In 1988, Scott Thorson published his memoir Behind the Candelabra,
in which he recounts his five-year relationship with musician Liberace.
In the text, Thorson explains how, at the age of eighteen, he met the
famed pianist, who was fifty-seven at the time, and they became instant
paramours, with their relationship bitterly ending after Liberace
rejected Thorson for a younger man. Sadly, Thorson’s tale is not unique.
In Edmund White’s 1980 States of Desires, an excerpt of which is published in this April 1980 issue of Mandate
(which has been broken into two parts), the writer tells about a couple
he met in Kansas City with the same dynamic as Liberace and Thorson: a
thirty-year-old bar owner who has jilted his nineteen-year-old partner
and former bartender for younger men. Included in this second half
(see the first half here) is an excerpt from Armistead Maupin’s novel More Tales of the City and a celebration of Mandate’s
five years in publication.
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