The sexuality of Elvis Presley
Sometimes he got a little gay
In 1954, an androgynous young man burst on the cultural scene, entrancing with bizarre gyrations. Teenage girls went wild, as did teenage boys.
He did campy music and campy movies, and then a campy stage show. He became the biggest star in the world, always “aggressively bisexual in appeal,” as a reviewer noted in 1959.
I’m thinking about Elvis Presley.
Elvis is often assumed to be a very “masculine” performer.
As a performer in the mid-1950s, he seemed a force of sexual energy. He was called a ‘rebel’. He was ‘Elvis the Pelvis’, and unsettled conservative people. Didn’t that mean masculine? Didn’t he drive the girls wild with his ultra-masculinity?
Early news coverage, however, often says that Elvis moved like a female stripper. That’s why it was so upsetting.
An early newspaper critic said he “shakes his pelvis like any striptease babe in town.” In 1956, a judge was disgusted at the “self-gratifying striptease with clothes on.”
The recent Baz Luhrmann movie went with this ‘ultra-masculine’ angle, and suggests, absurdly, that Elvis’…
