Praise-seeking-and-Shame-avoiding Self-idolatry – Liberace – Behind the Candelabra (2/4)

by Philip Jonkers

Hungry for fame and fortune, moving into the bright lights of New York City

Emboldened by “local success“, in his early twenties–brimming with hopeful anticipation–Lee left home, left his home state and anxiously set out to try his luck in the “bright lights of New York. He felt sure that fame and fortune waited for him on the East Coast.“ (Thor.20)

However, while he had managed to acquire a bit of a name for himself in Wisconsin, nobody had even heard of him down in New York and–because of having trouble to find decent work–for some time even went around literally going hungry. Success proved to be more elusive than he bargained for. To give you an idea of the drama he seems to have felt, much later in life he were to retrospectively have complained to Scott–“still smarting from injured pride“–that most of the people there, still at a time of personal oblivion, treated him with implicit disdain, even having the guts to approach him as if he were a mere waiter or cab-driver. “Lee dreamed of the day when he’d be rich and able to live in a mansion in a ritzy neighborhood. Ironically, years later, when he had a seven-figure yearly income, Lee found that he was uncomfortable in places like Bel Air and Rancho Mirage. His enormous homes were located in more humble areas.“ (Thor.22)

When in 1942 the US became embroiled in the Second World War, Lee had the luck of being able to dodge enlistment while many of his potential competitors were called upon to help in the country’s war-effort, fighting the evil specter of fascism. “A cyst on his spine would make him ineligible for service. Had his homosexuality been known“, argues Scott, “it would have excluded him from the draft too, but Lee was so paranoid about concealing his sexual identity by then that I doubt he would have admitted the truth, even to avoid the draft.“ (Thor.23)

If true, Lee’s extreme dedication to keep hidden what he considered to be his unbearably shameful form of sexual orientation, once again becomes evident when he even were to have been willing to risk ending up getting wounded or worse on the battlefield — anything, any damn kind of thing, no matter how dangerous to his own being, just so long as it would ensure that the people around him would not be able to find out that he happened to like boys instead of girls. If Lee would even have been willing to put his physical health in serious jeopardy in order to prevent giving away his true sexual orientation, it goes to show the mind-boggling extent of the fear of shame which plagued the aspiring artiste and consummate cloak-and-dagger daisy; the daringly double–crossing captivator of adoring audiences seemingly fearing shame more than losing his very life.

It was around this time that Lee made up his mind to change his stage name to the one he would eventually become so well known by. “Following the example of his idol Paderewski, Lee decided to be booked under a single name. In his opinion, ‘Liberace‘ sounded important, unique, fabulous!“ (Thor.23) It was also during this time that Lee only even further stepped up his efforts to conceal his sexual orientation already clouded in a stultifying–indeed–self-strangling sort of secrecy. “Throughout the war years, Lee told me, the straight world was even more hostile to gays than it had been during the depression. Every man out of uniform was suspected of being unpatriotic, a draft dodger, a coward, or a queer. To protect himself and his reputation“, recalls Scott, “Lee went deeper into the closet, making sure only his closest associates knew his secret. Onstage, he developed a flirtatious patter with the mature women in his audiences. All he had to do was tease them gently, treat them like ladies, and, to his surprise and delight, they responded warmly. Lee discovered that he had a gift for pleasing older women and he began to play to them exclusively. His act was expanding, becoming a combination of patter and piano.“ (Thor.24)

“Two years after Pearl Harbor“, “Lee had achieved modest renown as an entr’acte performer.“ (p.24) Even though he wasn’t starving for food anymore, he was for recognition. Fortunately for his fame-craving self, Lee finally had his long sought-after break when a Las Vegas entertainment director working for Howard Hughes offered him a six-week contract to perform in the–what, at the time, was a promising but still rather modestly-sized–settlement of Nevada. And although he was a bit disappointed by the off-putting way in which the “cow town“ were to have looked back then. “Despite his initial misgivings, Lee was in the right place at the right time, geographically and musically. Vegas, fueled by the public’s passion for gambling, was slated for unprecedented expansion. And classical music, thanks to films that romanticized the lives of Chopin, Liszt, and Grieg, was becoming part of the popular idiom. Couples were dancing and making love to tunes like ‘Til the End of Time,‘ a beautiful melody lifted from the music of Chopin. Lee decided to put a candelabra on the concert grand, an idea he borrowed from that Chopin film. He added a few easily recognized etudes to his act and rode the wave of popularity [which] Hollywood had unwittingly created for someone just like him. His absolute genius as an entertainer took care of the rest.“ (Thor.25)

That small but burgeoning “cow town“ and Liberace prancing around in it, turned out to be a match made in heaven. “Lee blossomed in Las Vegas. He negotiated a $750-a-week salary and, when his booking was extended beyond the initial six weeks, he demanded and got $1,500 a week. Over the years, he would play a total of twenty-four different dates at the Last Frontier and his salary would be increased each time. Vegas loved Lee and he loved it back.“ (Thor.26)

Even though he was apparently reluctant to get involved with them, Lee–according to Scott–did end up having also a “friendly relationship“ with the Mafia — the mob was, after all, well entrenched, hard to miss and probably even harder to dodge in Vegas, all-the-more-so if you’d happen to succeed in seriously tapping into your money-making potential. “On two occasions“, writes Scott, “once in New York at an ultra-exclusive restaurant and once in Boston at a pizza joint in the heart of an Italian neighborhood, I accompanied Lee when he met a major Mafia don. Each time, I watched as Lee exchanged warm greetings, hugging the don and kissing his cheek. There was never any question in my mind that Lee had powerful and very dangerous friends.“ (Thor.27)

The passionate and energetic young guy from Wisconsin was made for the stage. “From the very beginning, it was Lee’s ability to reach out to his listeners that set him apart from his competition. Whatever mistakes he may have made in his private life, he never took a false step professionally. ‘An audience can spot a phony a mile away,‘ Lee told me. ‘If you don’t enjoy going out there, if you don’t love what you’re doing, they’ll know it.‘ ‘Onstage, I know who I am. I’m sure of myself, in complete control.‘“ Scott adds, “He had the rare capacity of making each individual in the audience feel that Liberace was performing just for him or her.“ (Thor.28)

Lee loved getting attention from his audience and respected them enough to refrain from using his tempting elevated stage position in conjunction with his mastery of sophisticated classical music as a rationale to look down on them. “Despite his vast repertoire and his solid grounding in the classics, Lee never talked down to his listeners–he never forgot his own lower-middle-class roots. Stepping down from the stage and shaking hands suited him better than setting himself up on a pedestal.“ (Thor.29)

Nevertheless, in spite of feeling at home among the humble and homely, Lee was ever more hungry for fame and recognition because, even though he had what he called–according to Scott–a “comfortable career“, the ambitious budding showman wanted more, “so much more. He told me he dreamed of being a movie actor, of leaving his handprints in the cement of Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, of winning an Oscar. The newly popular medium of television, with its barely explored possibilities, intrigued him as well. More than anything, Lee longed to be a star. But that seemed increasingly unlikely. At the age of thirty“, it appeared as if he was losing the battle for immoral stardom since already “his hair was thinning and his waist thickening. He’d been on the road for ten years and he was still waiting for the lightning bolt of fame to strike.“ (Thor.30)

“Contrary to what everyone believes when you’re on television you’re not playing to tens of millions of people. Your audience is really small groups; families sitting around in their living rooms, or play rooms or people in beds in hospitals. Maybe it’s not a group at all. Your audience may be just one lonely person. So you see, television is not one huge audience. It is a huge number of small audiences. . . . It’s a very personal thing. If you can produce this kind of show on television you’ll be holding lightning in a bottle.“ Don Fedderson (Pyr.143)

Finally freeing himself from the dreary fate of oblivion by managing to appear on television

In 1949, a television executive named Don Fedderson was vacationing in San Diego’s Del Coronado Hotel. It was there, at the hotel’s “subdued Beach Bar“, that Fedderson happened to attend a performance by Lee and his brother George. Still appearing in “their customary black tuxedos looking more like morticians than entertainers“, that evening, Lee “surveyed the small audience with a sinking heart. It was going to be another quiet, unspectacular night.“ Nevertheless, in spite of the seeming uneventfulness of also this one of his little shows, “Lee had an old-fashioned attitude toward his profession. He not only believed the show must go on: he believed every show and every audience deserved his very best. And that’s what he gave those few people on that stormy night: his very best.“ (Thor.31)

In Pyron, Liberace explains the reasonable need for upping the ante of performance precisely when the audience room is sparsely filled. “Liberace himself theorized about the difficulties of a small crowd. ‘When the house is full a certain amount of excitement rubs off on the audience before you even get on the stage. Everyone in a packed theater says to himself, ‘If all these other people came, I must have been right to come, too.‘ ‘ Empty seats, vacant tables, he mused, have the opposite effect. Patrons feel they’ve erred, ‘and this makes them more selective about what they see on the stage and harder to please. The fact that more people didn’t come makes them feel that maybe the performer is slipping. The result is that you have a house full of critics.‘ That evening, he pulled out the stops. ‘If those seventeen people are expecting a show–a show they will get,‘ he determined.“ (Pyr.139)

Fortunately for Lee, Fedderson “listened carefully–and he returned to the Beach Bar every night for the rest of his vacation, striking up a friendship with Lee in the process. Television was just a baby in those days, but it was a voracious baby that demanded a steady diet of new talent. Thanks to Don Fedderson, Lee starred in a local television show and that led to his engagement as a summer replacement for ‘The Dinah Shore Show.‘“ (Thor.31) It was an opportunity Lee could not possibly go on to regret since his “fifteen-minute, two month show proved to be so popular that NBC offered Lee a thirty-minute variety show.“ In television, Lee had finally found his much coveted means to ever broader success. By the end of 1953, Lee was able to count his own show to be among the top ranking shows of that time, including major leaguers like “I Love Lucy“ and “The Ed Sullivan Show“. “He proudly recalled being dubbed ‘television’s first matinee idol.‘ “ (Thor.31)

