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6
THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE
AMERICA
Liberace and the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall
Margaret Thompson Drewal
To be natural, as Wilde observed, is such a very difficult pose to keep
up. The result is camp: the whole gay masquerade of men and
women who self-consciously act; who flaunt incongruous allusions,
parodies, transvestite travesties; who are still sanely aware of the
gap between their feelings and their roles; who continue to
proliferate a protean, and never normative, range of fantasies in
social dramas of their own choosing.
Harold Beaver (106)
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: