"You can have either the Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can't have both"
About this Quote
Liberace’s line lands like a rhinestone-studded slap: a flamboyant entertainer staging a theological ultimatum, then winking as he does it. The genius is in the forced choice. “Resurrection” isn’t just Christian doctrine; it’s shorthand for solemnity, restraint, the demand that certain things be treated as sacred and therefore policed. “Liberace,” by contrast, is excess made personable: satin capes, candelabras, a kind of performative joy that refuses to apologize for being too much.
The intent is defensive and slyly aggressive at once. He’s telling his critics - moralists, church ladies, the culture cops - that his act can’t be judged by the same rules they use for Sunday certainties. If you want transcendence packaged as humility, choose the Resurrection. If you want spectacle, camp, and pleasure without a sermon attached, choose him. The subtext: what you really can’t have is a tidy moral universe where you also get to enjoy the people you’re condemning.
Context sharpens the bite. Liberace built a career during decades when queerness was both omnipresent in entertainment and publicly unspeakable. He cultivated an image that was extravagantly coded yet insistently “family friendly,” and he sued anyone who said the quiet part out loud. This quote is a pressure valve for that tension: a comic line that doubles as boundary-setting. It reframes moral panic as consumer preference, exposing how often “values” talk is just taste pretending to be law.
The intent is defensive and slyly aggressive at once. He’s telling his critics - moralists, church ladies, the culture cops - that his act can’t be judged by the same rules they use for Sunday certainties. If you want transcendence packaged as humility, choose the Resurrection. If you want spectacle, camp, and pleasure without a sermon attached, choose him. The subtext: what you really can’t have is a tidy moral universe where you also get to enjoy the people you’re condemning.
Context sharpens the bite. Liberace built a career during decades when queerness was both omnipresent in entertainment and publicly unspeakable. He cultivated an image that was extravagantly coded yet insistently “family friendly,” and he sued anyone who said the quiet part out loud. This quote is a pressure valve for that tension: a comic line that doubles as boundary-setting. It reframes moral panic as consumer preference, exposing how often “values” talk is just taste pretending to be law.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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