Obviously, as compared to performing to life audiences–something which he was perfectly used to–Liberace now had to adapt to new type of audience. Nevertheless, he took full advantage of the benefit of being able to expand the size of his audiences to unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, larger-and-larger audience is precisely what he wanted all along anyway. “He wanted and calculated mass appeal. He rewrote the music in performance–popularizing the classics, classicizing pop melodies, improvising one way and then the other. Taking popular requests, inviting individuals to perform with him, and bantering with the audience were only techniques that underlay a larger structure or ideal of his performance art. Achieving this intimacy was nothing to him at this stage of his career, he thought. ‘It’s what I did all the time,‘ he judged. ‘I tried to set up a one-to-one relationship between me and every individual in the room. . . . The only job I had was how to make it work when I could not get the ‘feel of bodies in a room,‘ and the audience could not, if it felt like it, reach out and touch me.‘ His technique, he related, was to think of the camera itself as a living person.“ (Pyr.144)

This time Lee had clearly also managed to strike gold in the sense of popularity and the promise of progressive fortune that came with it; “no more greasy spoons, rundown hotels, and second-rate clubs for him. He moved to California and built his first home in Sherman Oaks, a town that later made him its honorary mayor. With his developing genius for public relations, Lee had a piano-shaped pool installed in the backyard, a novelty that was soon featured in many national magazines. Overnight, Liberace had become a household name and everything he did was newsworthy. The more extravagant his lifestyle, the more media attention he received. Lee got the message. Offstage, the opulent way he lived would become as much a part of his persona, his legend, as anything he did onstage.“ (Thor.31,2)

Arguing in favor of the reason why Hollywood held out such an attractive appeal for people like Liberace, people who, like bees to honey, were drawn to glamour — lots of luscious, voluptuous streams of glamour accessible in executive manner with the right kind of talents and ambitions. “Stars were no longer normal people but idols to be worshipped from afar. Realism had nothing to do with this world, and the more artificial the celebrities, the more compelling the appeal to the audience. Image and impression were everything.” “While female stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Mae West might have represented the very essence of this artificiality, art, and hierarchy, it also shaped, with equal force, if in a rather different way, the image of masculine icons such as Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, and, most of all, perhaps, Cary Grant. They represented polish, urbanity, clean profiles, and sophistication. They were artificial men–and gods to a generation or more. Hollywood, then, was not just fame, not just wealth; it represented a cult of glamour gods and goddesses. It was a fantasy world, and it was all the more compelling because of that.” (Pyr.121)

To ordinary people, the stars produced by Hollywood were all-the-more fit for idolization. “As he duly noted in his memoirs as well, this sort of world had special appeal to common folk–people whose humdrum lives lacked art, beauty, or mystery. The cult of Hollywood, stars, and celebrity, then, proved an especially compelling creed among the mass of Americans nurtured in Anglo-Puritan values and raised up in the Great Depression. Wally Liberace fit this mold himself. Over and over, his memoir notes the lack of beauty, excitement, or enchantment in his childhood. Hollywood was everything his life had not been; the world of movies redressed the lack for him even when he was in his boyhood. Movies had been his own mother’s way of escaping from her dreary life, and she had named two of her sons after her Italian screen heartthrob, he insisted. He considered the Alhambra, Milwaukee’s great old cinema, his second home. This world drew him as powerfully as a magnet attracts metal filings.“ (Pyr.122)

Pyron explains why Hollywood–as the Mecca of make-believe, as the ultimate professional playground for play-acting–could hardly fail to attract homosexuals. “It is no accident that homosexual culture established a special relationship with Hollywood. If the common folk, their lives lacking grace, idolized Hollywood, the memoirs of young homosexual men, if for different reasons, brim with comparable descriptions of their attraction to the world of stars. To cite contemporary examples, Paul Monette and Andrew Sullivan, whose youths were radically different from one another, have both recounted their loving devotion to scrapbooks of their Hollywood idols when they were boys. Insofar as Hollywood represents a world of illusion, of fantasy and unreality, it corresponds to many fundamental impulses with gay life. That was a world, too, of illusion and illusions. What is a drag queen? What do you see, a man or a woman? A man in business suit? What do you see, a husband? A father? Or could it be a homosexual male? Two worlds of illusion coincided.“ (Pyr.122)

Even though “Lee loved being in the limelight and was thrilled by his new celebrity status“, he–at the same time–failed to prevent his newfound fame and fortune coming with a notable handicap, one that came in the form of his mother moving in with him. “Liberace was an old-fashioned man and he felt an old-fashioned obligation to care for his aging mother. But Frances, who sometimes treated him like a ten-year-old, really cramped his style. She wanted to meet all his friends, to revel in her son’s acclaim. But Lee’s closest friends were gay, not exactly the kind of men you bring home to mother when you’re pretending to be a heterosexual male. Lee told me that she wanted him to act like the superstar he’d become, to give large parties attended by Hollywood’s elite.“ “Frances cajoled, pressured, and manipulated Lee just as she had when he was in his teens, trying to get him to do what she thought he should.“ (Thor.32)

I find it remarkable that, even though Lee was no longer a child–no longer intrinsically helpless and so clearly no longer in natural need of paternal guidance–his mother regardless still sought to deny the autonomy of her now adult child. Apparently, Frances was so blinded by stubborn selfishness that she still tried to shape and mold her son into her mirror-image — still seeking to twist and turn the will of the son she liked to objectify until it ideally would be a perfect carbon-copy of her own suggested mother-knows-best authoritarian sort of will. Having gotten a good whiff of the intoxicating scent of fame–albeit, of course, vicariously–Frances seemed as determined as ever to continue seeking to use her own son as a vehicle, an extension of her will, for the sake of being able to savor ever more of the taste of celebrity herself.

However, Lee was none-too-pleased by the invasive intervening action into his broad affairs which his mother brought down on him, the exact sort of affairs ‘even‘—read: especially—mommy dearest was to know nothing of. For the purpose of keeping his taboo lifestyle away from also the prying eyes of his demanding and meddlesome mother, Lee–in an air of surreptitiousness–started renting an “apartment in North Hollywood. It became his hideaway–another item on his growing list of secrets.“ “Lee always referred to the fifties as the ‘white heat‘ period of his life. He’d spent years dreaming of, striving for that kind of recognition. Now he finally had it. But Lee would soon learn that sometimes you have to be careful of what you wish for.“ Already having become a “household name“, Lee “couldn’t go out in public without having someone come up and ask him for his autograph. People recognized his trademark toothy grin and wavy locks wherever he went.“ (Thor.32)

Speaking of “trademark toothy grins”, “Liberace’s voice was a source of what was often called his ‘little boy’ appeal. It was as if he could not completely recall lines that he had tried in earnest to memorize, and the audience was encouraging him. One reviewer captured the whole picture nicely: ‘Liberace talks to his audience with a perpetual smile on his face–the kind of smile a little boy musters to prove to his parents that he’s brushed his teeth–and he speaks in the carefully controlled and subdued voice of a kindergarten teacher talking to a nervous child.‘ “ (Pyr.155)

Although the man may have had a habit of faithfully flashing his trademark toothy grin, at the same time Liberace took special care not to display too polished a personal image. Indeed, the upbeat and cheerful showman seems to have poured special attention to bear out a cleverly-sympathetic personal image profuse with spontaneity by simply not editing out any kind of personal slip-ups made during performances — and thereby was prone to appear somewhat, if you will, casually defective. “He projected a combination of power and vulnerability in other ways as well. Although they were filmed, he insisted that the shoots look ‘live.‘ He calculated the disarming on-air mistakes and flaws to fit the image he desired. ‘We made no retakes,‘ ‘we filmed the mistakes just as we would have done using electronic cameras with no opportunity to stop and go back and shoot it over.‘ ‘Actually we did use electronic cameras and a live audience, as well as the film cameras. But if I perspired I just mopped away the perspiration with a handkerchief as I do on the stage. Or if I made some kind of language slip‘, ‘mispronounced a word or committed a grammatical error.‘ ‘I just excused myself and corrected what I said. It was just the way anything would happen in a family situation. And I came across as a human being, not some sort of a facsimile person, the way some performers do in shows that are filmed and refilmed, and edited and cut and fixed up until they have about as much humanity as a plastic puppet.‘ “ (Pyr.155)

Although there do not seem to exist any stats as to how many people watched The Liberace Show during its heyday period from 1953 and 1955, it must have been very popular. “The Liberace Show was tapping a huge reservoir of popular desire, but the number of people gathered around television screens across the country offers only one manifestation of the performer’s appeal. By 1954, ten thousand fan letters a week flooded his offices. He was inundated with twenty-seven thousand Valentine Day cards that year. Fans mobbed him at every appearance. In New Orleans, he spent two and a half hours signing autographs. He appeared at an autograph party for a local sponsor in his hometown, and even the police could not keep proper order. It was the same story in Miami, where his appearance to publicize the opening of a new bank provoked a riot in which ‘several women fainted, many were bruised, and a small child was injured.‘ ” (Pyr.156,7)

And all-the-while, Liberace did very well in a financial sense. “In the mid-fifties, Liberace was earning a million dollars per year from public appearances, with additional income from records, piano-instruction courses, and real-estate investments. His television program made him immensely wealthy: he netted 20 percent of the profits on the first run, and up to 80 percent on fifth runs. His income from his television program amounted to seven million dollars during the show’s first two years. He was earning fifty thousand a week. His devotees organized into more than two hundred fan clubs and turned out whenever he appeared.“ (Pyr.161,2)

