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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 151
Male symbolism was also encoded in their machine-gun taps and their military
drills. The Rockettes were phallic, impersonal women performing tasks normally
associated with the masculine. What happens to our understanding of the
fetishization of the female body when the signifier is a gay man? Fetishism or
transvestism? Or both?
Once the signified is attached to a gay signifier, then the Rockettes can be
understood as trans-transvestites. Gender codes were in this way disrupted as
women became boys in what might be conceptualized as cross-cross-dressing,
that is, women cast as men—complete with phalluses and military moves—yet
devoid of any personality in their veiled womanhood. I suggest that, like
Liberace, the Rockettes were unmarked transvestites. Until today, gay men often
remain closeted in order to secure work, and thus they must mask their object of
desire. Phallic women can then stand for men masquerading as women in
perpetual displacements of sexual identity. The only way gay desire can be
signified within a heterosexual frame is in the guise of heterosexuality itself. Few
scholars writing on fetishism have interrogated the sexual identity of the socalled
“fetishizer” and what effect that would have on signification. I cannot but
read one of Liberace’s reported encounters with Mae West as just this kind of
displacement of identity and desire:
Finally, the big question came. One of the reporters asked, “Miss West,
where are you and Liberace going after this reception?”
She smiled and said, as only she could, “I’m going over to Liberace’s
home to see his gold organ. I’ve seen every other kind, but I’ve never seen
a gold one before.”
…When it was over she did come back to my home and she loved it. As
she walked into one room after another, she kept repeating, “It’s me. It’s me.”
“No,” I said, “It’s me.”
…And for the finish I showed her my gold organ. I not only showed it to
her… I played it for her.
(Liberace 150–151).
CONCLUSION
The disruption of social hierarchies was a common leitmotif running throughout
the Easter Show. Both Liberace and the Rockettes in their own ways served to
disrupt gender codes. And Liberace consistently undermined the construction of
value and taste, particularly in his blending of popular and classical music, but
also in other ways as well. As America’s blue-collar royalty Liberace worked
hard for what he got and, with what he got, he was privileged to hobnob with the
likes of Queen Elizabeth and Baron Hilton, confounding class structures. As a
kitsch Rockefeller, he was a capitalist of exaggerated style and little substance. His
style was his substance, but as Dick Hebdige has shown us style is a form of refusal
(3, passim). With his own philanthropies, foundation, museum, and material