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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 129
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….
An aged widow in St. Paul wrote: “I feel sorry for your mother. Now she
will have to share the adoration you give her.” A woman in Detroit
inquired: “How can you think of marriage? You belong to us.” A Monroe,
Louisiana, fan reasoned: “Everything a man is, he owes to his mother. A
wife would never make the sacrifices a mother would.” A Gardena,
California, woman wrote: “Your appeal is the fact that you’re single. If you
have to get married, pick a plain type, not a glamour girl.”
(Thomas 99–100)
A 1954 fan magazine reported that Liberace had been engaged to marry three
times (Thomas 93–94). As long as his gay identity was displaced to the son’s
devout loyalty to his mother, Liberace could represent a liberal democracy’s ideal
offspring: hard-working and successful, who went from rags to riches and who
remained dedicated to his mother both emotionally and financially, buying her
houses and clothes.
Even today, gays in the entertainment industry must remain closeted, and they
must work in the interests of dominant culture. As Vito Russo put it, “Hollywood
is where a gay director makes anti-homosexual films so that he can continue to
work with the big boys” (322). Productions at Radio City Music Hall were not
explicitly anti-homosexual. Rather they were stripped of any gay identity in
order to serve capitalist interests. When corporate capitalism appropriates Camp
in its own interests and then poses as its signifier, then the representation bears
only the residue of Camp politics. Detached in this way from a gay subject
position, Liberace’s performances constituted what Moe Meyer calls residual
camp or “the camp trace.” Another highly successful son, long-time
choreographer and originator of the Rockettes, Russell Markert, also remained
single and lived with his mother. If Markert was a closeted gay man or even if he
merely refused the compulsory heterosexist choice by remaining a “bachelor”
(Sedgwick 193), then the Rockettes, too, can be read as residual camp.
It is in this light that I would like to reexamine the performance of Liberace
and the Rockettes “in the heart of corporate capitalism” (see Drewal). First, I
will explore how their performance served the interests of corporate capitalism
through the agency of spectacle. In so doing, I deal at some length with spectacle
as a replication of the authority of state and marketplace. In the second part,
then, I reread these performances as indexical of the “gay regard” (Worman
1991), a subject position that holds out the possibility of subverting and
extending the rhetoric of sign systems by flooding dominant discourse with
Camp residues and traces that contaminate and pollute those systems through the