With increasing fame came increasing wealth and an increasing reliance of his image being steeped in concomitantly-increasing opulence. As a result, Liberace’s life came to increasingly revolve around maintaining an image of material splendor, whether the cameras were rolling or not. “This identification with culture and wealth became a critical part of Liberace’s identity after 1953. While it constituted one element of his television program’s popularity, he integrated the values associated with money and culture into his personal life so seamlessly that the accoutrements he used to create a high-class ambiance on television became virtually inseparable from the man himself. Off camera as well as on, he calculated his image to fulfill the public longing for wealth, grandeur, and display. He concentrated them all in the new home he built in 1953. He made the place a symbol of his public image; it was a private home yet a public emblem of his achievement. His first ‘celebrity house‘ was only on the surface his private domicile; it was, more, one more element in his calculated imagery.“ (Pyr.163,4)

Obviously, the rising entertainment star faced an increasingly-pertinent dilemma with, on the one hand, his fame growing with leaps and bounds thus leaving the man with ever greater public visibility, versus, on the other hand, the unavoidable accompanying diminishing potential for being able to secretly pursue–in sufficient peace and quiet–his anathematized kind of lifestyle. “It wasn’t long before Lee realized that anonymity had its virtues. He told me that, before his television show, no one had questioned his sexual preference. It had never been an issue as long as he didn’t flaunt his lifestyle. He’d been able to quietly patronize known homosexual bars and clubs without attracting undue attention.” (Thor.32,3)

And of course all of that changed–and dramatically so—when his image began to balloon and ascend right up into the stratosphere of stellar visibility due to the wildly inflating action provided by his ever more feverishly flowing fame and, as an unavoidable result, his nevertheless precious persona came to be increasingly cumbersome in the very one occult aspect of his bifurcated life at which–while steeped in irony thick as molasses—precisely having a niftily camouflaging meek and humble name would have been ever more expedient. “Overnight fame altered his freedom of movement. The ‘matinee idol‘ didn’t dare risk being discovered in a gay bar or bathhouse. Lee felt absolutely certain that the vast majority of his fans–middle-aged woman, working-class families–would drop him in a minute if they learned who and what he really was. He couldn’t risk being found out, having his homosexuality become public knowledge.“ (Thor.33)

To make life even more challenging for the already conflicted young star, his mother was not the only family member who moved to California. Liberace was soon joined by every single member of the rest of the club as well. “Lee’s enormous success was the catalyst that reunited them. Other family members recall this as the happiest period of their lives. George, a talented violinist in his own right, was an intrinsic part of Lee’s act in those days.“ Although his family members evidently reveled in the sumptuous success of the most fortunate kin in their kinship midst, and–indeed–the family as a whole “had never done better“, Lee couldn’t exactly say he was very happy with their newfound coalescing presence — indeed, not even remotely so. “According to Lee, George took advantage of Lee’s hard-won fame. Angie, although married and raising a family, joined the show as well. On the road, he remembered being under Angie’s and George’s watchful eyes and at home he had Frances to contend with. He felt he’d sacrificed his personal happiness, his need for a private life, for his family. Inevitably, Lee rebelled. Regardless of the publicized image of saccharine familial devotion, Lee said he wasn’t close to any of them. He resented their constant presence, their interference in his life, and he resented his mother most of all. From the ‘white heat‘ years until her death in 1980, he would never feel free of his obligation to her.“ (Thor.33,4)

Nevertheless, according to Scott, notwithstanding all the hardships it appears to have brought him, Lee “didn’t like to dwell on the negative aspects of any situation“ (Thor.34). Rather than mourn about any kind of predicament he found himself in, the rapidly rising showbiz star used the pleasurable intoxicating consolation of his increasing fame to soothe the malaise he experienced due to a for him regrettable and taxing family situation — one about which he–by the way, as per his well-established profound penchant to be sincerely secretive–in all likelihood never even did complain, at least not in front of the main cause of his familial predicament, the close relatives he–after all the dust of pretense had settled and the facade of smoke had cleared–seems to have been anything but close to.

Perhaps paradoxically to some, Liberace proved to be especially popular with women. Pyron explains why. “After the summer of 1953, Liberace went nowhere without being overwhelmed by masses of adoring females. His erotic appeal to younger women, however, played on some of the same attraction he had to older ones, except that it was inverted. If sexual attraction smoldered behind mothers’ affection for the son, the younger women idolized him because he was devoid of overt, physical sexuality. He exerted a unique appeal to them; he was a desirable, attractive man, but one purged of masculine loutishness. ‘Liberace fills a void in the lives of millions of American housewives whose dull, unromantic husbands,‘ summarized one critic, ‘can’t tell the difference between a rose and a dandelion.‘ ‘Liberace is the sympathetic type. He looks at you and you feel beautiful. For that alone, I believe in him,‘ one admirer told a reporter. ‘The main thing about Mr. Liberace, as it hits me,‘ reflected another fan, ‘is that he is through and through a Continental. When he kisses your hand, you know he isn’t going to chew off your arm.‘ A third woman put it even more succinctly. ‘What do I see?‘ she snorted to the question about Liberace’s appeal, ‘I have a little pleasant relief from what I have to look at every day: Loudmouths! Chest-beaters!‘ Like the ‘walkers‘ of old–homosexual friend/companions usually of older, wealthy women–Liberace reaffirmed the possibility of sophisticated companionship, witty discourse, male strength, and masculine attentiveness without the likelihood of rape or even sex.“ (Pyr.172,3)

The story of how Lee’s penchant for outrageously ostentatious costumes began

Scott suggests in his book that even though his former partner–as much as any other celebrity used to giving numerous interviews—seems to have dreaded answering the same kind of questions over-and-over again, Lee were to never have grown tired of clearing up one particular question, the one about how he started wearing those outrageously extravagant costumes of his. What happened was this. Courtesy of his blooming television popularity, Lee received a flood of invitations “to do concerts all over the country. One of the most exciting, from Lee’s point of view, was an opportunity to give his first concert at the Hollywood Bowl.“ However, this “breathtakingly beautiful outdoor amphitheater that seats twenty thousand people“ was so big that from the back of the theater, “the stage looked like a toy.“ Lee told Scott, “I pictured myself playing a black Baldwin concert grand, surrounded by a symphony orchestra all dressed in black. And I knew I’d fade into the woodwork if I wore black too.“ That was the moment when Lee decided to “break with tradition. Instead of the conventional black tuxedo, he planned to wear a set of white tails on stage. No one could have anticipated the enormous response to that simple decision.“ (Thor.34)

Lee was the first white performer to appear in an all-white tuxedo and it was a smashing success (in terms of generating raw publicity). “Television had given him popularity. The Bowl appearance gave him notoriety. Afterward everyone had something to say about Liberace. The critics used so many words to comment on Lee’s clothes that they barely had column space to critique his performance. The resulting furor gave Lee millions of dollars of free publicity. If white tails were worthy of headlines, Lee wondered what would happen if he wore something really flashy. They say clothes make the man. In Lee’s case, clothes helped make the performer.“ (Thor.34,5)

A lily-white Liberace had set in motion a trend for himself–needless to say, a purposefully-conspicuously self-flattering one–that was to only get more-and-more pronounced over the years. “In the years to come, he would often complain that the clothes had become an insatiable monster, consuming a lot of money and creative energy. But Lee had no idea that he would be creating a runaway show-biz Frankenstein in 1955, when he opened the new Riviera Hotel. His salary would be $50,000 a week, the highest fee ever paid to an entertainer; and, for the first time, his contract specified that he had to top any outfit he’d worn in the past. From then on, all his contracts would contain a similar clause. No problem, thought Lee. He’d been wearing white tuxedos or romantic, Edwardian velvet jackets for a few years. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with something a little more spectacular.“ (Thor.35)

Lee’s decision to start wearing brighter, louder and increasingly elaborately-designed costumes caught on well publicity-wise. When he had graduated into becoming the world’s highest-paid nightclub performer and was making an appearance at the Riviera, “His glittering gold lame tuxedo made him the most talked about. The reaction from the audience was instantaneous and powerful. Some people were offended by the way Lee had dressed, some were amused, some stunned; but no one was indifferent. His fans rewarded his audacity with a thundering round of applause. His detractors stayed and watched the act, mesmerized by the opportunity to dislike, ridicule, and feel superior to the strutting peacock onstage. For some, Lee’s appeal lay in the fact that they loved to hate him. But most of Lee’s fans, those little ladies from the small towns, adored him for daring to be different.“ (Thor.36)

It goes without saying that–owing to their power to mesmerize, magnetize and move the crowd–his dramatically-pompous peacock-impersonating sort of costumes came to have an important role to play in his act. Indeed, “for the rest of his career“, affirms Scott, “his costumes would be as important, or more important than the man who wore them.“ However, an unavoidable side-effect of incorporating eye-catching and hyperbolically-histrionic sort of outfits in his shows was that it caused “the strutting peacock“ to appear in the exact sort of way which the feline yet flashy flamer—ironically-enough–had always tried very hard to keep concealed from a presumed nosy, judgmental and most of all passionately homophobic public. “Lee, who so feared having his homosexuality discovered, had unwittingly placed himself in a position where he would appear onstage dressed like a queen, night and after night and year after year. Sometimes, after he made his stage entrance, he’d actually hear someone in the audience hiss, ‘Oh, my God! Look at that fag.‘ Those were dreadful moments. Lee’s popularity, his success, seemed to depend on his wild clothes, but the clothes themselves could get him in serious trouble. They gave birth to rumors, gossip, and innuendo.“ (Thor.37)

That Lee subjected himself to a persistent risk of being exposed for what he really was, may paradoxically also have added to the addicting thrill of being on stage. If you always have to fear being accused of being homosexual wherever you go (and face subsequent potentially traumatic persecution)–including especially on stage where he was indisputably most visible and therefore arguably most naked, most vulnerable–and yet if the audience for the night turns out to be frantic and favorable but simultaneously also sound asleep when it comes to catching on to your supposed dirty and allegedly damning personal secret, then gaining such reassuring awareness would likely be an immensely relieving and comforting experience.

