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The key value, however, among these seemingly contradictory ones was selfreliance
(Hsu 384–386). Liberace was the self-made man from humble
beginnings. And even though the Rockettes were seemingly dependent on each
other, that is not how their originator Markert thought of them. He looked for
self-reliant women (Roman 89). And, by the same token, a lack of self-reliance
could get a Rockette fired, for it was a cardinal rule that a Rockette never “hung”
or “leaned” on her neighbors in line (Love 40). As in other Rockefeller
organizations, the smooth workings of the whole required efficient, self-sufficient
units (Brown 51).
What the Easter Show at Radio City Music Hall promoted was a break from
work in order for the tourist to rediscover the spirit of work. This spirit was not
merely symbolic, but was felt. Through the agency of spectacle, the production
engendered a spontaneous sense of community in the audience, an idea that was
expressed metaphorically onstage by the Rockettes. Perhaps more important—in
the process it bound the collective to the ideology of corporate capitalism. This
ideology was expressed at all levels in the sacrilized environment in the display
of the fruits of man’s labors: in material wealth, in technology, in precision
teamwork. The Easter Show at Radio City Music Hall celebrated corporate
capitalism as America’s spiritual center, and it was persuasive through
spectacle’s power to engender communitas or, as Rothafel would have had it,
mass thought and appeal (1932b).
READING THE RESIDUE
As Harold Beaver has observed, the homosexual
THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 147
is a prodigious consumer [and I might add producer] of signs—of hidden
meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common
code impels the frenzied quest: in the momentary glimpse, the scrambled
figure, the sporadic gesture, the chance encounter, the reverse image, the
sudden slippage, the lowered guard.
(104–105, emphasis mine)
What happens to representation when the signified is reattached to the gay
signifier, that is, when it becomes explicitly indexical of the “gay regard”? In
brief, alternative readings of Liberace and the Rockettes become available,
readings not necessarily accessible to a heterosexual, lower middle-/middle-class
audience seduced by the desire for material wealth. What happens then when
dominant discourse is flooded with Camp residues and traces? This is the
question I will address for the remainder of this essay.
Not only did Liberace’s private sexual practices run counter to the dominant
code, but onstage his gay identity was hidden. Both Liberace and Markert were
“bachelors”; they emphasized their relationship to their mothers. They were also
presented as fathers and mentors. Markert constructed himself as a father figure