus and praised his verbal humor, including such titles as “Turban Renewal” for one of the Angels’ shows.
Greg added that the presence of someone like Ralph helped members feel that they were not “doing the wrong thing.” Humor normalized their departure from conventional behavior and relieved the emotional burden of separation from family and mainstream society.
The creation of Parasites Under the Bourgeoisie
Greg offered Parasites Under the Bourgeoisie as an example of how an Angels production developed. Set against a fantastical version of the French Revolution, the show emerged from constant meetings in which members attempted to determine how to embody revolutionary ideas theatrically.
One element involved an approaching plague. Looking back, Greg found the motif disturbingly prophetic: the production imagined a community preparing for a plague without knowing that an actual epidemic would later devastate their world. Although he did not name AIDS directly, the historical reference was evident in his observation that the plague would “impact everyone for quite a while.”
Tahara described the show as fundamentally anti-capitalist. Its revolutionary message was conveyed through extravagant comedy: Adrian Brooks appeared as Countess Flushett wearing a giant toilet on her head, while another costume incorporated a statue of a small boy urinating into the Countess’s headpiece. The absurdity required extensive collective planning. Greg recalled that they had needed many meetings to determine how to accomplish it.
The story demonstrated that the apparently spontaneous chaos of an Angels production rested upon rehearsal, deliberation, technical ingenuity, and choreographic discipline.
Bambi Lake: talent, reinvention, ambition, addiction, and pain
The final section of the evening’s discussion shifted to Bambi Lake and was markedly more difficult and contentious. August presented a video he had created as a student at the University of San Francisco, featuring Bambi singing “Jaded Lady,” and read the lyrics to her “The Golden Age of Hustlers.” The panelists then attempted to reconcile Bambi’s artistic gifts with the instability, addiction, mental distress, and interpersonal conflict of her later life.
Tahara remembered Bambi’s early years in the Angels as those of a “sweet, kind person”—a capable singer, dancer, and performer. During a European tour with Hibiscus, Rodney, Beaver, and Greg, Bambi remained in Berlin and began living openly as a woman. Tahara’s account emphasized work in strip clubs, subsequent prostitution, methamphetamine use, and a severe personal decline. [Note: August subsequently clarified that, according to Bambi’s autobiography, she went to Europe twice with the Angels. She stayed in Berlin the second time, not when she went with Greg and Beaver.]
Greg corrected parts of Tahara’s narrative. He said that Bambi worked in Berlin with the well-known performer Romy Haag and that obtaining hormones and developing breasts were connected to the seriousness with which Bambi pursued female performance. Greg stressed that Bambi’s gender history should not be reduced to a simple or complete medical transition.
Beaver argued for a more encompassing view. She described Bambi’s life as composed of “huge swings” and “incredible dichotomies.” The proper film about Bambi, she suggested, would have to include the struggles, the aspirations, the glories, the vulgarity, and the refined artistry.
She remembered the young performer first known as Johnny Dancer as “the most slender, ethereal” figure, with a beautiful voice and an elevated, almost Kabuki-like manner. She also remembered Bambi holding Beaver’s infant son and singing “Angel Baby” to him on stage. These memories existed alongside later encounters with someone whom friends might avoid on the street or fear would arrive at their workplace.
Beaver therefore called for recognition of the “whole round story” of Bambi Lake—not an idealized icon and not simply a collection of scandalous anecdotes.
A generational divide over Bambi’s meaning
Tahara identified a revealing generational difference. Younger people, he observed, often see Bambi as “an iconic rebel” for whom boundaries did not exist and for whom everything was immediate and authentic. Members of Bambi’s own generation, by contrast, may view the story more tragically—as a life marked by failure, damage, and unrealized promise.
Greg responded by emphasizing Bambi’s severe psychological suffering. Because of their shared history and affection, friends could tolerate behavior that might otherwise have signaled an urgent need for intervention. He suggested that communities must recognize when a beloved person’s conduct reflects serious mental or behavioral-health problems and help find “an avenue” for someone presenting such a “conflicted,” “painful,” and “confused persona.”