And so when you enter the stage while always having these fearful thoughts for being unmasked as flaming gay not even too far in the back of your mind, and when it turns out that–lo and behold–no-one in the audience apparently has a clue, now you can afford yourself to let a huge wave of relief wash over you — conveniently washing away all of your nagging insecurities about yourself in relation to your audience. So there you would have your addictive cycle: fearful heart-palpitating apprehension before the show, which would be climaxing in strength right up until the minute of going up there on stage (the shakes); followed by a tremendous wave of exhilarating relief when the crowd just so happens to be wooing, wowing, unmistakably wild for the night, yet–at the same time–is not out to vilify and crucify you (the fix).

Especially in Lee’s case, since he always–ever since his mother allegedly forced him to deceive people around him–had to be prepared to parry vindictive reproach coming from people around him and–as a result–may be expected to always have been a little bit tense around them, is it any wonder that the flamboyant praise-seeking-predator came to be addicted to stage performance?

The fifties, according to Scott, still comprised an “intensely homophobic period.“ “Although Lee knew that many of Hollywood’s most famous and desirable men were gay or bisexual, none of them dared reveal the truth. Lee confessed to me that he began dating women to suppress the growing rumors about his own sexuality. If anyone dared to question his masculinity“, the cunning concerto queen that he was, “needed to be able to flaunt pictures of his latest girlfriend. He had no trouble getting all the dates he wanted and he gloried in escorting well-known entertainers to parties, getting his picture taken with Susan Hayward, Gale Storm, Rosemary Clooney, Mae West, and Judy Garland.“ (Thor.37)

In 1953, conveniently squelching “rumors about his sexuality“, the bold and increasingly loud-colored backstairs bugger even went so far as to become engaged to a sure member of the opposite sex, a pretty Las Vegas dancer by the name of JoAnn Del Rio. But when his beloved ardent fans let him know they couldn’t really say they liked this materialization of his ambition concerning the old marriage department, he only went to take their highly-valued wish as his overriding command and proceeded to dump her — just like that. It should be obvious though, that the ease with which the magnificent yet mysterious mamhole-mining maestro turned his back on his fiancée, of course goes to show that the whole thing had been one big charade from day one. Lee just couldn’t help but be sexually attracted to men and only men, especially the younger specimen. Indeed, “The older Lee got, the more younger men appealed to him. In that regard, he was a Dracula who never wearied of the taste and touch of youth. By his fifties“, asserts Lee’s former lubricated lover, “he preferred dating boys in their teens.“ (Thor.38)

When the still rather bashful, puritanical and gloomy nineteen-fifties made way for the revolutionizing, permissive and colorful sixties, it was as if Libertinism made a comeback throughout the Western world — and especially so in the increasingly bacchanal and lascivious United States of America. “The growing sexual permissiveness of the late fifties and sixties had a profound effect on the gay community. Promiscuity, which had been somewhat suppressed, became socially acceptable. Having multiple partners was both pleasurable and chic. Bathhouses, pickup bars, and clubs that existed for the sole purpose of arranging sexual encounters between strangers all thrived in that ‘anything goes‘ atmosphere. Lee, who had an insatiable sex drive, took full advantage of the developing situation. He admitted to spending more time thinking about sex during those years than he spent thinking about his act.“ (Thor.39)

Pyron adds. “Male-male sex was available everywhere, and, not least, it was usually free.” “Sex was free in more ways than one; it was casual, endlessly repeatable, generally forgettable, and completely gratifying after the manner of men. This form of coupling, which came complete with anonymity and danger, was the sex of choice for many men; its risks and namelessness was an aphrodisiac.“ (Pyr.219,20)

Liberace had the least bit of trouble to continue his no-strings-attached sort of sex-seeking trend into the 1960s. “Cruisy encounters and boy pickups became a part of the Liberace underground lore. A gay Hollywood insider reported similar episodes. ‘In the ’60s, you could often see Liberace cruising the Akron store on Sunset Boulevard with his little doggie in hand, dressed all in white–Lee I mean–trying to pick up Mexicans in the store’s parking lot,‘ the television producer chuckled. ‘He wasn’t discreet, he was daring and rather outrageous about it. He’d stand in the lot and try and pick up young men parking their cars. Most didn’t recognize him!‘ None of this is very different from the gossip sheets’ earliest stories in 1954 about Liberace picking up strangers in bathrooms and hitting on weightlifters. Nor, of course, does it fail to fit with the particulars of the episode chronicled by Hollywood Confidential in the spring of 1957.” “A pattern emerges from this fragmentary data of the entertainer’s sexual proclivities: tricks, tricking around, one-night or weekend stands, temporary or transient relationships, an attraction to younger men, a devotion to inferiors. This pattern implies other sexual elements: libidinousness, aggressiveness, and promiscuousness. Other data, already mentioned, supports the conclusion. ‘He was an incredibly, incredibly aggressive man,‘ repeated John Rechy. Another old associate put the showman’s aggressiveness in clearer focus still: ‘Oh, Lee was a top! He liked to fuck.‘ “ (Pyr.307-9)

While gratefully hiding under a showy cover of overt yet phony heterosexuality, “During those first years of fame, he became even more skilled at leading a double life. The matinee idol dated glamorous women and“ at the end of a typical date, when he had dropped off the woman du soir and bade her good-night, rather than (straight away) hitting the sack all by his lonely self, the clever closet catamite catcher that he was, “then headed for his Hollywood apartment to meet a homosexual lover. Onstage he smiled sweetly and flirted with his fans. In private“—in stark diametrical contrast–he easily and gladly got rid of his heterosexual false habit, only to quickly replace it with the kind that was more in tune with reality, one which invariably had the words flaming gay written all over it — in loud ALL-capital letters. (Thor.40)

The saucy secret sausage jockey seemingly had no qualms at all to even go and build “an enormous and expensive collection of pornography that he shared at all-male parties. Although the family never discussed Lee’s sexual identity, they had to know he was gay.“ “Frances herself played an unwitting role in Lee’s carefully crafted public image. She often attended his performances and he proudly introduced her as ‘My mother, Mrs. Liberace,‘ thereby negating Alexander Casadonte’s existence“ and–as a direct result from her generous son–conveniently was able to implicitly profit from advertising to all who had eyes to see and ears to hear what nonetheless was an irrefutable illusion: that she never ever had suffered even the smallest bit of a painfully-shameful divorce from Mr. Salvatore Liberace, and that she thereby–by supposedly still being happily married to Liberace’s ‘fortunate’ father–would be just as respectable as she had ever been and that she furthermore at once would likewise be just as worthy of praise, lots of wonderful delicious praise coming from as many audience members as would be decently possible (thank you very much!). (Thor.40)

Being called out for what he really is by the British press, yet responding by suing instead of acknowledging

In going and performing abroad, Lee found some reprieve from the apparent unsettling pressures he experienced at home, i.e., the kind of pressures which the public-at-large–sadly, still to this very day–tends to bring down on the famous ones in their midst. “Touring abroad gave him an occasional break from his problems. He said he felt safer, more free to be himself in countries where his name was not yet a household word. In the mid-fifties“, the young enterprising and energetic yet enigmatic entertainer had the fortune of receiving an invitation “to play the famed London Palladium and he jumped at the offer. The Palladium is to stage acts what Nirvana is to Buddhists. To be asked to perform there signaled Lee’s arrival as a star of international magnitude.“ (Thor.40)

After having played at what was such an exclusive and illustrious English venue in front of nevertheless much the same type of audience which he also enjoyed having back home (middle-aged working-class house-wives), Lee sadly would find himself returning to the States with a rather bitter proverbial aftertaste. “He enjoyed a huge box-office success in Britain, but the critics united in attacking him. One columnist for the London Daily Press launched an all-out war, describing Lee as a ‘deadly, sniggering, snuggling, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.‘ ‘Fruit,‘ of course, was the colloquial expression for homosexual.“ (Thor.40,1)

Liberace didn’t take too well this caricature-like characterization of him by the columnist responsible, a guy called William Conner (AKA Cassandra). In fact, he was quite upset. ” ‘I’m never bitter about things written about me, but I must admit I do become bitter when my love for my mother is described as any kind of ism,‘ he groused, ‘whether it’s Communism, Fascism or momism.‘ ‘What I don’t understand,‘ he said in his interview with reporter Art Buchenwald, ‘is, if I was as degenerate as they claim, and an unmanly man as they indicated, how do they explain the interest all the women have shown in me?‘ “ (Pyr.194,5)

“For the first time in his career“, recalls Scott, “Lee was publicly branded as gay and it devastated him. He imagined himself stripped of his fame, success, wealth, and power–all the things he’d worked so hard to achieve. Seeing the London Press article made him feel naked in front of the world. His entire career had been jeopardized. Lee burned with impotent rage for days. In Vegas, where he had connections, he’d have known exactly how to handle the situation. He’d have used his influence, his power, or his dangerous friends. But in London he felt helpless. So he struck back in the only way he could. He sued.“ (Thor.41)

