The recent bio-pic of famed Las Vegas piano-player and showman Liberace revealed much about the truths of the gay lifestyle and the dysfunction inherent in homosexual relationships. While not strictly a biographical film, the movie focuses on the superficial relationship between Liberace and one of his younger male lovers, Scott Thorson. When they met in 1976, Thorson was 17 and Liberace, a much older, 57. Like many young men who sometime wander about the edge of the gay sex world, Thorson was sexually confused and rather aimless with a non-existent family. When he meets Liberace, and is hired as his new “assistant,” he feels as if his life has purpose; he belongs; and is happy. For a couple of years, Thorson and Liberace appear to be a healthy same-sex couple in love. But the relationship is based upon a lie; the idea that two men can, like heterosexual marriages, become a symbiotic whole from separate persons. Within the false notions of top and bottom, which only describe a sexual position, not a hormonally-based sex characteristic, the woundedness of both Thorson and Liberace, a tear in the psyche of all gay men and women, still persists and prevents any true sense of union. With the two men, we witness no real giving and receiving; or the male-female dynamic.
As with many first gay relationships, for an inexperienced young man, their initial lover, who ceremonially initiates them into gay culture, is almost always an older guy. Sometimes, in the case of childhood or teenage molestations, this can happen quite traumatically before the person even reaches the age of consent. Most often, the young man, looking for the comfort and love of a father-figure, attracts the attention of a “sugar-daddy” or “chick-hawk.” In the case of Thorson, he found both: as Liberace provided the hapless kid with a career, albeit a phony one, and money. As often occurs, the older partner begins to use the younger man as a sort of living trope or pagan idol. When I was just starting out in the lifestyle, I had a cadre of older men who were very eager and willing to give me whatever I wanted; of course, in exchange for sex. As time progressed, the ones that I stayed with, wanted me to fulfill their fantasies: sharing me with their friends, kinky sex, and or sex in public places. This phenomena of vicarious excitement is reflected in the movie by Liberace's obsession with remaking Thorson into a version of himself. But, like a downward spiral into more intense perversity: these obsessions also fail and leave the worshiper limp.
The last act of the the movie is the most desperate, and therefore, in terms of exposing homosexuality, the truest. It gets the restlessness, and the paranoid desires that weight-down every homosexual, exactly right. Still, unfulfilled with Thorson, Liberace starts to become fixated with pornography. At the same time, Thorson falls into the the neighboring pit of drug abuse. Both are left empty. As with the majority of “monogamous” gay couples, Liberace decided to “open” their relationship; while staying emotionally connected. Then, Liberace begins a series of illicit affairs with even younger guys. When neither of them is of much use to the other, Liberace and Thorson go their separate ways. Liberace moves on to find another kid to become his new assistant. For Thorson, whose whole identity to linked with the gay lifestyle, the ability to move beyond all that he knew is disconcerting. But an existence filled with constant excess and diversions only temporarily masks the pain of the past the disappointment of the present. The end, a metaphoric final scene that mirrors the fall of 1970s gay liberation philosophy of freedom through decadence, Liberace dies of AIDS and Thorson is left alone. The entire film is an operatic tragedy of Grecian proportions, the stage littered with bloodied and dead corpses as the curtain falls.