Tahara clarified that the criticism was not directed against Bambi’s transgender identity but toward the pain of the individual person. Beaver agreed that Bambi’s life could be instructive for others experiencing pain and confusion: “It isn’t always a walk in the park.” Bambi, she said, “hit every note that could possibly be hit,” and therein lay the profundity of what her life might offer the world.
Fame desired and fame deferred
The panelists repeatedly returned to Bambi’s longing for fame. Beaver said that Bambi wanted to be “famous, famous, famous, famous”—a household name. Greg’s final story illustrated both Bambi’s talent and the obstacles that repeatedly frustrated her ambitions.
While living in London, Bambi informally attended classes at the London Institute of Fashion and learned tambour work, a technique for applying sequins to cloth with a hooked needle. She created a beautiful sample panel and planned to show it to Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba organization in the hope of obtaining bespoke work. Bambi traveled across London to present it, only to discover upon arrival that she had left the panel on the Underground.
For Greg, the incident encapsulated the difficulty of Bambi’s path toward fame: formidable ability and ambition were repeatedly undermined by disorganization, instability, or circumstance.
August added that Bambi had been sober during the final four years of her life and had begun performing again. Tahara, however, remembered her during this period as burdened by self-hatred and afraid to leave home because she believed people despised her. The contrast between renewed performance and profound isolation was left unresolved.
An audience member, Austin Kevin Roach, closed the remembrance on a more intimate note. He recalled sewing and beadwork with Bambi and regretted not having provided her with new dresses when she lacked performance clothes. He resisted dismissing her as merely “weird,” insisting instead that she was “a very, very talented person” whom he missed personally.
Principal conclusions
The discussion portrayed the Angels of Light as far more than an experimental theater troupe. In the panelists’ recollections, the Angels constituted:
- a sanctuary from war, homophobia, conventional masculinity, and family rejection;
- an alternative family built through communal residence, shared food, collective care, and the raising of children;
- a free cultural institution offering performances, instruction, clothing, food, and creative participation without monetary exchange;
- a laboratory for gender, costume, relationship, and personal transformation;
- an artistic expression of the broader Kaliflower intercommunal network;
- and a disciplined collective whose extravagant theatrical effects were created from scavenged materials, prolonged rehearsal, and continuous meetings.
The panelists did not present a romanticized picture without contradiction. They acknowledged alcohol and drug use, conflict, instability, domineering personalities, and the psychological costs endured by members. Yet even these darker recollections reinforced the importance of the communal structures the Angels attempted to create.
Bambi Lake’s legacy exposed the deepest tensions in the evening. To younger admirers, she may represent uncompromised rebellion, gender freedom, and artistic authenticity. To those who knew her over decades, she also represented addiction, mental suffering, frustrated ambition, and the limits of what friendship and communal tolerance could repair. Beaver’s demand that people remember the “whole round story” supplied the most balanced conclusion. Bambi’s talent, tenderness, excess, pain, aspiration, destructiveness, and survival cannot be separated without falsifying the life.
Taken as a whole, the event was an act of living communal history. Its value lay not in producing a single authoritative account but in preserving the differences among people who shared the experience. Beaver spoke primarily of transformation, creativity, and care; Greg emphasized political context, family, collective intimacy, and psychological complexity; Tahara supplied irreverent anecdote, historical detail, and blunt judgment. Their disagreements were themselves evidence of the continuing life of the Angels of Light—not as a settled legend, but as a community whose members are still determining what their experiment meant.
I thought the discussion added an important dimension to the history of the Angels that is often missing. The surviving photographs, programs, and reviews convey the extraordinary visual spectacle, but the memories of Beaver, Greg, and Tahara revealed the lived experience beneath it: the Angels as creative family, communal household, sanctuary, school, and practice of Free. Performance and daily life were intertwined. Their discussion helped explain not merely what the Angels did, but what the Angels were.
Prepared by Eric, August 1, 2026
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