No individual exemplified the glass closets of my youth, where everyone knew someone was gay but no one would admit it in public, with more vivacious audacity than the pianist and entertainer Liberace.
I have fond memories of watching him, with more than a little confusion, performing on the television in my grandparent’s house in the 1970s.
A recent article on Slate highlighted this animated version of an interview with Liberace, including his rationalization that he dressed so flamboyantly because of a 1960s fashion trend where “The male peacock is beginning to show his true plumage.” He then segues from the attention on his outrageousness, and any potential danger of revealing himself as gay, by invoking Reagan-esque attitudes about hard work and perseverance. (No really, he invokes Reagan, then governor of California.) It all makes for a fascinating timepiece:
For young people who do not know him or his story, and everyone who does, too, I recommend the brilliant HBO movie Behind the Candelabra with Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his chauffeur and clandestine lover. It is a beautiful movie that really captures the story and times admirably and with surprising respect. Watch on HBO or on Amazon.
Throughout his career, Liberace claimed he was not gay. In fact in 1957, a London newspaper wrote that he was:
…the summit of sex — the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love…
Liberace sued that newspaper for libel, and won, claiming he had never committed a gay sex act.
Liberace smoking in a London rehearsal room. (Allan Warren, 1968)
To this day he remains one of my favorite queer progenitors, but his story leaves me with profoundly mixed feelings. (Freddy Mercury of Queen is another, for similar reasons.)
On the one hand, I love Liberace’s pluck and absolutely admire his talents and truly groundbreaking success. He managed to be the ultimate male peacock, to use his own words for it, at a time when society was successfully tormenting most gay people into cowed conformity. He lived his life his way in great big style, and I can only admire him for that.
On the other hand, Liberace was never able to break out of his closet, even as he lay dying from a disease being spread among a group of people he denied he was one of. Liberace died of AIDS, in 1987, after swearing his wasting was caused by a watermelon diet.
If he could have just stepped out of that closet for a moment before his death, like the actor Rock Hudson was able to do, Liberace could have affected countless blue-haired old ladies who still thought of gay people as monsters, and therefore believed gay lives had no value. That one additional brave step would have been the perfect ending flourish to a lifetime defined by boldness, and he could have gone down in history as a hero for human rights, and be remembered as more than a near-buffoon entertainer.
In the end, Liberace remains one of my favorite funny uncles… one of the batshit crazy ones I was left admiring and marveling at without ever really understanding. He was the kind of gay man from my grandparents generation who always left me puzzling about the kinship we seemed to both share, and not share, at the same time.
R.I.P, Uncle Władziu Valentino Liberace. Some of us still remember you with great fondness and bedazzlement, just as you would have wished.
As a side note, back when I was a young pup I really loved the song Mr. Sandman. It was just one of those tunes that got stuck in my head and played over and over again, so much that I used to wonder what it was about the lyrics that so drew me in. Only in retrospect can I see that experience as an early indication of my not-quite-yet-budding homosexuality, wishing for just the right man to hold. And only on re-listening many years later did I realize that 1950s song named Liberace as a heterosexual ideal, at least for the kind of women could really harmonize.
Here is a classic version with animated subtitles from The Chordettes. The reference to Liberace’s luxuriant hair is at the 1:51 mark. Enjoy!
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