Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathias Queered Pop Music examines the way four popular male musicians who emerged in the 1950s, Johnnie Ray, Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, and Liberace challenged post-World War II masculine conventions. Rocking is a critical close reading that fuses queer literary theory, musicology, and popular music studies frameworks to develop its argument. Recent scholarship in queer theory and literary history constitutes a key strand of the book’s discussion of queer ambivalence regarding identity. Notably, the book explores ho ... More

Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathias Queered Pop Music examines the way four popular male musicians who emerged in the 1950s, Johnnie Ray, Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, and Liberace challenged post-World War II masculine conventions. Rocking is a critical close reading that fuses queer literary theory, musicology, and popular music studies frameworks to develop its argument. Recent scholarship in queer theory and literary history constitutes a key strand of the book’s discussion of queer ambivalence regarding identity. Notably, the book explores how the four artists challenged male gender and sexual conventions without overtly identifying their respective sexual orientations or necessarily affiliating with gay activism, identity politics, or community tropes. The book outlines the emergence of postwar social expectations of male figures and employs these expectations to define a unique a set of five “queering” tools the four musicians employed in various combinations, to develop their public personae and build audiences. These tools include self-neutering, self-domesticating, spectacularizing, playing the “freak,” and playing the race card. Despite the prevalence of postwar gender norms, their deft use of these tools enabled each artist to develop sexually ambiguous personae and capitalize on the postwar audiences’ attraction to novelty and difference. These “queering” tools endure among contemporary musicians who challenge masculine conventions in popular music.