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Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music by Vincent L. Stephens

2022; Music Library Association; Volume: 78; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2022.0010

1534-150X

Renée McBride,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music by Vincent L. Stephens Renée McBride Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music. By Vincent L. Stephens. (New Perspectives on Gender in Music.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. [xiv, 230 p. ISBN 9780252084638 (paperback), $27.95; ISBN 9780252042805 (cloth), $99; ISBN 9780252051661 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. Vincent Stephens, who holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland at College Park and is director of the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity and a contributing faculty member in music at Dickinson College, brings fresh frames of reference to conventional historical understanding of the closet and queerness pre-Stonewall in Rocking the Closet. In this winner of the Advocate “Best Queer Non-fiction Book of 2019,” Stephens examines the careers of Johnnie Ray, Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, and Liberace—whom he refers to as “the Queer Quartet” or simply “the Quartet”— focusing on the artists’ queering tools, or their “queer public behavioral elements that challenged postwar masculinity in the artistry and personae of the musicians” (p. 3). Stephens also examines the influence of his subjects on more current popular musicians who have used queering tools (regardless of their sexual orientation) to establish their personae. He sets the stage for his analysis of the Quartet’s careers with discussions of the meaning of queer, which he defines as “identities and practices that foreground the instability inherent in the supposedly stable relationship between anatomical sex, gender, and sexual desire” (p. 2), and of the nature of post–World War II social and popular culture. Stephens begins his analysis of the careers of each member of the Quartet in chapter 2, “A Freak Deferred: Johnnie Ray Navigates Innovation and Convention.” Ray’s deafness (he wore a highly visible hearing aid in his left ear), bisexuality, effeminacy, highly emotional [End Page 418] style of singing, and open approval of Black culture made him a freak, by his own accounting. Ray was heavily influenced by R and B and was sometimes mistaken for a Black female singer. He also had a criminal record for public solicitation (of males) and public drunkenness and disorderly conduct, resulting in impugning tabloid coverage. Over time, he and his management moved to the middle of the road musically and tried to tone down his persona, resulting in a decline in his popularity. The very aspects of his persona that made him so popular were lost through their queerphobia, which exceeded that of his audiences. In chapter 3, “Spectacular Vacillations: Little Richard Charms and Disarms America,” Stephens observes how Little Richard’s merging of male and female characteristics aided his acceptance by White audiences, because he was not, as a Black man, perceived as a sexual threat. During his career, Little Richard vacillated between secular stardom and behavior to religious zeal, eventually achieving a sense of integrated self that “balances his freakiness with his faith” (p. 88). Stephens summarizes Little Richard’s approach as “the queer feat of fusing many elements typically defined as opposites” (p. 114). Chapter 4, “Fine and Dandy: Mapping Johnny Mathis’s Negotiations of Race, Sexuality and Affect,” portrays Mathis as a master of “the musical and visual language of ambiguity” (p. 141). He was free of personal scandal, presented himself in a manner that Ebony considered worthy of a Black male role model, and flew under the radar in every aspect of his life, resulting in an image of being “who and what you need him to be” (p. 116). Mathis came out in the mid-1960s with little repercussion, paving the path for future Black sexually ambiguous males such as Michael Jackson, Prince, and Luther Vandross. Stephens tells the stories of Little Richard and Mathis in the context of the racial constructs of the times, examining how they identified and employed approaches that would result in their being found acceptable, as Black men, by White audiences. “Their social navigations,” Stephens notes, “are inseparable from their music careers” (p. 142). The stories of Little Richard and Mathis are as much about navigating racial waters...