Liberace

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2020

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This "deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love" rose to stardom playing "classical music without the boring parts" and didn't need to stay in the closet because he wore its entire contents. How could he become an emblem of Middle American family entertainment? The United States of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was undergoing enormous social change –– the Civil Rights Movement, the Summer of Love, Women’s Lib, the Stonewall Riots, Gay Liberation, and the beginning of the AIDS movement –– and Liberace was an entertainer who appealed to precisely those parts of the country who sought to resist those changes. Hated by classical music critics, he was beloved by audiences precisely because of the openness of his secret and the way he performed a kind of minstrel act that nevertheless won him fame, riches, and glory. Visit our website for Patreon, T-shirts, and an eopside archive. ----more---- Gabler, Neal. “Robert Harrison’s Scandalous Confidential Magazine.” Vanity Fair, April 2003. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2003/04/robert-harrison-confidential-magazine. Liberace Music Video & Entrance 1981, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dioRwB4RvrQ. O’Connor, Pauline. “Mapping the Many Razzle-Dazzle Homes of Liberace.” Curbed LA, May 24, 2013. https://la.curbed.com/maps/mapping-the-many-razzledazzle-homes-of-liberace. Pyron, Darden Asbury. Liberace: An American Boy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Rechy, John. “Randy Dandy.” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2000. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-06-bk-65295-story.html. Thorson, Scott. Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace. Head of Zeus, 2013. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:22.2	My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.
0:24.5	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, historian, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:30.1	Last week we talked about a sort of colonialist gangster who somehow has still managed to put
0:36.9	himself at the center of the culture
0:38.1	wars who are we talking about this week ben well hugh i want to begin by setting a scene for you
0:44.0	to the sound of a tinned orchestra playing the soaring string theme from the first movement of
0:49.6	the tsikovsky piano concerto da da da da da da youda-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
0:56.0	You know it.
0:57.0	I'm closing my eyes in imagining this, yeah.
0:59.0	A man springs fully dressed from a glittering white polyester bed.
1:03.0	He strides into an enormous walk-in closet.
1:07.0	No closet on reality TV or in a Cirque movie could compare.
1:10.0	You need to understand this is an
1:12.1	absolutely enormous closet, big enough to live in for a week, a month, even a lifetime, and
1:17.9	selects a spangled white jacket to put on over his white coat and trousers and a flowing
1:22.9	white fur cape with a seven-foot train. Regally, this man descends the white stairs of his white mansion,
1:30.0	stopping at a white piano to tinkle a few notes
1:32.4	while staring directly into the camera,
1:34.7	face frozen in a surgically enhanced grin,
1:37.6	eyes twinkling almost unnaturally,
1:40.3	as if a human face had somehow been transformed into a logo. He greets and then waves goodbye to a series of small dogs,
	...

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