Description
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.
About the Author
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.
Reviews
"Scholars interested in queer history, music history, race, and American popular culture generally will therefore learn much from this excellent book." --Journal of the History of Sexuality
An Advocate Best Queer Non-Fiction Book of 2019
"Stephen's Rocking the Closet investigates how contemporary queer stars such as Little Richard navigated the mid-twentieth-century popular music landscape and, as important, how observers reacted to their unconventional gender presentation. . . . Stephens should be commended for the diverse range of primary sources marshalled in his study. . . . Rocking the Closet presents students and practitioners of queer cultural history, as well as those studying post-war cultural history, with fresher methods of examining popular culture and its legacies." --Cultural History
"Distinguished by excellent writing Rocking the Closet achieves the admirable goal of being both a sound scholarly work and accessible to readers from all walks of life. It raises provocative ideas and arguments, challenging entrenched ways of thinking about the history of queerness in postwar America." --Notes
"Well-argued and thoughtful." --Arts Fuse
"Rocking the Closet is a worthy contribution to better understanding the queering of postwar masculine identities and popular music. . . . As the barriers between folk and popular cultures continue to be dismantled, scholarship such as Rocking the Closet follows an interdisciplinary trajectory that will satisfy scholars across disciplines." --Western Folklore
"The spirit of Rocking the Closet is enjoyed in how deftly Stephens illuminates those nuances. He is as lucid about the music as about the cultural moment, the entertainment business, and the lives of the musicians." --On the Seawall
"The contemporary mainstream LGBT narrative claims that artists should out themselves for the greater good. But Rocking the Closet makes a persuasive case that 'open secrecy' helped make stars of Little Richard, Liberace, Johnny Mathis, and Johnny Ray in the decades prior to and after Stonewall. These (until now) academically under-examined, yet enormously successful and influential musicians used the surprising leeway of the glass closet to develop artistic personae that were both appealing and ambiguous, leading to commercial success that rivals that of our current musicians. Stephens' insightful intersectional book will liven the debate in identity and popular culture scholarship!"--Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Temple University
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Book Information
ISBN 9780252084638
Author Vincent L Stephens
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 15mm