Pyron argues that Lee succumbed to the sway of what at the time passed for the only acceptable definition of manhood — a truly manly man, the traditional male-chauvinist sort of man who likes nothing better than to roll up his sleeves and use his hands doing technical jobs requiring raw physical strength, one who doesn’t snicker all the goddamn time. The other type of humanoid creatures only superficially resembling males, especially those pansies working in the entertainment industry who go around with permanent smiles plastered on their silly giddy faces, wearing loud-colored faggotty suits while singing faggotty songs, were automatically too effeminate to even remotely deserve being called real men. Lee obviously qualified for the latter category, not the former. “Ideologically and culturally, he defaulted to the social definitions of maleness and to the asexual identification of that category with work, achievement, control, public authority. If homosexuals were not men, according to this definition, his commitment to the public definitions of masculinity required his public repudiation of homosexuality. The logic was infallible. Conner’s essay, he declared, had ‘cost me many years of my professional career by implying that I am a homosexual. . . . It has caused untold agonies and embarrassment and has made me the subject of ridicule.‘ Twenty years later, while he had by then loosened the gendered categories, the showman still assumed an inevitable relationship between masculinity, aggression, and livelihood, on the other hand, versus homosexuality, passivity, and ineffectualness on the other. ‘In 1956, people were destroyed by that accusation. It hurt me. People stayed away from my shows in droves. I went from the top to the bottom in a very short time, and I had to fight for my life.‘ “ (Pyr.227,8)

During the actual trial, in which a guy called Beyfus acted as his attorney, Lee went to boldly deny being a homosexual, indeed, ever having even being remotely near to being one. “The pianist himself testified for six hours in two days of testimony, and early on in the questioning Beyfus charged into the breach of his sexual identity and preference, despite the defense’s protest. ‘Are you a homosexual?‘ Beyfus queried him. ‘No, sir,‘ the pianist replied simply. He did not leave the issue at that. Beyfus continued the line of questioning. ‘Have you ever indulged in homosexual practices?‘ Again, the showman answered simply and directly: ‘No, sir, never in my life.‘ He did not stop even there. On he plunged. ‘I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society,‘ he finished.“ (Pyr.229)

Note that the dear plaintiff doesn’t admit that he does not like the practice but that he instead were to disapprove of it because the practice didn’t square with externally-imposed conditions. Rather than simply admit to the flaming fruit-flavored truth and be done with it, Lee used all of his power to purge his name—which he, since becoming successful, had grown to idolize—from the public insinuation that he was something which he as inveterate bum-boner in all honesty could not possibly deny being of course. “Lee didn’t care what the lawsuit cost in time, effort, or money. Money was surely no obstacle to the highest paid performer in the world. In the past he’d used his wealth to attract friendship and love. In England he used it as a tool to buy vindication and revenge. Lee made up his mind to prove, for all time, that he wasn’t gay, even if it meant bringing another woman in his life.“ (Thor.41)

What incredible lengths some people are willing to go to just to avoid acknowledging the stone-cold truth — in this case, the twinkly tickle-your-beard type of truth. It is apparent that Lee acted not on a pure AN-conscience but instead on a conscience that way back in his past–when he was a teenager–had sustained an RA-perturbation due to what he must have felt was an essential mental need to accommodate a service to Secrecy-idolatry having as aim to cover up his homosexuality. That is, if Lee were to have been an openly-practicing homosexual, he would not have found it right and proper to try and fight what he would then probably not have considered offensive commentary from the London Daily Press (and may have even been capable of seeing the fruit-flavored humor of it all).

However, while in actuality being under the sway of his RA-perturbed conscience, he now found it flat-out wrong and improper to refrain from combating what to him must have appeared as being dangerous, indeed, life-threatening kind of slander. And so, while driven by his mesmerizing artificial conscience, he decided to–as it were—go fully topsy-turvy by fighting what was true and defending what was false.

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Rational argument against the punishment and persecution of homosexuals for being homosexual

Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who was persecuted by the British government because of his (openly practiced) homosexuality, a blatantly immoral kind of victimization which tragically culminated into the man’s suicide.

But what would have happened if Lee would have stood up to defend not his false image, but himself–who he really was, his true self–by getting on with it and admit fair-and-square that he was gay? Would it really have ruined him and his career as he seemingly always had thought it would? Instead of spending all this money on protecting what was nothing more than a pretentious and misdirecting mirage, what if he was to have gathered together all of his courage and wits and had resolved to coordinate a type of defense of his deemed taboo sexuality in such an original and convincing way that, through its illuminating simplicity, not just the courts, but all the rational-thinking British and American people, indeed all the rational-thinking peoples of the entire world, could do no other thing but to agree–and adamantly so–that persecuting the lavender likes of him was not just wrong but outright immoral to the point of absurdity, indeed, insanity?

Some may not be particularly favorable to homosexual conduct, others may be squarely repulsed by it, still different folks may even go so far as to practically vomit at the mere thought of it, but all of that should not matter because judging homosexual conduct of poor taste–even intolerably poor taste–is an insufficient ground in-and-of-itself for any non-homosexual outsider to go ahead and intervene in the affairs of any pair of homosexuals when those two gays or two lesbians, while practicing their preferred sexuality, would present no threat and pose no burden to their outside community — the broader society of which they are part.

The matter comes down to the question: What gives some person, Person A, the right–from a humane point of view–to not only judge but to forbid and persecute another person, Person B, when Person B has committed no criminal offense in the sense of producing any victims but who merely had been engaged in mutually-consenting sexual intercourse with yet another person, Person C, one who happens to be having the same gender as Person B?

Or rephrased, when a man happens to prefer having sexual intercourse with another man instead of with a woman, would such a fact make the homosexual man immoral in the sense that some third party—be it gay-bashing vigilantes or legally-acting government agents—were to have the unquestionable and incontrovertible right to intervene in the business of that homosexual man to such an extreme and profound extent that this third party could, with supposed sufficient moral justification, safely harass and or violently persecute and or even altogether rob the freedom of that homosexual and or–along the way–force him to relinquish, when convicted and thrown in prison, some or perhaps even all of his (material and immaterial) assets?

The Christian formulation of the Golden Rule states that, in strong form, you are to love your neighbor as yourself; that, in slightly weaker behavioral form, you are to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And so what if your neighbor happens to engage in some kind of activity with some other neighbor which poses no actual clear and present danger at all to the society of which they are part, the kind of activity that leaves behind no trail of rape victims, no murder victims, no traces of victims of deprivation or destruction of property, no trace of victims of explicit and deliberate offensiveness, indeed, that produces no victims of any kind, none whatsoever, and–by perfectly keeping to themselves just like any typical sexually-active heterosexual couple would do too–does not even cause any kind of social disturbance to boot, in other words, if your neighbor does his “thing” while refraining from violating the Golden Rule with respect to any of his neighbors, would you then really have any kind of right–consistent with the Golden Rule–to forbid your neighbor from doing what they are doing (in the privacy of their own home)?

To those who keep on being convinced that, regardless, they were to still see themselves as having the right to intervene in what to said homosexual neighbor would be nothing more than his choice pursuit of happiness, what if the situation were the other way around? What if one of your neighbors catches you engaging in some kind of activity (whether that activity involves another neighbor or not) that this neighbor of yours would happen to personally find intolerably distasteful and yet that–likewise, at the same time–also would not produce any victims and present no substantial burden to any outsider? How would you like it if this neighbor of yours would try to prevent you from doing what you are doing simply because they would happen to find unbearably distasteful and off-putting that which you freely chose to do (in the privacy of your own home)?

Would it be anywhere near moral for your neighbor to try and prevent you from doing what you’re doing on the sole basis that it happens to elicit feelings of nausea in your neighbor? By either perceiving or merely contemplating whatever it happens to be that you would be doing, would your neighbor’s feelings generated by such an event be of higher importance than your natural right to profess your autonomy and pursue happiness in ways that you see fit? — mind you, ways–Golden Rule-abiding ways–which would not pose any burden or danger to the society of which you are part.

Then there is the argument from religion. Homosexuality would be a sin. It says so on various places in various scriptures, right? While I cannot pretend to know God’s precise opinion on the matter and–in all fairness, on the one hand–I have been informed of certain spiritual risks associated with the practice of homosexuality, and I also full well understand that no couple of (same-gendered) homosexuals could ever hope to produce babies without any outside help (in the form of a surrogate mother or sperm donor), on the other hand, I also would like to believe that–consistent with the Golden Rule–God first-and-foremost wants us to love another. And if one man loves another man (or one woman loves another woman) and their–mind you—shared interpretation of love involves sexual intercourse with each-other, then the moral crux of the issue comes down to the following question.

Which of the two possible alternatives would be the more immoral: (I) a situation in which one person has mutually-consensual sex with a loved same-sex person from the same age-category, versus (II) a situation in which some third party uses raw power to prevent one homosexual person from having sex with another homosexual person and to potentially subject them both to subsequent legal persecution with the aim of permanently destroying the homosexual relationship and robbing both individuals of their freedom? Isn’t that second alternative the more immoral one of the two? Isn’t that third party—using raw intervening power to break up the relationship between two sexually-active homosexuals–more in the wrong, more in violation of the Golden Rule, than the first situation in which two homosexuals seek to love one another in their mutually-consented preferred way?

But let’s delve into the matter with a little more specificity of applicable legality and morality. Let’s assume there exists in some region of the world, whatever region wherever it may be found, a State having a legal body which enforces a law that prohibits homosexual intercourse in the sense that this legal body would seek to legally persecute any and all couples of individuals who are caught, by agents working on behalf of said legal body, engaging in homosexual acts. Consider one such couple of homosexuals hailing from such a region and who end up arrested and sentenced for violating said law on homosexuality. Consequently, the two homosexuals end up either thrown in prison or–if the region is of an even worse, medieval sort of, moral development–end up executed, and–at any rate–are prevented, through the use of potentially-violent intervening power, from continuing their relationship in their preferred way and which they professed prior to the arrest. If the homosexuals are executed, by ordering the lives of the two homosexuals be snuffed out in a welter of legally-endorsed lethal violence, the administrators of the legal body undoubtedly commit the grossest of violations of the Golden Rule with respect to the two homosexuals — whom, regardless of breaching the law on homosexuality, are still–consistent with the Golden Rule–neighbors to be loved as the administrators love themselves.

