Elvis Presley - The fans

It has been claimed that there are over 500 US fan clubs and that they exist in every state except three: North Dakota, Idaho and Wyoming. According to the American Demographics magazine, 84% of the US people say that their lives have been touched by Elvis Presley in some way, 70% have watched a movie starring Presley, 44% have danced to one of his songs, 31% have bought an Elvis record, CD or video, 10% have visited Graceland, 9% have bought Elvis memorabilia, 9% have read a book about Presley, and 5% have seen the singer in concert. Not all of these people are Presley fans.

Music critic and Presley biographer Dave Marsh says about the singer's fans: "There are people in places that count in the world, and people in places that don't. He is the son of the people who don't count, and their shining star. That's what makes him unique and what people still respond to." A collection of essays entitled The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media critically examines what distinguishes fans from general audiences and explores the relationship between fans and their adored media products. Part of this volume is the article, "Fandom and Gender" which includes an examination of female fantasies of Presley. To many of his female fans, the songs Presley sang "were secondary to his personality and the way he performed them," evoking the well-known emotional responses. In her autobiographical article, "Sexing Elvis" (1984), Sue Wise even describes "how she came to terms with her lesbianism through a close identification with the feminine side of the King."

"Elvis's 'effect' on young girls threatened those men who assumed that young girls needed to be protected both from sex in general and from its expression in questionable characters like Elvis in particular." However, there were not only female fantasies directed at the star. According to Reina Lewis and Peter Horne, "prints of Elvis Presley appeared to speak directly to the gay community."

"Perhaps it is an error of enthusiasm to freight Elvis Presley with too heavy a historical load", as, according to a public opinion poll among high school students in 1957, Pat Boone was "the nearly two-to-one favorite over Elvis Presley among boys and preferred almost three-to-one by girls"; yet, Presley "clearly outshines the other performers in rocknroll's first pantheon." This poll should, however, be taken with a grain of salt as Presley had significantly more record sales than Pat Boone.