Camp (style)
[3][11][13][14] While author and academic Moe Meyer defines camp as a form of "queer parody",[7][8] journalist Jack Babuscio argues it is a specific "gay sensibility" which has often been "misused to signify the trivial, superficial and 'queer'".
[23] Writer Bruce Rodgers also traces the term camp to the 16th century, specifically to British theatre, where it referred to men dressed as women (drag).
[14] Writer Susan Sontag and linguist Paul Baker place the "soundest starting point" for the modern sense of camp, meaning flamboyant, as the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
[29][30] Writer Anthony Burgess theorized it may have emerged from the primary sense of the word, as in a military encampment, where gay men would subtly advertize their sexuality in all-male company through a particular style and affectation.
[35][36] The term camp is still sometimes used in the UK to describe a gay man who is perceived as outwardly garish or eccentric, such as Matt Lucas' character Daffyd Thomas in the English comedy skit show Little Britain.
[16] By the mid-1970s, camp was defined by the college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary as "banality, mediocrity, artifice, [and] ostentation ... so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal".
Conversely, he argued, the biggest threat to camp wasn't heterosexuals ("who tend to accept it, although usually at a fairly broad and superficial level"), but "a neo-puritanism, a received conformism" emerging among gay people at the time.
[46][40] In reaction to its popularisation, critics such as Jack Babuscio and Jeanette Cooperman have argued that camp requires the alienation of LGBTQ+ people from the mainstream to maintain its edge.
[47][48] Poet and scholar Chris Philpot, like Cooperman, nevertheless argues that camp can still be a viable "survival strategy" for marginalized queer people, so long as it evolves with them.
"[48] Patrick Kelly's designs have been described as camp and "Radical Cheek" for his ironic use of bold colours, antiquated or incongruous styles, and reclaimed racist symbols.
[51][52][49]The 2019 Met Gala's theme was Camp: Notes on Fashion, co-chaired by Anna Wintour, Serena Williams, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Alessandro Michele.
[53] The show featured tributes to queer and camp figures, including a bronze statue of the Vatican's Belvedere Antinous, portraits of Louis XIV and Oscar Wilde, and celebrations of Black and Latinx ball culture and the Harlem Renaissance.
[55] Gaga arrived in a hot pink Brandon Maxwell gown with a 25-foot train[56] and went through a series of four "reveals," paying homage to drag culture,[55] debuting a new outfit each time, until reaching her final look: a bra and underwear with fishnets and platform heels.
[59] Several features of the family melodrama, later emphasized by film theorists as integral to the subversive and progressive essence of the genre, were precisely the attributes that gay men found humorous.
[59] Several later exponents of gay cinema, like John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes, among others, have cited campy melodramas as a major influence.
Examples cited by Sontag included Tiffany lamps, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, and Japanese science fiction films such as Rodan and The Mysterians of the 1950s.
[74] In public and on stage, Dusty Springfield developed an image supported by her peroxide blonde beehive hairstyle, evening gowns, and heavy make-up that included her much-copied "panda eye" look.
[51] South Korean rapper Psy, known for his viral internet music videos full of flamboyant dance and visuals, has come to be seen as a 21st-century incarnation of camp style.
Her famous banana dress has been noted as particularly camp for its flamboyant, humorous and ironic qualities, as well as the way it makes a political point using outdated but reclaimed imagery.
[93] Thomas Dworzak published a collection of "last portrait" photographs of young Taliban soldiers about to depart for the front, found in Kabul photo studios.
[96] The Comedy Central television show Strangers with Candy (1999–2000), starring comedian Amy Sedaris, was a camp spoof of the ABC Afterschool Special genre.
[102] The Australian theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky is renowned for his use of camp in interpreting the works of the Western canon, including Shakespeare, Wagner, Molière, Seneca and Kafka.
In the first act ("The Song of Phaeton"), for instance, the goddess Juno takes the form of a highly stylized Marlene Dietrich, and the musical arrangements feature Noël Coward and Cole Porter.
Kosky's use of camp is also effectively employed to satirize the pretensions, manners, and cultural vacuity of Australia's suburban middle class, which is suggestive of the style of Dame Edna Everage.
"[103] In the UK, the music hall tradition of pantomime, which often uses drag and other features of camp, remains a popular form of entertainment for families and young children.
[26] Musicologist Philip Brett has described camp as:a strategy which confronts un-queer ontology [states of being] and homophobia with humor and which by those same means may also signal the possibility of the overturn of that ontology—as when, on a famous night in 1969, the evening of the funeral of Judy Garland, the mood of a group of gays and drag queens reveling in the spectacle of their own arrest by members of the New York City Vice Squad at the Stonewall Bar turned to one of rage and produced the event that solidified the lesbian and gay movement.
