Air Guitar. Dave Hickey

costume that was, in his description, “just one tuck short of drag.” He would stop under the big light, do a runway turn, and invite the audience to “Hey, look me over!” Then, flinging his arms upward in a fountain gesture, like a demented Polish-Italian diva, he would shoot his hip, wink, and squeal, “I hope ya’ like it! You paid for it!” And the audience members would signify their approval and their complicity by their applause. They not only liked the dress, they were happy to have bought it for him. So, unlike Coward, whose veiled naughtiness remained opaque to those not “in the know,” Liberace’s closet was as democratically invisible as the emperor’s new clothes, and just as revolutionary. Everybody “got it.” But nobody said it.

      Even my grandfather got it, for Chris’sake. I can remember sitting before the flickering screen of an old Emerson at my grandparents’ house, watching Liberace, which was one of my grandmother’s “programs.” At one particularly saccharine moment in the proceedings my grandfather leaned forward, squinting through his cataract lenses at the tiny screen.

      “A bit like cousin Ed, ain’t he,” my grandfather said. Getting it but not saying it.

      “Yes, he is,” my grandmother said, with an exasperated sniff. “And just as nice a young man, I’m sure.” She got it, too. She didn’t say it, either. And my point here is that, if my grandmother and grandfather (no cosmopolitans they) got it, if they perceived in Wladziu Valentino Liberace’s performance, in his longing gaze into the television camera, a covert acknowledgment of his own sexuality—and if they, country people to the core, covertly accepted it in him, then “the closet” as a social modality was, even then, on the verge of obsolescence. All that remained was for Liberace and the people who accepted him to say the words. But for the most part they never did and some, recalcitrant to the last, never have.

      Those who got it and didn’t accept it, however, never stopped yelping. Liberace’s career from first to last was beleaguered by snickers, slimy innuendo, and plain invective with regard to his sexuality . . . and his bad taste. The two, perhaps not surprisingly, seem so inextricably linked in attacks on his persona that you get the feeling they are, somehow, opposite sides of the same coin. At any rate, he was so regularly attacked for dramatizing his sexual deviation while suppressing the formal deviations of Chopin and Liszt, you get the impression that, had he purveyed a little more “difficult” art, he would have been cut a little more slack with regard to his behavior.