Rocking the Closet

How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music

Vincent L Stephens

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051661
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public assume—but not see—their queerness. That these artists cultivated ambiguous sexual personas often reflected an understandable fear, but also a struggle to fulfill personal and professional expectations.Vincent L. Stephens confronts notions of the closet—both coming out and staying in—by analyzing the careers of Liberace, Johnny Mathis, Johnnie Ray, and Little Richard. Appealing to audiences hungry for novelty and exoticism, the four pop icons used performance and queering techniques that ran the gamut. Liberace's flamboyance shared a spectrum with Mathis's intimate sensitivity while Ray's overwrought displays as "Mr. Emotion" seemed worlds apart from Little Richard's raise-the-roof joyousness. As Stephens shows, the quartet not only thrived in an era of gray flannel manhood, they pioneered the ways generations of later musicians would consciously adopt sexual mystery as an appealing and proven route to success.

CHAPTER ONE

Visibly Hidden

Postwar Disorientation, Queer Community, and Queer Ambivalence

THE NEWNESS OF THE post–World War II culture fundamentally meant varieties of subcultures were being incubated within or in parallel to the dominant mainstream culture of the time. The postwar era is as much about Beat culture, civil rights activism, nascent second wave feminist organizing, commercial pornography, and a more visible urban homosexual culture as it is about nuclear families, suburban housing developments, and consumerism. This chapter elaborates on some of the slippages in gender norms that the Introduction alludes to by tracing their roots in a “disorientation narrative” (Breines 1992, 6). Bustling forces beneath the veneer of prosperity and uniformity mobilized some unexpected energies that countered the conformity and the monotony that colors memories of the era.

I begin by outlining the emergence of new postwar social norms and how growing discontent with these norms is inspiring various social rebellions. Next, because the policing of gender is so integral to the postwar mindset, I examine how the stigmatizing of gender deviance put gender deviants at risk. Simultaneously, such exposure also gave them the visibility that provided an ironic catalyst for community building. As queer communities formed nationally, liberation politics emerged and clashed with the homophile movement. The chapter’s third section examines this generational divide. Though certain elements of the liberationist philosophy retain their social and political power today, notably the politics of visibility, one of the most overlooked aspects of pre-liberation culture was an unspoken anti-identitarian perspective about sexuality. I conclude with a discussion about how James Baldwin and Gore Vidal queered the way we understand gender and sexuality, in both their work and life, through rejecting the notion of affiliating with a sexual identity group. They parallel members of the Quartet in important ways. Both writers were popular artists who were legibly queer in their art and personae, and yet they were unconcerned with coming out. Many observers certainly made insinuations about their sexuality. But their conscious self-projection of sexual ambiguity, rather than explicit identifications with LGBTQ communities, gave them unique, expressive freedoms as artists unburdened by social or political loyalty to a singular sexual community. Beyond this effect, it reflected the ambivalence, uncertainty, and complexity about the meaning of their individual queer identity and the burgeoning prospect of affiliating with communities of desire.

Postwar Experimentation and Disorientation

The immediate postwar period is a national civic and cultural touchstone that was not only endorsed but was also an industrially supported solidification of the American Way of Life. This newly modernized, national lifestyle trumpeted a democratic government antithetical to socialism and fascism; a free-enterprise capitalist economy; social tolerance for religious and racial differences; and the emergence of the nuclear family as a social microcosm of national values (Foner 1998, 236–47). We know historically that this dream was not equally accessible to all or even most of the population. Various legal and industrial realities, such as de facto segregation and restrictive housing covenants, ensured different segments experienced newfound prosperity unequally, if at all. However, understanding the official narrative is key here.

