What became of that young hippie putting flowers in the gun?
A Life magazine specialty edition hit newsstands last week. It is titled, “The Vietnam Wars/50 Years Ago — Two Countries Torn Apart.” The cover features two photographs from 1967; a battlefield image by David Douglas Duncan, and a photo by Bernie Boston depicting a young man inserting flowers into the gun barrels of armed soldiers at a Pentagon anti-war demonstration.
On October 21, 1967, Mr. Boston’s photo of the brave, peace-loving teenager in a turtleneck sweater putting flowers into the gun barrels of military police went far beyond being a runner up for the Pulitzer Prize. This iconic moment captured Allen Ginsberg’s anti-war catchphrase of the 1960s, “Flower Power.”
Mr. Boston told Alice Ashe of Curio magazine in 2005, “I saw the troops march down into the sea of people, and I was ready for it. One soldier lost his rifle. Another lost his helmet. 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. With his right hand he began placing the flowers into the barrels of the soldiers’ guns. ‘He came out of nowhere,’ says Boston, ‘and it took me years to find out who he was . . . his name was Harris.'”
That hippie was my brother, George Harris III. He was 18 years of age at that historic moment. His entire life’s work can also be described as an example of Flower Power and free expression. In the mid-1960s, my parents, George Harris, Sr. and Ann Harris, and my five siblings, brought a unique brand of original musical theater from our Florida garage to the coffee house stages of Manhattan’s West Village. There we, as a family, collaborated with future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights, revolutionary directors and stars of today at the beginning of their careers including Bette Midler, James Earl Jones, Diane Keaton, Tim Robbins, and many others. Within a few years of leaving Florida, members of our theatrical family were working actors on Broadway, (Hair, The Great White Hope, and The Porcelain Year), and on television, radio and film.
Soon after Boston’s photo was taken, my brother George left for San Francisco, changed his name to Hibiscus and announced his own outlandish style of gender-bending fashion by founding the Cockettes. This flamboyant, psychedelic theater troupe became the subject and name of a critically acclaimed 2002 documentary film by David Weissman and Bill Weber. Free theater and spiritual liberation were Hibiscus’ calling. Next he created a new theatrical group, the Angels of Light, which included the originator of those powerful words “Flower Power,” Allen Ginsberg, in drag.
Hibiscus moved his Angels of Lighttroupe to the thriving West Village of 1972. Childhood theatrical friend to our family and Oscar-winning actor, Tim Robbins, remembers it this way: “They were doing things in the 1970’s that had not been done before. No one had lived as large in the utter joy of free expression as the Angels. They brought it like rock stars.”
In the early 1980s, Hibiscus, myself and our other two sisters (Jayne Anne and Eloise) formed the glitter-rock group, Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets. While preparing to record an album and shoot a video, Hibiscus became severely ill. His 1982 death from AIDS made him one of the first casualties of the disease. As depicted in a film by Ira Sachs called Last Address, which marks the disappearance of a generation of New York artists who died of AIDS, George Harris III/Hibiscus was a devoted West Villager to the end. He died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village at thirty-two years of age. I miss him. His life story is recounted in our family memoir, Caravan to Oz: a family reinvents itself off-off-Broadway. http://www.caravantooz.com .
