Academic journals offer praise for Rocking the Closet
Rocking the Closet received positive critical notices reviews from three academic journals including Cultural History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Notes.
From Cultural History (April 2022), reviewer Jacob Bloomfield concluded the review with the following:
“Stephens should be commended for the diverse range of primary sources marshalled in his study. Mainstream periodicals such as Life, the African American press, music industry publications, scandal sheets and other material provide illuminating contemporary observations across the spectrum from high to low culture. This is especially refreshing in the case of Little Richard since earlier studies of the singer, like Charles White’s The Life and Times of Little Richard (1984) and David Kirby’s Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (2009), privilege Richard’s own recollections over other accounts such as contemporary critical assessments of his performances in the press. The process by which ‘audiences of the period craved’ and consumed ‘alternative representations of masculinity’ certainly deserves further study that takes various types of audience demographics into account: Black, white, mainstream, adults, teens, queer, straight, and so on (p. 84). Stephens offers salient points in this area, such as his questioning of the narrative that spectators were largely ignorant of these performers’ queerness. Rocking the Closet presents students and practitioners of queer cultural history, as well as those studying post-war cultural history, with fresher methods of examining popular culture and its legacies.”
Link: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/cult.2022.0258
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In the Journal of the History of Sexuality (January 2022), David Imhoof noted,
“Ultimately, Stephens expands LGBTQ+ history to consider that “many queer gestures circulated in 1950s US popular culture well before the late 1960s politicization of sexual identities” (147). Certainly, queer political movements starting in the 1970s loosened the social and sexual strictures under which the Queer Quartet labored. But Stephens shows that these artists found space for themselves and began to open opportunities for other gay Americans to live more freely. Scholars interested in queer history, music history, race, and American popular culture generally will therefore learn much from this excellent book.”
Link: muse.jhu.edu/article/852614.
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Renee McBride’s review in Notes (March 2022) stated,
“Distinguished by excellent writing, Rocking the Closet achieves the admirable goal of being both a sound scholarly work and accessible to readers from all walks of life. It raises provocative ideas and arguments, challenging entrenched ways of thinking about the history of queerness in postwar America. I highly recommend Rocking the Closet to all libraries with an interest in music, popular culture, and sexuality studies.”
Link: http://doi.org/10.1353/not.2022.0010