ABSTRACT
But what happens when Camp performance is detached from its gay identity and that identity is displaced or put under erasure?1 Or, from another angle, if gay signifying practices serve to critique dominant heterosexist and patriarchal ideology through inversion, parody, travesty, and the displacement of binary gender codes, then what happens when those practices are severed from their gay signifier and put into the service of the very patriarchal and heterosexist ideology of capitalism that Camp politics seeks to disrupt and contest? In this essay I address these two questions with regard to productions at Rockefeller Center’s Radio City Music Hall, in particular the Easter Show featuring Liberace and the Rockettes. Public acknowledgment that Liberace was gay came only shortly after his death in 1987. Liberace masked his sexual preferences from his public, and indeed in 1959 he won a libel suit against a British critic who implied he was homosexual. Not that the critic was unable to prove Liberace’s sexual preferences, but rather Liberace’s lawyer was able to prove that the review defamed the star’s character. Liberace’s audiences, largely middle-and lower-middle-class women over forty and their husbands, participated in what Michael Thompson in Rubbish Theory (1979) has called “a conspiracy of blindness” (2, passim). An overt homosexual identity would have been unacceptable to Liberace’s blue-collar, heterosexual, and homophobic audiences, who preferred not to view him as gay, but instead focused on his devotion to his mother, an image that Liberace himself promoted (Plate 12).2 When Liberace was engaged to be married in the early 1950s, he publicized the purported response of his fans:
On the day news broke of a possible wedding, the fan mail was flooded with calls from all over the country. “Is it true?” women asked, and when the news was confirmed, they broke into sobs. The outpouring of dismay overwhelmed the secretaries who handled the six thousand weekly letters sent to Liberace. Eighty percent of the writers were adamant that Liberace should remain a bachelor….