In The Way We Never Were (2000), Stephanie Coontz reminds contemporary readers that the nuclear family is a modern development not a transhistorical structure: “For the first time in more than one hundred years, the age for marriage and motherhood fell, fertility increased, divorce rates declined, and women’s degree of educational parity with men dropped sharply. In a period of less than ten years, the proportion of never-married persons declined by as much as it had during the entire previous half century” (25). For example, before suburban migration, extended kin were more integral to family structures, and ethnic ties among second-generation European immigrants were stronger (Del Mar 2011, 107). The excitement regarding the newness of the nuclear family outweighed these shifts and emerged in the popular responses to television programs, films, magazines, and “expert” literature that depicted the new quality of life that white couples experienced as they transitioned from cities to suburbs, the working class to the middle class, and extended families to contained nuclear families. In a sense, they were pioneers, and “not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of ‘traditional’ family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life” (May 1999, xxii).

Anxieties about sexual and gender propriety are staples of most historical and sociological investigations of the era. These created unique opportunities for outsiders to penetrate the mainstream. As Wini Breines notes in Young, White, and Miserable (1992), “Anxiety accumulated around other more personal issues too; sex, gender, and the family were beset with ambiguity,” and she cites historian William Chafe (The Unfinished Journey: American Since World War II [1986]) in support: “The nature of family life, particularly in suburbia, was far more complicated and tension-filled than stereotypes of the fifties would have us believe” (8). She eloquently frames the era’s contradictions and paradoxes by locating them as part of a “disorientation narrative” where “the alter image” to the image of “a white, affluent, suburbanized society compensating for the deprivations and disruptions of the Depression and World War II” is “of a people alienated, disoriented, and discontent” (6).

Women, for example, were expected to serve both as erotic companions for their husbands (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988, 308–9) as well as mothers who were primarily devoted to raising normal, well-adjusted children. After analyzing the results of the Kelly Longitudinal Study (KLS), historian Elaine Tyler May, in her 1999 study Homeward Bound, outlined women’s sense of feeling compromised intellectually, professionally, and emotionally by their domestic roles (25–28). Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America (1996) also noted the impact on men when he depicted male malaise as the “Goldilocks Dilemma” (170). May concluded that despite the iconic happiness associated with heterosexual married couples of the time, “their poignant testimonies … reveal a strong undercurrent of discontent; their hopes for domestic happiness often remained unfulfilled” (xxiii).

Domestic discontentment culminated in a series of reactionary behaviors and rebellions. Coontz notes the rise in the use of alcohol, prescription drugs, and tranquilizers among women during the postwar period, quoting a 1949 Life magazine story that recalled how “suddenly and for no plain reason” women were “seized with an eerie restlessness” (Coontz 2000, 36–37). The synthesis of these symptoms surfaced most pointedly in 1963 via journalist Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, described by historian Sara Evans as giving “a name to the malaise of housewives and the dilemma of those who did not fit the mold” as key to the book’s cultural impact on women. One measure of its seminal articulations was that “thousands of letters flooded Friedan’s mailbox, as women poured out the stories they had thought no one would ever understand” (Evans 2001, 195). In The Story of American Freedom (1998) Eric Foner recalls The Feminine Mystique’s pivotal role as “the public reawakening of the feminist consciousness,” even if “Friedan’s mailbag also contained evidence that reactions to her critique differed strongly along lines of class and religion” (295–96). Consumer culture served as major outlet for men and included Playboy magazine’s debut in December 1953 and its influential philosophy that men should “enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved” (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988, 302). Other sources of rebellion included an invigorated fitness culture (for example, the popularity of fitness equipment salesman and TV star Jack LaLanne), which promised to re-create the male body as an antidote to domestic ennui, and the iconization of the Western—in fictional literature, TV “horse operas,” and films, which reminded men of the “rugged individualist” archetype they had abandoned (Kimmel 1996, 181–83). “Beat” culture offered even more radical possibilities for men: “In the Beat, the two strands of male protest—one directed against the white-collar work world and the other against the suburbanized family life that work was supposed to support—come together into the first all-out critique of American consumer culture” (Ehrenreich 1983, 53).

