The Gay & Lesbian Review

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IN ORDER to gain a new perspective on camp, let us
first re-examine some of the precepts of Susan Sontag’s
seminal if problematic essay “Notes on Camp,” pub-
lished in 1964. First and foremost, Sontag points out
that camp is a sensibility and, more significantly, a vari-
ant of sophistication.
To start things off, and as a prime example of camp that per-
haps fits outside of its “normal” definition, let us consider John
Cassavetes’ film masterpiece The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
The ultra-campy emcee of the strip joint that Ben Gazzara owns
and operates in the film calls himself “Mr. Sophistication.” The
role is played by Meade Roberts, who wrote the screenplay for
Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, which verges on good
gay camp: Geraldine Page’s mannered acting style, especially
her performances in films like Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth
and Woody Allen’s Interiors , always errs on the side of camp.
She also appears in Cassavetes’ brilliant Opening Night , which,
I would argue, can be classified as (good straight) camp. Stages
and staged performances figure prominently in both films, a
particular earmark of camp, but both works also contain Cas-
savetes’ trademark improvisational, naturalistic, almost docu-
mentary style, a tendency that would seem to run against the
high artifice and theatricality of classic camp. Therefore one
could argue that Cassavetes’ œuvre generally embodies two es-
sential qualities that paradoxically reaffirm and eschew camp,
evincing a high sophistication of form that would tend to rein-
force the former position.
S INCE S ONTAG
The essence of camp, according to Sontag, is its love of the un-
natural, of artifice and exaggeration. She points to its esoteric
nature, amounting to a private code or a secretly shared badge
of identity. Further, she states that “to talk about camp is to
therefore betray it,” simultaneously reinforcing and rejecting
her own deep connection to the camp sensibility. She goes on to
say that “to name a sensibility ... requires a deep sympathy mod-
ified by revulsion,” a remarkable statement considering that her
own article on camp can be considered both camp in itself (in
its lofty, pretentious pronouncements) and a betrayal of it (in its
sympathetic identification). Significantly, Sontag was a lesbian
who had a long-term relationship with Annie Liebovitz, a pur-
veyor, in her staged and artificial photography style, of camp, or,
more accurately, bad lesbian camp. (Sontag also wrote a rather
camp treatise on photography called On Photography (2001).)
Sontag identifies camp as “a sensibility that converts the serious
into the frivolous” (rendering her article another kind of betrayal
by taking camp far too seriously), and as a matter of “taste” that
“governs every free (as opposed to rote) human response.”
Camp, then, is an existential condition as much as a sensibility:
an enormously serious and profound frivolity.
Sontag rightly points out that camp is a certain mode of
æstheticism, which is not to say beauty, but a high degree of
artifice and stylization. (One could easily argue that the con-
temporary abandonment of the æsthetic dimension in favor of
Realpolitik and mundane, conventional social issues has been
disastrous to the gay experience and its formerly highly de-
veloped camp sensibility.) But her most crucial betrayal of
camp comes in her statement that camp is “neutral to content,”
and thereby “disengaged, depoliticized, or at least apolitical.”
This is where I most strongly disagree with Sontag’s idea of
camp. My perhaps idealized conception is that it is, or was, by
its very nature political, subversive, even revolutionary, at least
in its most pure and sophisticated manifestations.
Sontag’s camp manifesto of camp was published fifty years
ago, and it’s clear that it is no longer adequate to lump together
all styles and modes of camp. Distinctions must be made, and
the evolution or devolution of the sensibility, its movement
through (accelerated) history, must be taken into consideration.
I would go so far as to argue that “camp” has replaced “irony”
as the go-to sensibility in popular culture, and it has, at the risk
of generalization, long since lost its essential qualities of eso-
teric sophistication and secret signification, partly owing to the
contemporary tendency of the gay sensibility to allow itself to
be thoroughly co-opted, its mystery, and therefore its power,
hopelessly diffused. In other words, and not to put too fine a
point on it, I will argue that now, in this moment, the whole god-
damn world is camp.
A critic in Harper’s Bazaar once identified irony as “the ide-
ological white noise of the nineties,” a proclamation that always
stuck with me. This wasn’t to say that irony no longer operated
as a useful device or sensibility, or that it could no longer be
used to subtle or witty effect. It simply meant that irony had it-
self been normalized and generalized into the default sensibil-
ity of the entire popular culture, thereby rendering it more
difficult to detect and less effective to use unless expressed very
carefully and consciously for a particular effect. The net result
was that much of the general populace (now roughly equivalent
to “pop culture”) had adopted the posture as a given to the ex-
tent that people generally lost track of its meaning or purpose:
there was a kind of ironic detachment from everything. People
started routinely to say the opposite of what they meant, and
meant it, failing to understand that their new “sensibility” had
become a betrayal of their actual former set of beliefs or tastes,
which they even perhaps once held sacred.
So, in a sense, irony became a malaise, a kind of generalized
disaffection that infected the dominant culture. I surmise that
this is what opened up the floodgates for the rise of camp cul-
ture, or rather the corruption and misinterpretation of camp cul-
ture—a certain detached artificiality and forced excess which,
in the wrong hands, and in its popularization, one might go so
far as to call the ideological white noise of the new millennium.
B AD STRAIGHT CAMP
Camp is now for the masses. It’s a sensibility that has been ap-
propriated by the mainstream, commodified, turned into a
fetish, and exploited by a hyper-capitalist system, as Adorno
warned. It still has many of the earmarks of “classic camp”—
an emphasis on artifice and exaggeration and the unnatural, a
spirit of extravagance, a kind of grand theatricality. It’s still
based on a certain æstheticism and stylization. But what’s lack-
ing is the sophistication, and especially the notion of esoteri-
cism, something shared by a group of insiders—or rather,
Bruce LaBruce is a Toronto-based filmmaker, writer, director, photog-
rapher, and artist. He has directed and starred in numerous films and
theatrical productions and his photography has been featured in exhi-
bitions across the U.S. and Canada. This piece, which originated as a
presentation in Berlin (see above), was first published in Nat. Brut mag-
azine Issue 3 (April 2013).
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