Revisiting Camp
The question remains — is it Camp though?
12 minute read
In this crowded basement bar, much of the night’s energy was spent on pretending to enjoy nonchalantly while hiding my nervousness. I looked for fire exits. What if some angelic drag queen busted through the door, yanked the cords that were connected to the shitty speakers, and tell our sweaty bodies to divide ourselves — who is here out of your self-proclaimed love for drag? Who is out here with your straight girlfriend? Who is here because you just want to look cool? We were all ready to repent. The 80’s Whitney Houston club mix resumed — as queers and the occasional straights continue their game of figuring-out — glances become a way of signaling territory while turning by a weird desire — what if something happens here?
Between the makeshift stage for tryout drag performers (Category is: First Time in Drag!) and the neon-lit bar, queers shouldered through the crowd seeking a reclusive corner. They are tired of tiptoeing to see what tricks the drag performer are pulling out. They have seen it all before somewhere. Smokers made their way in and out of the dance floor as they climb the stairs, congregating against a pole, lighting each other’s cigarette against the early November cold.
The real party is where the smokers are. My companion J waved down a friend from afar followed by high-pitch squeaking. Between bitching about job searching, working in hospitality, sexual misadventures, the new queer in town (who is that?), J and his friends alike were squeezing in as many cultural references as you can. With an eyebrow raised, the other seemed to precisely get it and retort with another witty catchphrase from some old movie star. They took occasional long drags from their cigarettes and blew it out sky-high. The cigarette smoke dragged into nothing as another car passed by as if this encounter never happened.
I think about that particular night and my subsequent exposure to the queer world out there. To much expected, I was a timid lonesome queer with little sexual experience and little things to say. I miss those innocent days and my firmness, to my innocence. In retrospect perhaps that was my initiation to campiness, or bitching, faggotry, queening out, gurl-ing.
Say Yes to Notes on Camp
Attempts to reanimate “camp” (this piece included) find themselves back to Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”. Among other descriptions, camp is commonly described as a sensibility expressed through the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” For Sontag, objects such as Tiffany lamps, turn-of-the-century postcards, Swan Lake ballet, 1933 movie King Kong, dirty movies, are camp.
In the midst of the 60’s civil rights movement, Sontag’s subject of the camp reflects a new American vision that embraces the new and abolishes the antiquated. When it came to camp sensibility, it was particularly understood through the sexual lens. The Camp was not gender or sexuality-specific, Sontag argued, but the aesthetic had been embraced by the LGBTQ community as a way to “neutralize moral indignation” by promoting a playful approach to that which others took seriously. In sexual matters, Camp goes against the conventional beauty and cherishes the ambiguous — the androgynous, the slightly dangerous, and undecipherable.
Art historians have predated camp back to ancient Rome, referring to the classic pose contrapposto (literally, "opposed") found in statues. The stance is characterized by the careful balance of the shoulders, which are turned away from the hip, and the resting of the weight on the back foot. At the same time, one arm is bent from the hit and the hand is turned back, which signals both power and relaxation. Later in 1671, French playwright Molière debuted his play Scapin the Schemer, which introduced the term "se camper," meaning to pose in an exaggeration, an allusion to the crooked pose with bent leg: "Camp about on one leg. Put your hand on your hip. Wear a furious look. Strut about like a drama king."
Camp has always been around — from the nonchalant extravagance that trickled down to the recent “gay wrist,” as a way to describe the interplay between the mainstream and the subcultural; the permissible and the taboo; the extravagant and the quiet, etc. Camp, as a position, takes itself outside of the cultural complex and sees what is in front of us as a mere combination of history and probabilities, and the arbitrariness of what we think is good versus bad. In The World in the Evening (1954) by Christopher Isherwood when two characters discuss the meaning of camp, both High and Low:
You thought it meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles they call that camping. … You can call [it] Low Camp…High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art … High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.
How is camp understood in other cultures?
Camp Case Study: “I’ve Had a Bad Case of Diarrhea”
In my second year of college, I took a linguistic course called “English as Second Language (ESL) Approaches" in which I wrote a paper on the Zuiikin’ English method from Japan.
Aired in 1992, Zuiikin’ English combined English language lessons with gymnastic exercise programs. In the video, the hostess is acting out a stomach ache scene with bilingual subtitles. A white man came to her rescue asking her “Where does it hurt?” to which she could not reply. In pain, she stutters “my stomach…” The next scene abruptly cuts to three young Japanese women practicing aerobics while chanting the phrase “I’ve had a bad case of diarrhea”. At the beginning of the show, the host explains how cultures use physical movement to enhance learning and memory retainment.
And it worked — but perhaps for other reasons. And the rest is internet meme history. In the midst of 90’s Japan Bubble Economy excess, the combination of exercise crazes and tight-fitting aerobics fashion with English lessons made perfect camp material which is often based on excess. Looking beyond Japan’s tumultuous relationship with the American empire, its colonial histories, and the very English language itself, the reach for the word “diarrhea” together with the aerobics format makes up precisely a camp visual logic. It is through the forgetful observer, the “foreign” falls into camp.