However, for the sake of simplicity of argument and for the sake of upholding faith in humanity (including and in spite of its not always prudent and humanely-acting class of lawmen), let’s assume that the two gays or two lesbians of whom we speak are not killed but are imprisoned instead. By seeing to a destruction of their relationship, the prosecuting administrators of the State thus are responsible for making it as of then impossible for those two homosexuals to love one another in a way which would be consistent with the Golden Rule; this constitutes the first violation of the Golden Rule, affecting two people, for which the prosecuting State is responsible. By using the for-all-practical-purposes deemed almighty authority of the law (in other words, by way of idolizing the law), the State grants itself the power to drive a proverbial wedge between the two homosexuals, to furthermore deprive them both of their freedom, to also deprive them both of their opportunity to freely lead their chosen way of life, as well as depriving them both of any and all of the personal assets they enjoyed having while being able to live freely outside of the confines of the prison they now both find themselves in.

In addition, each of the two homosexuals may–in general–be expected to be emotionally connected to a distinct group of people who care for and who love the condemned homosexual individual — loved ones, nearest and dearest, family-members and friends. By imprisoning the two homosexuals, by brutally yanking the two men or two women from their respective communities (of loved ones), the State also effectively seeks to drive a wedge between, on the one hand, each of the two prosecuted homosexual individuals and, on the other hand, each individual of the group of loved ones belonging to the homosexual individual. Each individual of the two groups of loved ones are hence bound to find out that now all-of-a-sudden it is a lot harder to love their loved one when that loved one–who so happens to be homosexual–has been locked away in prison. Consequently, in principle, under normal circumstances, a lot of people–potentially a lot more than ‘just’ the two homosexuals at hand–end up victimized because of the State’s invasive and–from a moral humane vantage point—highly-dubious prohibitive interference into the lives of the two by-now imprisoned homosexuals.

Let me elaborate on that last part. Ever since the sentencing and subsequent incarceration of the two homosexuals, each and every loved one of each of the prosecuted homosexuals is forced to make a choice. On the one hand, they could choose to (a) continue loving the homosexual as they always might have done before the arrest took place but then, if they were to do so–through what would then be an in-tact empathic connection with the homosexual–that person would be forced to endure a state of suffering along with the condemned homosexual for at least the duration of the prison sentence. Especially if the pertinent prison conditions are harsh and inhumane to such extreme extent that the well-being of the homosexual is in jeopardy for as long as he (or she) were to be housed in such a hazardous type of prison, then remaining fully emotionally-connected to the imprisoned homosexual could hardly be but a (gruelingly) tormenting ordeal; that is, loving and caring for the imprisoned homosexual would then likely be an enormously emotionally-taxing experience for the loved one, one fraught with incessant worry for the safety of the deprived homosexual.

Patty Hearst, victim of Stockholm Syndrome — in which captives end up (romantically) bonding with their captors.

On the other hand, alternatively, that same loved one could opt to (b) do themselves a selfish favor and cut all ties with the incarcerated homosexual, including any emotional ties, and–as a result–save themselves from the plight of having to (empathically) suffer along with the homosexual locked up in a cage (like a wild animal needing to be tamed). In this alternative, the–what would then be—former loved one effectively chooses to side with the legal body in its executed decision to condemn the homosexual to a fate of (humiliating and degrading) imprisonment. Siding with the factually homophobic governmental oppressor, in order to gain for themselves some approximation of peace of mind, now all-of-a-sudden, said person must be able to rationalize and defend the State with respect to its choice to destroy the homosexual relationship and convict the couple of homosexuals.

In order to be psychologically consistent, by logical extension and consequence, the person doing so will become (highly) prone to adopt a similar dismissive mindset to any other and or subsequently-encountered homosexual couples; that person will likewise find it necessary to rationalize away the State’s tyrannical efforts to destroy the relationships of all other apprehended homosexual couples; that person will likewise will find it necessary to rationalize away the State’s tyrannical decision to condemn all those arrested homosexuals to a bereft and disgraced state of imprisonment. In other words, this person is expected to learn to identify with the State acting as an aggressor; he or she is expected to identify with the aggressor and therefore, by very definition, enters into an at-once dubious type of bonding with that State, one that is known as Trauma Bonding.

It’s the same type of pathological bonding that may exist between captors and certain psychologically-susceptible captives, called Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages choose the side of their abductors even in the face of abuse and rather than being able to rationally acknowledge the nevertheless necessarily abusive type of relationship to which they voluntarily surrender themselves to, are prone to much sooner make excuses for their abuser(s) and manage to be at peace with what actually is a pathological relationship where the balance of power is frighteningly skewered in the favor of the abuser(s). As such, even though painfully clashing with the Golden Rule, the person effectively siding with the State, will consequently likely develop a tendency to be systematically unwilling to love any and all other homosexuals that somehow, however briefly and in whatever way, go on to appear in his or her life throughout his or her subsequent lifetime.

First off, it needs to be understood that the State does not deserve to be held responsible for literally forcing that person to make the choice between either continuing (a) to reserve a loving and affectionate attitude towards homosexuals or (b) adopting a perhaps indifferent or possibly even hateful and ruthless attitude towards any and all homosexuals whom they would be confronted with during the remainder of their lives. However, that same government nevertheless does deserve to be held responsible for subjecting that person to moral dilemmas of this kind, i.e. the government should own up to the responsibility for systematically and repeatedly confronting that person with a dichotomous situation in which he or she finds themselves forced to make said painful conscientious choice.

Hence, the State–by destroying homosexual relationships and incarcerating the involved homosexuals–effectively causes each loved one of each condemned homosexual to be confronted with the conscientious choice to either retain or discard their love for the convicted homosexual. The State is responsible for confronting, in principle, each loved one with a moral dilemma of this nature. Indeed, since retaining the love for a condemned homosexual is more arduous and painful than discarding it, the State therefore deserves to be regarded as the great facilitator of the dissolution of potentially–in a worst case scenario—all of the bonds that may possibly exist between all of the involved loved ones with all of the condemned homosexuals.

The State, by proscribing homosexuality and actively prosecuting the homosexuals it orders to be arrested and imprisoned, therefore deserves to be regarded as the great facilitator of the sad phenomenon–still existing in some of the more savage and morally underdeveloped societies of the world–in which the community is torn up into two basic camps: a camp formed by all the people who choose to retain their general love for homosexuals, whether those homosexuals are imprisoned or are free; versus a camp formed by all the people who have chosen to altogether discard their general love for homosexuals. And with that we have arrived at pinpointing the broad legacy of the sort of State which has resolved to (brutally) enforce (automatically morally-failing) anti-homosexuality laws; it acts as the unequaled facilitator or supreme catalyst to violently split up the communities over which it lords (divide and rule?) into–in principle–two mutually-antagonistic camps: one that is pro-homosexuality versus one that is anti-homosexuality.

When the ruling legal body gives observance of a law such pronounced importance that it (far) exceeds the importance which that legal body, at the same time, is willing to attribute to the well-being and security of the people over which the law is said to hold jurisdiction, when the legal body thereby effectively gives such law near-god-like a stature, we could then say that the legal body has baptized said law an object of idolatry — and as a result, by construction, its service would automatically come at the sacrificial expense of the people having the misfortune of falling under the jurisdiction of that law. That is, it may then be said that this law has become an idol–an artificial and abstract ‘decider’ of human life–and that its proverbial altar is, in a proverbial sense, eagerly awaiting the reception of sacrifices to be drawn, by the de facto Law-idolizing members of the legal body of government, from the broad population (of commoners) constituting the dominion of said law.

In the case of a law prohibiting homosexuality, any apprehended homosexual subject to prosecution on the basis of having violated such anti-homosexuality law, may be considered to have visited a blemish on the accompanying Anti-homosexuality Law-pidol — or, more accurately stated, a blemish on each of the Anti-homosexuality Law-pidols which each of the administrators of that law may be said to have in their minds. Due to supposedly, in an abstract sense, having inflicted a stain on the Anti-homosexuality Law-pidol–or, more accurately, on each of those mental Law-pidols possessed by the pertinent administrators—consequently, the offender is expected to redeem the actuality of the stain (or stains) by surrendering a sufficiently substantial sacrifice of personal assets. In the case of receiving a custodial sentence, in order to lift the blemish on the idolized law, the offender is expected to sacrifice his freedom and future as well as all his other personal assets which belonged to him in his preceding unconvicted free life and which can no longer be retained due to incarceration of its proprietor or professor (rental or physical property, employment or vocation, etc.). In the case of receiving a death sentence, the offender is granted the opportunity to redeem said blemish–now deemed exceptionally hideous—only by way of sacrificing his life altogether.