The gay and lesbian constituents of the queer community recognized gender as a major organizing category with potential social consequences for effeminate men and masculine women. One of the best ways to gauge the burgeoning social consciousness of gays and lesbians during the postwar period is to understand the kinds of questions and tensions that emerged as queer communities developed a political culture and cultivated new relationships with popular media. At issue was how to achieve social and political liberation without sacrificing queerness. This is less a matter of competing political philosophies than the question of what constituted social progress in the context of sexuality.

Historians usually cite the founding of the Mattachine Society in 1951 and the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 as the birth of the homophile movement. Though both of these groups disbanded eventually, their desires for homosexual men and women to be understood as social minorities, comparable to racial and religious minorities, eventually inspired smaller homophile groups. These include San Francisco’s Society for Individual Rights (SIR), founded in 1966, and larger organizations, notably the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), founded in 1963, and the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), founded in 1966 (McGarry and Wasserman 1998, 153, 150, 156). All of these are signposts of a burgeoning awareness among gays that they had shared interests and the ability to organize and demand equal protection from harassment and discrimination under the law. The ways governmental agencies, the popular press, and other entities simultaneously stigmatized gender and sexual deviance created a hostile climate for queer people but also, ironically, mobilized some awareness that those who expressed themselves queerly had a culture and potentially an identity and a community.

Stigma + Publicity = Queer Visibility

Clearly defined gender roles and an imperative for parents to socialize children as future citizens were central features of the nuclear family, which was an essential ingredient of social normalcy. There was immense social pressure for adults to form nuclear families and settle into consumerist lifestyles. Adults who resisted this tacit expectation were socially aberrant and vulnerable to being perceived as subversives. This was especially true for known or suspected queers. David K. Johnson terms the political manifestation of these anxieties the “Lavender Scare”: “a fear that homosexuals posed a threat to national security and needed to be systematically removed from the federal government” and that “permeated 1950s political culture” (Johnson 2004, 9). From February through November 1950 the U.S. government fired nearly six hundred federal civil servants suspected of homosexual activity, a number that grew into the thousands (1–2). During the postwar era this fearful behavior also led to the wide-scale firing of homosexuals in private industry and the routine policing of homosexual social spaces. These represent some of the main forms of social control intended to enforce national values. Managing the range of what was gender appropriate is integral to these forms of control.

There was a complex dynamic attached to this systematic harassment. It socially stigmatized homosexuals and simultaneously verified the existence of homosexuals to other homosexuals. Homophobic forms of social control, such as stigmatizing effeminacy, contributed to a growing sense among dispersed homosexual men and women that there was the potential for a homosexual culture even if it tended to be represented crudely. Michael Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture (2007) captures the contradictions of this postwar dynamic by noting how “Americans created modern antihomosexuality in part by examining queers and queerness in the arts. They bequeathed to us images of gay people as curiously both silly and sinister, protean and perverse, creative and corrupting, invaluable and insidious: as both outside and inside American life. Gay people contributed to these images, albeit rarely from a position of power” (2).

Michael Bronski in his Pulp Friction (2003) reminds us that “midcentury America was a unique historical moment for homosexuality. The Second World War had generated profound dislocations and disruptions of traditional ideas of sexuality and gender” (13–14). For example, in Allan Bérubé’s 1990 study of gays and lesbians during World War II, Coming Out under Fire, he quotes poet Robert Duncan’s 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society,” published in the magazine Politics, as an early example of public pleas for homosexual liberation as an extension of human liberation. Bérubé comments that “Duncan’s coming out, and his critique of forming separate homosexual groups, anticipated a political discussion that began to appear in gay novels immediately after the war” (251) and lists Jo Sinclair’s The Wasteland (1946) and John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947) as representative examples (250, 251). He also briefly reviews mid-to-late-twentieth-century discourse on the notion of homosexuals as minorities, as published in Cosmopolitan, Newsweek, and the letters column of the Saturday Review of Literature (250–51).

