Cross-dressing public performers embodied a revolution that street-level Maoist radicals rejected with violence.

Evidence

Even out of the play, perhaps especially out of the play, Jackie was a star—what the Diggers would call a “life actor.” … Curtis, the grandchild of Second Avenue saloon proprietress “Slugger” Ann Uglialoro, was a one-person revolution: … [Touring] St. Mark’s Place at midnight with Jackie offers a revelation about the longhaired political activists who regard themselves as street guerrillas of the new people’s revolution. They jeer at and threaten Jackie with the backlash zeal of a bunch of uptight goons. … But Jackie sails through the machismo of the Che-Mao country unperturbed, with the confidence of one who know that she is riding the wave of the future. History is on her side. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1534

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the counterculture’s internal fissures (gender revolution vs. Maoist street politics) fractured the downtown scene — relevant to the two-part Subcultures → Countercultures structure.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘The avant-garde’s gender revolution happened in the same streets where the political radicals jeered it’ — how the vanguard and the political left split over which revolution was real.