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150 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie
Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12, 1921….
There must be something wrong with us that our teenagers longing for
sex and our middle-aged matrons fed up with sex, alike fall for such a sugary
mountain of jingling clap-trap wrapped up in such a preposterous clown.
(qtd in Liberace 204–205).
This review instigated a libel suit that Liberace won. In order for Liberace’s
ambiguous sexual subtext to remain closeted, he was forced to confront his critic
publicly.
Liberace came closest to revealing his gay identity onstage when he
announced that he would play “Mack the Knife” “straight” before turning it into
a “classic.” “Mack the Knife” is gendered male—definitely phallic. Liberace’s
“classic” renditions included “Mack the Knife Sonata in C Major” by Mozart,
“Claire de Lune de Mack the Knife” by Debussy, and “Blue Mack the Knife
Danube” by Strauss. The very status of the identities of the music is thrown out
of kilter. A stylistic cross-dresser so to speak, “Mack the Knife” was a
transvestite tune. The vestments Liberace put on him were by implication
hierarchically superior, that is, classical. Never mind that the music was already
from an opera before it was popularized. This kind of identity fiddling is the
hallmark of drag. Playing “Mack the Knife” straight before cross-dressing him
commented on the absurd way in which essential identities themselves are
constructed rather than given. Liberace’s musical antics can be read as a critique
of the depth. model of identity on which gender distinctions are based.
The Rockettes in their own way confounded gender distinctions too. They
were never as glitzy as Liberace. Nor did they portray any distinctive
personalities. In their focus on uniformity, they were not individuated, but rather
turned into a massive military machine. Nor were they icons of femininity;
rather, they represented the smooth workings of industrial capitalism, male
bonding, automation, and the labor force. They could do so precisely because of
their phallic attributes and the denial of individuality. They were fetishized, or
were they? If fetishization is the symbolic attribution of a penis to a woman out
of the heterosexual man’s fear of sexual difference, then the status of the
Rockettes as fetish is at best problematic.
Transvestism shares with the concept of fetishism an additive procedure. That
is, in male transvestism, female clothes are added literally to veil that which is
present, the penis (Garber 342–344). Garber has argued, “because human
sexuality is constructed through repression, the signifier of desire cannot be
represented directly, but only under a veil” (343). Fetishism is also additive, in this
case to displace what in psychoanalytic terms has been construed as a “lack,” or
an absence.
But like transvestism, the addition is never a direct representation. It is
encoded through metaphor, in the case of the Rockettes, by their downstage high
kicks that were “straight” and went “up like rockets” to climax their dances.