These World War II and postwar examples of homosexual discourse clearly illustrate a transitional moment when public engagement with homosexuality was possible in mainstream media. Bronski elaborates on this transition by pointing out the tension between social expectations and social curiosities regarding sexuality. He cites the mainstream’s response to Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, especially its revelation about homosexual behavior among adult men at various stages of their adolescence and maturity, as exemplifying the country’s budding postwar fascination with male homosexuality (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948; Bronski 2003, 13–14). According to Bronski, “the contradictions generated by and embedded within this fixation were tremendous. Here was a country obsessed with ridding its government of ‘subversive’ homosexuals, yet it idolized performers like Liberace and Little Richard and refused to acknowledge their—rather evident to many—homosexuality” (13–14). Queer gender behavior, not necessarily sexual object-choice, is the implicit link Bronski is making. Clearly, “homosexuality was very much in the public consciousness. If anything, it was more integrated into popular culture than it would be in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This is not to say that public discourse about homosexuality in the 1950s was more enlightened or tolerant … but it was understood and discussed in very different ways” (2). This historical pause is about something present versus something more legible, which speaks to the dynamics of queer life before the rise of visibility politics.

Homosexuality figured prominently in mainstream discourse about social threats to family, normalcy, and democracy. Two popular genres that stig-matized male homosexuality for the general public were nonfiction exposé books and tabloids. Journalists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer led this market through a series of exposés of life in major U.S. cities. They frequently, and disparagingly, reference homosexuality throughout their 1948 New York: Confidential!: The Big City after Dark. For example, chapter 4, “The Theatah!,” warns readers: “Unfortunately, too many of the adolescents have been tinged with political radicalism and tainted with homosexuality. Yet, the New York theater is still the most vital and vibrant facet of show business, and from it comes almost everything good in its bastard offspring, radio and the movies” (Lait and Mortimer 1948, 39). Their discussion of the Fifty-Second Street jazz scene in chapter 5, “Swing Lane,” notes, “Two other developments in the street—said to be natural consequences of its jazz madness—are the presence of reefer (marijuana) addicts and homosexuals, of all races” (45). In chapter 8 there is a discussion of Greenwich Village, which is titled “Where Men Wear Lace Lingerie” and is a smirking treatise on homosexuality. According to the authors, “There really are two Greenwich Villages—the one the sightseer glimpses and the less appetizing one inhabited by psychopaths dimly conscious of reality, whose hopes, dreams, and expressions are as tortuous as the crazy curves in the old streets” (66). As I noted in the introduction, the black mainstream press also constructed homosexuality in extreme gendered terms. The contrast between “freaks” who pervert gender norms draws attention to the presumed naturalness of gender normative behavior, which amplifies the normalcy of gender-conforming blacks at a historical moment when blacks were seeking civil rights and greater mainstream acceptance.

New York: Confidential! was a hit, and Lait and Mortimer continued to outline the gay presence in America’s biggest cities in books such as Chicago Confidential (1950), Washington Confidential (1951), and U.S.A. Confidential (1952). Johnson describes how Washington Confidential, which featured lurid descrip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Queering Post–World War II Masculinity through Music
• Chapter One. Visibly Hidden: Postwar Disorientation, Queer Community, and Queer Ambivalence
• Chapter Two. A Freak Deferred: Johnnie Ray Navigates Innovation and Convention
• Chapter Three. Spectacular Vacillations: Little Richard Charms and Disarms America
• Chapter Four. Fine and Dandy: Mapping Johnny Mathis’s Negotiations of Race, Sexuality, and Affect
• Chapter Five. Building an Empire of Illusion: Liberace and the Art of Queering
• Conclusion: Disquieting and Exciting: Queering Tools in Popular Music and Queer Becoming
• Notes
• References
• Discography
• Index
• Back Cover