Unfortunately, although bad enough a situation for the lorded-over people as is, the sacrifices which the so-called offenders of the Anti-homosexuality law are forced to make on the collective abstract altar servicing the mental Anti-homosexuality Law-pidols of the administrators, are not the only sacrifices that are made. As I explained up above, the result of the government choosing to idolize the law prohibiting homosexual conduct is that the mental Law-pidols of the administrators may also be thought of as demanding to be brought to their–if you will—hungry altar, the quality of the whole host of relationships existing between the condemned homosexuals and all of their respective loved ones. When a homosexual disappears behind bars, or worse, ends up executed, then all-of-a-sudden the quality of all of the individual relationships existing between each of the condemned homosexuals and all of their respective loved ones has been dealt a profound, and in some cases, lethal blow. It may be said that, per condemned homosexual, an initially relatively high quality has been sacrificed on the collective abstract altar and the resulting low quality constitutes the—if you will—left-over of the sacrificial procedure. Footnote{I will delve more into the particulars of Law-idolatry in the upcoming volume of this series, Volume II. For an introduction, see Chapter … .}

This straightforward argument goes to show that, on the basis of what deserves to be called a collective practice of Law-idolatry by the government–i.e., by all the administrators forming part of the legal body of the government–the State’s meddlesome and invasive interference into the lives of prosecuted and condemned homosexuals causes a lot of suffering in the communities it lords over; specifically, it makes it harder–if not impossible–for all of the involved people to, in ways consistent with the Golden Rule, continue loving all those homosexuals who have been rudely plucked from their midst and unceremoniously thrown behind bars.

As such, while exercising to the point of idolatry a type of law which actually is immoral and therefore is inexcusable and unacceptable, the State is responsible for needlessly inflicting suffering, markedly more suffering than would be sustained if the two neighbors were just allowed to love one another in their own preferred and private way — even if it would involve a form of sexual conduct which some (or, depending on the geographical location, maybe even most) people find objectionable to the point of taboo.

Hence, given the shockingly high moral cost of prohibitive (idolatry-based) intervention, so long as the way in which they choose to love one another does not conflict with the Golden Rule, there is no morally-sound justification whatsoever for the State to invasively intervene into such type of relationship; specifically, the government has no morally-defensible right to destroy any consensual homosexual relationship if the sole reason for destruction would be the homosexual nature of that relationship. Hence, designating a homosexual relationship to be illegal is itself immoral; maintaining the illegal status of a homosexual relationship is itself immoral.

In other words, courtesy of the Golden Rule, the State has no morally-defensible right to enforce an Anti-homosexuality law, the State has no morally-defensible right to destroy (much of) the lives of prosecuted homosexuals and it has no morally-defensible right to destroy (much of) the quality of the relationships existing between each of prosecuted homosexuals and each member of the group of loved ones belonging to each of the prosecuted homosexuals. By the same token, any other congregation of people other than the State, such as gay-bashing vigilantes, have likewise zero moral justification to harass and or persecute homosexuals for being homosexual. The homophobes which Lee allegedly encountered throughout his life-time had and would have had zero just cause whatsoever to persecute the likes of Liberace on the sole basis that they were homosexual.

The moral corollary which thus reasonably follows from this argument would be, in simpler general terms, something along the lines of: If you don’t like doing something, then simply don’t do that something, yet–provided that something is and remains to be consistent with the Golden Rule–you have no right to try to prevent other people from doing that something if those other people have so chosen based on their own uncoerced volition, their own free will.

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Estimate of the moral cost sustained by each administrator tasked with penalizing one couple of homosexuals with a prison sentence

For robbing the two homosexuals–Homo1 and Homo2–of their freedoms even though their behavior had not been in conflict with the Golden Rule, let’s say that–for every single day it wrongfully incarcerates the two victims–each-and-every administrator of the legal body having been a part of the prior successful prosecution incurs:

Add2PsycheImpactCost(State) = gMC from {Homo1, Homo2}. (3.1)

For destroying the Golden Rule-compliant relationship between the two homosexuals, let’s say that–for every single day it forcefully holds the two homosexuals apart—each administrator incurs an additional:

Add2PsycheImpactCost(State) = gMC from {Homo1, Homo2}. (3.2)

For depriving the two homosexuals of their freely chosen way of life, let’s say that–for every single day it locks the homosexuals up in cages—each administrator furthermore incurs:

Add2PsycheImpactCost(State) = gMC from {Homo1, Homo2}. (3.3)

For depriving the two homosexuals of all of their assets they had at their disposal while living freely outside, let’s say that each administrator incurs–on a daily basis–an extra:

Add2ExtraPsycheImpactCost(State) = gMC(extra+psyche) from {Homo1, Homo2}. (3.4)

In addition, the administrator is also responsible for making it impossible for all of the loved ones to continue loving their deprived loved homosexuals (the way they were used to). If we say that Homo1 has a number of N loved ones and Homo2, M loved ones, then for—on a daily basis—driving a wedge into N relationships between Homo1 and his loves ones as well as driving a wedge into M relationships between Homo2 and his loves ones, the administrator incurs another:

Add2PsycheImpactCost(State) = {gMC from Homo1 + gMC from Homo1_LoveOne₁ + gMC from Homo1 + gMC from Homo1_LovedOne₂ + . . . + gMC from Homo1 + gMC from Homo1_LovedOne_N} + {gMC from Homo2 + gMC from Homo2_LoveOne₁ + gMC from Homo2 + gMC from Homo2_LovedOne₂ + . . . + gMC from Homo2 + gMC from Homo2_LovedOne_M} = N gMC from Homo1 + Σ_n=1^N {gMC from Homo1_LovedOne_n} + M gMC from Homo2 + Σ_m=1^M {gMC from Homo2_LovedOne_m}. (3.5)

The combined moral cost per administrator for inflicting the sum-total of the harm associated with incarcerating the two Golden Rule-compliant homosexuals, thus may be written as:

MoralCost(State) = D(3 + N) gMC from Homo1 + D(3 + M) gMC from Homo2 + D gMC(extra+psyche) from {Homo1, Homo2} + D Σ_n=1^N {gMC from Homo1_LovedOne_n} + D Σ_m=1^M {gMC from Homo2_LovedOne_m}, where D is the number of days the two homosexuals are incarcerated. (3.6)

This equation, (3.6), may be interpreted as an estimate for the moral cost due to convicting one homosexual couple and which may be thought of being incurred by each-and-every administrator forming part of the legal body collectively engaged in idolizing the law prohibiting homosexuality. In other words, (3.6) gives a crude lower-bound estimate of the moral cost corresponding to the sacrifices made by the couple of convicted homosexuals and the community of which they were yanked from on the abstract altar of the mental Law-pidol belonging to just one administrator.

The moral cost incurred by that administrator is, in turn, copy-inherited by each-and-every one of their superiors of the legal apparatus in which they are working, going all the way up in the hierarchy of legal power, not stopping at the level of supreme judges (Justices) but only at the level of the Head of State who, explicitly or implicitly, would be endorsing the law prohibiting homosexuality.

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R.D. Laing

What would have happened to Lee if his legal team were to have opted for a kind defense that would be consistent with the above line of reasoning?

The late psychiatrist R.D. Laing used to say, “True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.“

Lee was homosexual and he was made to feel guilty about it, not because he was doing something wrong in the sense of really earning persecution for it by third parties having justifiable cause to punitively “correct” the sort of unacceptable behavior coming from him that were to discernibly be hazardous to society; but rather solely because those third parties simply had made up their bigoted homophobic minds that practicing (consensual) homosexuality was supposed to be unacceptable according to their choice moral standard, one which–in perfectly dogmatic manner–only accepted strictly heterosexual conduct. The kind of guilt that such third parties forced on Lee was not genuine guilt but false guilt, the kind of guilt that some people apparently insist on wanting to foist on the likes of Liberace for the alleged infraction of failing to meet what such people consider to be the only acceptable standard of behavior.

When your conduct does not violate the Golden Rule and yet it fails to meet the standard of acceptable conduct held by other people and they seek to make you feel guilty for it, in other words, when your conduct is in harmony with the Golden Rule and your guilt would be false (externally-imposed – flagged by your RA-perturbed conscience) rather than true (internally-recognized – flagged by your AN-conscience), then no-one has a morally-defensible right to persecute you for it. It is sad that Lee seemingly never was able to arrive at this conclusion himself but instead always remained fixated on wanting to invest–if need be, all of–his energies into propping up and promoting an outward personal image in which he was featured as some nevertheless entirely-fictitious sort of person who were to always be perfectly compliant with the only deemed appropriate sexual orientation — always busy seeking to flaunt an image of adherence to an externally-imposed rigid standard of acceptable conduct, while at the same time having no apparent significantly-obstructive misgivings to secretly engage in the exact kind of behavior which flagrantly violated such nevertheless artificial and arbitrary standard.

Liberace faking it with Sonja Henie

In order to flaunt to the world this secretly-false heterosexual picture of himself, in order to do his bit in the service of Heterosexual Positive Group-idolatry, in order to help convince the world that he would “really and genuinely” deserve to be recognized as a sound member of the heterosexual in-group, rather than involving someone of only modest caliber like Del Rio, this time Lee brought in a seasoned heavy-hitter. “Sonja Henie had been the world’s premier figure skater in the 1920s and thirties. She’d parlayed ten world championships and three Olympic gold medals into an enormously successful show-business career.“ “Sonja was seven years older than Lee and her fame was waning when they met. I think mutual need drew them to each other.“ “Lee used his romance with Sonja as proof of his sexual preference.“ (Thor.41)

All for the purpose of disavowing what was really the unmistakable truth, all for the benefit of his public image as an entertainer with ideally incontrovertible sort of a heterosexual orientation, one also supposedly having an industrial-strength sort of stability about it, all for floating an at best titillating mirage, Lee proved to be willing to use other people and–as such–proved to have a kind of mentality that he ironically-enough shared with the one person in his life whom he secretly seemed to have despised at least as much as he loved. His mother Frances, as will become only even clearer later on, also entirely selfishly used her favorite son as a de facto tool to be able to enjoy soaking up public acclaim for her own person (Narcissism by Proxy). Quite possibly therefore drawing example from his mother (albeit arguably entirely unwittingly), Lee used Sonja Henie, and before her JoAnn Del Rio, for nothing more than to show the world at large that which was flinkingly flaming false.

