20-50
A01=Vincent L Stephens
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Author_Vincent L Stephens
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVC
Category=AVGP
Category=AVH
Category=AVN
Category=AVP
Category=JBCC
Category=JFC
conspiracy of blindness
COP=United States
dandy
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
deviance
disorientation
enfreakment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
flamboyance
freak self-domesticating
gay closet in the 1950s
gay closet in the Fifties
Gay Liberation
Homophile
Johnnie Ray
Johnny Mathis
Language_English
Liberace
Little Richard
PA=Available
post-WWII masculinity
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
queer ambivalence
queer culture Fifties
queer history
queer masculinity
queering in pop music
queering in popular culture
queering in rock music
queering tools
race men
respectability
sexual ambiguity
softlaunch
spectacle
straight-queer
tabloids
unmarked transvestism
Product details
- ISBN 9780252084638
- Weight: 399g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2019
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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.
Vincent L. Stephens is the director of the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity and a contributing faculty member in music at Dickinson College. He is a coeditor of Post Racial America? An Interdisciplinary Study.
