Hibiscus (entertainer)

Boston recalled the moment in a 2005 interview in Curio magazine:.mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}

Hibiscus died of Kaposi's sarcoma due to complications from AIDS on May 6, 1982, at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. He was an early AIDS casualty; at the time of his death the new illness was still referred to as GRID.

When the Cockettes wanted to start charging for their shows, Hibiscus left, believing all shows should be free, and formed the Angels of Light in San Francisco, which gave many free theatrical performances in the early 1970s in San Francisco and New York City. After moving back to New York, he put together a number of off-off Broadway revues, of which Sky High ran the longest. He also appeared in a daytime soap opera under his birth name. 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.

He was widely seen in Flower Power (1967), a photograph taken during a major anti-Vietnam War protest in Washington, DC. He was photographed putting flowers into the gun barrels of the MPs.

In 1967, George Harris III and his father appeared in New York in the Off-Off-Broadway play Gorilla Queen by Ronald Tavel.

On October 21, 1967, Hibiscus (then George Harris) joined the March on the Pentagon, an anti-war march intended to "levitate" the Pentagon. He appears in Bernie Boston's Pulitzer Prize-nominated photograph, Flower Power; he was the turtleneck sweater-wearing protester photographed putting flowers into the gun barrels of a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne).

In 1964, the family returned to New York. Harris appeared in commercials, and started acting in television. In 1966 he performed in an Off Broadway play titled Peace Creeps by John Wolfson, with Al Pacino and James Earl Jones.

1960's counter-culture member Paul Krassner, in a blog entry he did not post until a week after Bernie Boston died in 2008 (and three years after Boston was quoted in Curio), states that the young man in the photo was Joel Tornabene, a leader of the Youth International Party; in addition to Boston, both Harris/Hibiscus and Tornabene were dead before Krassner posted this statement.

Hibiscus (born George Edgerly Harris III; September 6, 1949 – May 6, 1982) was an American actor and performance artist. 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.

Harris was born in Bronxville, New York in 1949 to George Harris II and Ann M. Harris. The family moved to Clearwater Beach, Florida. The Harris parents became interested in theater and began performing with a local community theater called "The Little Theater". George and his siblings started a children's theater troupe, the El Dorado Players.