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Liberace: An American Boy
Darden Asbury Pyron
University of Chicago
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"How," you might wonder, "did Liberace ever get away with it in the 1950s?" You can't imagine a bigger sissy, or one more determined to not stay in the closet. In a decade that made the closet de rigeur, this second-rate piano player-- with the shit-eating grin of the Cheshire Cat and a wardrobe that if it were worn by Marie Antoinette would have ignited the French Revolution years earlier-- insisted on being both publicly heterosexual and adamantly queer. Later in his career Liberace was fond of telling audiences with enormous modesty "Don't be misled by this flamboyant exterior. Underneath I remain the same-- a simple boy from Milwaukee." As Oscar Wilde noted, the truth is rarely pure and never simple, and Darden Asbury Pyron's Liberace: An American Boy (cloth, University of Chicago Press, $27.50) manages to give us something that convincingly approximates the truth about the queen behind the keyboard.

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Born Walter Liberace in 1919, the boy was an embryo of his later self, and soon began show his fine feathers. He had a flair for larger-than-life self-presentation that, surprisingly, did not get him into trouble. He was so well liked that when he come to a school party dressed as Greta Garbo his classmates gave no interference. Pushed by his single mother to become an entertainer, the pianist began playing clubs and nightspots in the 1930s. By the early 1940s, Liberace was cultivating the extravagant performance style-- glossy specialty items like "Home on the Range" played as a Strauss waltz-- and donning the uninhibited, unrestrained apparel for which he would eventually became famous. By the increasingly subdued postwar years, he quickly evolved into a prominent, highly visible cultural icon and attracted the endless adoration of middle-brow, usually female, audiences. Providing a flamboyant alternative to the man in the gray flannel suit, he was, in essence, a breath of fresh air in a culture that prized and rewarded masculine conformity. And, of course, he also engendered antagonism, criticism, and charges of sexual deviancy, which he usually countered-- and won-- with lawsuits.

Pyron is a careful and astute critic and this smart and illuminating biography gives us a solid, well-researched life of the performer. But the book uniquely shines in showing how camp, homosexuality, gay sensibility, and homophobia shaped popular American culture.

Pyron draws on a range of sources, from all of the existing Liberace autobiographies and biographies to contemporary gay and queer theory, reviews of the pianist's concerts, and scandal-sheet accounts of his private life. Perhaps most illuminating are the court records-- Liberace was always suing or being sued-- that give us the legal underside of the closet in the 1950s and '60s. Pyron has a fluid, eccentric, but fascinating range of interests-- the influence of a Roman Catholic sensibility on Liberace and gay culture, the aesthetic metaphysics of television, social importance of self-help books in the 1950s-- that bring together so many sides of Liberace's lifestyle and persona that we are convinced, no matter what we though before, that Liberace's life and times was an important cultural moment for both gay and mainstream culture.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com