In more technical language, Liberace used the company of women to expose to all those who wished to see, false Pidols featuring himself as heterosexual, perceptual Pidols which derived from his Prime-Pidol being shifted in an inauthentic heterosexual display-mode with the augmenting help of various women by his side, who basically functioned as nothing more than useful props. Lee surrounded himself with women not because he loved women (not in a romantic baby-siring family-seeking sort of sense anyway), but rather because he wanted to inspire into the minds of the people perceiving him, whether that be in the street or on stage or on television, strategic and carefully-crafted yet perfectly-misleading and artificial Pidols(Liberace).

Borne out of what had originally started in his teens (ever since discovering his taboo sexual orientation) as an overriding neurotic need for shame-avoidance and which, when his professional career had taken off, also came to comprise a similarly important need for retaining his for-all-practical-purposes deemed holy fan-base, once again, while under the self-hypnotizing direction of his RA-perturbed conscience, Lee chose to deviate from what was objectively true and what was objectively right, all for the purpose of defending and clearing his image after it had come under–what he must have felt was–such an intolerable siege laid by such an unbearably hostile press.

In spite of blatantly going against what–to any sober and impartial observer–should be so obviously and painfully clear, the celebrity-mediated ruse nonetheless turned out to be a resounding success. “After the London court case came to an end“, picks up Scott, “Lee never again felt the need to camouflage his true nature by dating ladies.“ Before the year 1959 ended, “Lee was completely vindicated; his name and reputation were freed of any blemish.“ “Never mind how much he’d spent during the three-year legal action; Lee had been officially, in a court of law, cleared of any suspicion of homosexuality. He’d have gladly spent a fortune to achieve that goal.“ (Thor.41,2)

Unfortunately for the man, Lee’s victory in court proved to also be more-than-anything a rather timely triumph, somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory—if you will. In the 1960s, America loosened-up sexually-speaking, and being gay slowly but surely began to be no big deal. “As America’s social climate became increasingly liberal, other gays came out of the closet.“ Nevertheless, “Lee felt compelled to keep his silence.“ His hands were tied behind his back and, tragically, he and the callous villain who had been so cruel to do the tying were one and the same person. “I can’t admit a thing,“ he allegedly told Scott (with some suggested remorse?), “unless I want to be known as the world’s biggest liar.“ (Thor.42)

Lee felt that the allegations made by especially the British press had worked to whither away his success as a performer. On advice of his lawyer–John Jacobs–who had previously urged him to press charges against the Daily Mirror, Lee decided to sack Heller. “The circumstances of his life seemed to sap Liberace’s genius, and he turned himself over to Jacobs in 1958 to reform his image.” “At Jacobs’s counsel, he determined that charges of homosexuality were responsible for destroying his career. ‘It hurt me,‘ he said later about the Cassandra affair. ‘People stayed away from my show in droves.‘ He read his declining popularity, then, as a function of his identity as a homosexual. He would butch himself up.” “He played it straight, for once in his life.” ” ‘When you’re starting out in show business you need these things. Once I was established, I gave up the flamboyant clothes. Actually, I had to do it to find out if the audiences came to see me or all the fancy trappings. It became a matter of personal pride.‘ “ (Pyr.200,1)

Pyron continues, “Liberace presented his butch image when it aired. Engineered by Jacobs, his old television mentor, Don Fedderson, and his agents at MCA, the show rotated around his new, conventional persona. ‘They cut my hair very short, put me in Brooks Brothers suits and shirts with button-down collars.‘ Everything was different: ‘No candelabra, no fancy clothes, none of the showmanship, that, it turned out, was responsible for my first big success.‘ Variety’s review captured something critical about the show. The star still possessed his powerful personal appeal: ‘There’s still something nice about the man,‘ it judged, but otherwise he ‘seemed to be under the control of some outside force,‘ for example, by ‘talking a couple of octaves lower than he is famous for.‘ “ (Pyr.202)

Team Liberace had gambled and they had gambled wrong. “The result was disastrous. If his star had been fading before, the new show seemed to obliterate it altogether, he judged later. Fifteen years after the fact, he pronounced it all wrong from the very beginning. First, the new look failed his audience, he insisted. Viewers, he determined, ‘resented the plain look. Letters began pouring in saying the music was still beautiful, but all the charm, the glamour, the fun was gone out of the show.‘ “ (Pyr.202)

In a bid to rekindle and revive the success which had slipped from his control, it would not take an awful long time before Lee decided to drop the sober schtick and return to his tried-and-tested formula of flaunting good-old-fashioned glamour. “Besides his almost incredible will, energy, and drive, the showman’s successes had an external source as well, at least according to Liberace himself. He altered his management team again. In 1961, he returned to Seymour Heller.” “Facilitated by his own hard work and assisted by St. Anthony, St. Jude, and now good old Seymour, Liberace was flying high again by 1962. He reestablished his name; once more he had become a desirable commodity.“ (Pyr.253)

Pyron elaborates, “As he acquired a career and reputation in the forties, he practiced a fairly conventional form of elegance–tuxedos, tails, and, of course, the candelabra after 1945. By the early fifties, however, he began pushing the limits of convention. At his Hollywood Bowl performance in 1952, for example, he had exchanged the standard white tie and black tails for an all-white version of formal eveningwear. The outfit grabbed headlines. He was ‘the new Cab Calloway . . . the hidey-ho man of the Hollywood Bowl.‘ The ‘snowy sheared beaver dress suit‘ he wore to the premiere of Forever Yours in 1955, or his Christian Dior-designed gold lamé jacket of his Las Vegas performance of the same year, represented more play with fashion. Under the direction of John Jacobs, he gave all this up in 1957. He went straight and plain, sans glamour, for almost five years. As he regained fame and celebrity after 1961, he also reclaimed glamour. While his reassertion of real flamboyance did not take place until 1962, he had begun establishing the new style earlier, privately and domestically. Indeed, it was in his home that he first began the really radical development of what might be termed fashion as spectacle.“ (Pyr.255)

If glamour was what his audience wanted, glamour was what they were going to get. Liberace would be only all-too-glad to provide. “He had rediscovered that glamour was not only profitable but highly profitable after 1961. Folks craved it. He was delighted to satisfy their longing. Not least, he enjoyed the spectacle. Show had been his metier since high school, but the conservative eclipse had proven to him, finally, that this was where his future lay. He gave over to glitz like never before in his career. His spectacle now outstripped anything he had ever tried before, and, indeed, what anyone had done before.“ (Pyr.259)

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In 1963, Lee found himself coming down with a peculiar yet mysterious and serious sort of illness that would go on to almost take his very life. On the exact same day that Kennedy was assassinated, Lee awoke bathing in cold sweat, and found himself unable to perform the shows scheduled for later that day. When he was admitted to the St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh, it was discovered what the cause for his sudden crippling condition was. You see, during his recent string of performances, “he worked under blazing lights which caused him to sweat profusely. Consequently, his costumes required frequent cleaning.“ The cleaning agent used on one of his costumes turned out to be a toxic chemical, tetra-chloride. By way of sweating heavily, the woebegone body of the energetic entertainer happened to absorb the “deadly chemical through his pores. Lee wore that costume for part of each performance on all the ensuing evenings, absorbing more and more of the lethal chemicals. By the time he collapsed, his kidneys had shut down completely.“ (Thor.44)

Lee received the ominous diagnosis of “uremic poisoning.“ “Waste fluids had already collected in Lee’s tissues. His feet and legs were already swollen. If the swelling couldn’t be halted before it reached his vital organs, Lee would literally drown in his own body fluids.“ A relatively new medical treatment back then, kidney dialysis was the only available means that was regarded having a chance of saving him. Fearing that his time might be up, Lee began to pray. The praised and already popular performer–who so suddenly came to be in such abject peril–were to much later have told Scott, “I knew prayer was the only thing that could help me, so I began to pray harder than I ever had in my life.“ (Thor.45)

Lee’s efforts to call on God would not be in vain. “Sometime during the thirty-six hours between treatments, Lee woke to find a nun dressed all in white seated by his bed. The nun, whom he assumed to be one of the nursing sisters at the Catholic hospital, told Lee that he mustn’t waste his strength worrying because of his illness. She assured him that he was going to live“ and, lo and behold, “twelve hours after the second dialysis“, “Lee’s kidneys began to function again.“ The doctors dealing with his case were amazed and called his recovery nothing short of miraculous. “In their opinion“, the charismatic prismatic piano-playing private poof “owed his life, not to their skills, but to divine intervention.“ Lee was told by hospital personnel that the all-white nun could not have been from around, since “none of the nuns in the hospital fit his description, none of them wore all-white habits.“ (Thor.45)

“Six weeks after he’d been taken to St. Francis, Lee was released, weighing twenty pounds less than he had on the day he’d been rushed there by ambulance.“ The experience was to have a dramatically altering effect on his worldview. “Despite the church’s position on homosexuality, Lee firmly believed he wouldn’t have been spared if being gay was the sin Catholic dogma held it to be. He believed he’d been saved because God, and most particularly St. Anthony, looked on him with special favor. As for the mysterious nun, nothing could convince him she wasn’t God’s messenger. Knowing God loved him“, was a tremendously reassuring event and this comforting feat of novel awareness “filled Lee with peace and well-being. He’d done things the church regarded as sins–sodomy, homosexual acts with multiple partners–but God had spared him anyway. From 1963 on, Lee, believing there was no sin too great for God’s forgiveness, would stop at nothing in his pursuit of pleasure.“ (Thor.46)