Thinking back, I have learned how camp comes from those weird disconnections between time, culture, and language. Regarding Sontag’s case against interpretation, it is within the make-believe tensions between the content and the form where camp seeps through as a commentary of tone. The camp stands in its own light as an artform of ridiculous plasticity and absurd thinginess.
Camp and The Mainstream
Camp has always been in the cultural margins and has gone through a camp revival in the recent decade. In 2019, the Met Gala theme picked camp as the theme under the title “Camp: Notes on Fashion”. Appeared with their custom-made costumes, gowns, and dramatic reveals, celebrities were asked what “camp” means on the red carpet. With a few exceptions, most of them failed to give a conclusive answer (including Nicki Minaj as the generous queen of camp rap herself).
The thing is, camp is difficult to talk about. In 1964, camp was a curious vision to a new America, but in 2019, camp is everywhere, camp is a product. And its omnipresence seems to render it curiously invisible. Setting camp as an occasion renders camp as a script for people to follow, and that script comes with expectations. How much of our current camp’s plasticity and malleability is lost within a capitalist circuit and exclusive celebrity culture? While many praises Lady Gaga for “doing her homework”, one could easily argue whether it is true camp or just campiness?
During his appearance on the Jimmy Fallon show, when asked why he did not dress up in full drag, RuPaul explained that “everyone is gonna look like a drag queen” when he appeared with a clean sequinned dramatic suit. RuPaul then describes what camp means to him:
You have to be able to see the facade of life…the absurdity of life, from outside of yourself. The idea of drag is camp, because [it tells us] “I am not this body, I am actually god, in drag playing humanity. So when you are in that place, then you can laugh at the absurdity of life.”
RuPaul’s comment on seriousness echoes Sontag’s lifelong mission writing against it. As Time magazine wrote in her obituary, her alertness against seriousness “emerged from the cramped quarters of the 1950s” where “educated opinions” are dismissed as trivial. During her time when barriers between high and lowbrow culture were absolute, Sontag argued instead for genuine openness to the pleasures of pop culture.
The need to make “camp” mean something more than it is, precisely is what Sontag and the camp proponents tease at. Yet, to be within the culture and make a good laugh at it — risks turning itself into cheap nihilism. We so wanted camp to carry political and radical bearings but the camp is too chill to resist. Is camp a placebo or an antidote to the increasing toxicity that comes with identity politics? Is camp just a version of radicalism domesticated?
So…Now What?
The question remains: why should I care? What do I have to do with camp? I ain’t no preacher of the camp but hear me out. Camp has been a formulating component in my queer awakening and in general our modern understanding of queerness — queerness as a tone that wriggles through the cultural polarities (e.g. high versus low, mainstream versus subcultural, permissible versus taboo, domestic versus private). The sexual camp abandons and exists outside the heteronormative script, from nipple biting, the skin-tight latex suits, bathhouses, dark alleyway encounters, to the random body contortionists suspending in mid-air.
Camp has its internal fault lines too — is camp only meant for people who have lived enough to know “good taste” from the bad? What about the privilege to compartmentalize the world as merely an aesthetic phenomenon, and not a historical one riddled with racial, sexual, class struggles. To speak of “camp” while the house is on fire when lovers of camp would rather die in flames. They scream “Balenciaga!” They do not let you into the blazing house. It is their little inside joke.
Perhaps it is how camp camouflages its hope and nihilism altogether. To unwillingly quote Fight Club — “losing all hope was freedom.” To see through the absurdities of life we found ourselves liberated albeit just a window of time, yet our existence reminds us otherwise. To camp has no political aspirations, but to live with camp is an existential one — is there anything campier than “live, laugh, love”? We all laugh at the cliche Etsy handwriting but somehow it is irking something within us. Are we truly living?
Beyond the yellow brick road and the other side of the rainbow — there is Kansas. Camp’s dramatic irony reminds us how Oz’s fantasies bring out how real Kansas is, and how Kansas brings out a technicolored dream. In between these two worlds and amidst all drama, how do we reason with our intentions and seriousness, and still enjoy the many pleasures in life? RuPaul's remarks serve as a reminder, “Don’t take life seriously. But take what you do seriously. Love is serious. Kindness is serious. Being mean is not nice, it’s not cool, it’s not clever.”
My Recent Camp
Say the word “moist” for hundred times
Alyssa Edwards on Drag Race All-Star Season 2 Snatch Game as Faye Dunaway from Mommie Dearest as Joan Crawford
Dawn Davenport “sex” scene in Female Trouble (1974)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford
RuPaul on Jimmy Fallon the way Ru says “drag queen”
Check out my previous writing
I had a bad case of diarrhea…
I feel like there’s a whole world I have not seen yet. Wow.
Great piece that needs a second read. Camp was a tough theme since it’s difficult to define and if it’s center in an arena of people who aren’t familiar, few would get a passing grade.