The Batman TV Show is known for its campiness, but it reaches an apotheosis of arch gay subtext in the episode with Liberace as the villainous pianist Chandell and his evil(ler) twin brother, the cigar-chomping, Harry — who essentially gives Liberace the opportunity to don butch drag.

I’ve mentioned before in this series that the Batman TV show tends to play shell games with objects of desire; the camera lingers on scantily clad lovelies, who then express visible/audible lust for the delectably paunchy Batman. That scrambling of hetero and homo (whatever the identity of the watcher) reaches its apotheosis in this episode, which features not the usual single villainness, but three, who improbably dress up in Scottish highlander garb (with mini-kilts) and/or Orientalist Balinese wisps of nothing. They undulate sensuously about the screen, and especially around Liberace, who undulates sensuously himself about a besotted Aunt Harriet. Chandell’s manly charms conceal and reveal his manly charms, just as Harry imitating Chandell reveals the truth of Liberace elaborately imitating himself — and someone else.

The Chandell episode is wonderful in part because it is the most explicit revelation/elaboration of the meaning of the show’s camp, and the one which connects the show’s irony and flamboyance most directly to drag and homosexual performance. Liberace’s presence is not just a camp display in itself; it infects everyone and everything around it; with Chandell nearby, Bruce and Dick rushing into a closet can’t help but have a double meaning. Then there’s the scene where Dick is sitting and sighing with a high school sweetie — and suddenly he gets a call from Batman, and instantly dumps ice cream in his girl’s lap so he can talk to his true love. A crime fighter has to make sacrifices, he sighs — but his eagerness to drop that desert suggests that maybe he’s protesting too much.

The message of the camping here isn’t just “Batman and Robin are gay!” Rather, it’s that heroism is a pantomime of masculinity, linked to and comparable to Liberace’s multiple pantomimes, and dependent on a deferred sensuality, in which the fetishization of women is rerouted into a fetishization of masculinity. Thus, the show suggests, it is Liberace, with his double identity, his capes, his colorful costumes, and his virtuoso mastery, who is the greatest superhero of them all.