There, I said it. He was officially in the closet but I have to reveal the truth to you. He was gay, homosexual. Yes, Mom, he liked men… no, I mean he liked men in that way. Understand? Yes, I’ll just sit over hear while you wrap your head around that.
Alright - completely fictional conversation. Right? Nobody in their right mind could’ve believed that Liberacé was straight, could they?
Rock Hudson - yes - leading man beautiful - great with Doris Day - carefully in the closet. It was a shock to some and I know a woman who denies it to this day. Liberacé, though, flamed. He was fabulous with a capital F-A-B.
Why, then, was he so accepted by the core of his audience? We’re talking grandmothers and mothers and all that warned me of the dangers of having gay friends (“be careful or you could be painted with the same brush”, warned Mom).
I would’ve thought the George & Marion Cunninghams would’ve gotten one whiff if him and turned the other way in a hurry. What enabled him to be so flamboyantly gay in a time when that was a definite no-no with his core audience?
Effeminate men who are not gay do exist (and, of course, so do gay men who are not effeminate). I suspect that many of those who refused to believe that Liberace was gay were clinging to the notion that he was just “arty.”
My mom absolutely will not believe that Paul Lynde was gay. Some folks are just in a total state of denial.
From what I understand he wasn’t coy about anything. He just straight up said he liked the ladies. Sure he was lying but in the 50s do you think most people would have just assumed that he was part of a “dark” and largely ignored subculture or taken him at his word? Libs was all “I want a nice girl!” (while thinking… “with a penis… and without the girl part”)
It seemed that others were more coy about their love lives. Stuff like “I’m looking for a special SOMEONE.” or “I just haven’t met the right PERSON yet.”… you know… like Wentworth Miller from Prison Break does.
My take on the OP’s question is that it seems fairly common in our cultural history for some behavoirs to be frowned upon en masse (or politically) but tolerated individually (or when it’s someone you love), especially when the ‘rule’ to be broken seems particularly unfair.
See:
Drinking vs 20’s ethics
Draft dodging vs 1972 ethics
Birth control vs Catholic ethics
Speeding vs freeway ethics
and so on…
I remember waaaaay back, but still as late as the 70s, when I was probably but a wee six-year-old, I was quite the fan of Mr. Liberace. He’d show up on the tube when I wasn’t in kindergarten, on something like the Merv Griffin show or Sesame Street or whatever, and I thought he was a total hoot. Plus, I loved his music! I remember distinctly one time when he was on, mom got this weird smirk on her face, and then had to stifle giggles at what seemed to me totally inappropriate times. “What did he say that was funny, mommy?” “Oh…what? Nothing!”
I get the feeling lots of people were convinced he was gay but simply didn’t talk about it.
Maybe L functioned as a kind of cultural lightning rod that allowed people to feel okay about really obnoxious gay males while still nurturing hatred for men who were merely unmasculine. After all, any mass hatred is never about a small group of extreme fringe people, it’s about people with “tendencies” (see: McCarthyism, which had to associate liberals with commies before starting a campaign against them).
This may come as a shock to anyone under the age of 50 or so, but back in the 1950s most people didn’t think anyone was gay.
As far as any typical middle-class 1950s American knew, a homosexual was a pervert who approached you in the bus station restroom.
Sissies, mama’s boys, whatever. That was simply how someone acted, not what they were. Liberace’s flamboyance was only set dressing, like his candelabra.
Sure, his fans probably figured out that Liberace wasn’t the type to go out and knock back a few brewskies after a concert, but it would have been nearly incomprehensible for them to believe that he would want to have sex with men.
One thing you have to understand is that it was far more standard back then to have a set of things that one simply didn’t talk about. The difference between present-day American society and American society fifty years ago is not so much that we are more tolerant than people were back then (although that’s probably true) as that we insist much more on making things explicit. I suspect that there’s been much less change over the past fifty years in what we do as in the fact that we now talk about everything. We now live in a society in which we are not necessarily more tolerant about everything (one example is child molestation, which fifty years ago was probably more tolerated), but we demand that everybody’s behavior be explicitly labeled and endlessly discussed. Fifty years ago, people were more willing to say, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
There was probably a significant minority of people in the 1950’s who understood very well that Liberace was probably gay. It’s wasn’t that dressing flamboyantly always meant that a man was gay, but Liberace was giving off enough signals that those in the know could figure it out. There was a second minority of people who suspected that he was gay but wasn’t sure. Then there was the majority of people who didn’t know and didn’t suspect that he was gay. It wasn’t the case that all of these people would have turned against him if they had known that he was gay. For many of them, it was again more a matter of “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
I think there was a definite “don’t ask - don’t tell” sort of thing going on.
Also - Liberace was on stage. There has been such a long history of male flamboyance in the performing arts that it allowed enough doubt regarding his sexuality as to make him acceptable to the mainstream. After all, there were any number of cross-dressing male entertainers at the time, and men in drag have a long history on the stage. Liberace at least wore pants. A lot of what he wore was part of The Act.
Meanwhile, he kept his private life mostly private.
Which is what it took to “pass” as straight in 1950’s America.
no doubt the constant “is he or isn’t he?” tension was part of his appeal as well.
