What is camp gay culture
Aesthetics for Birds
Every year, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City selects a theme around which to base its annual exhibition. And each year, that exhibition is kicked off with a huge fundraiser, the Met Gala. It has been called fashion’s biggest party of the year, drawing A-list celebrities and fashion personalities. Everyone attends, dressed for the exhibition’s theme. This year, that theme is camp.
A lot has been written about what camp is, and how we should understand it. But we idea it would be good to overhear from scholars with interests in aesthetics and camp. Hold reading to acquire more about the history of camp – including Susan Sontag’s significant but perhaps overstated role, Old Hollywood, and queer and DIY cultures – as adequately as camp’s alternating seriousness and light-heartedness, and even a reading of Donald Trump as camp.
Our contributors are:
For me, the most surprising thing about the Met’s decision to take up camp as the theme for this year’s gala was the fact that they hadn’t done it before. After all, camp’s most typical qualities—theatricality, extravagance, and a “seriousness that fai
WHAT IS CAMP? The very definition of the word remains up for grabs in a way that isn’t the case for other artistic styles. Or is it a “sensibility” (as Susan Sontag called it)? Or an attitude, a commentary upon other styles or cultural constructs, thus a “meta” style? As a mode of social satire, most definitions agree that camp involves exaggeration, artificiality, over-the-topness. A more culturally specific definition sees camp as a feature of gay and lesbian culture when it satirizes heterosexual conventions and heterosexism. An even narrower definition tends to equate camp with drag, female impersonation, cross-dressing, or gender bending à la Annie Lennox, Madonna, or Elton John.
The notion of camp that I grew up with when I came out in the preceding 1960s was taught to me by a people of female impersonators, performative queens, and Jewish humorists. It was a camp that savagely mocked the rules and roles of straight society through gesture, language, voice, tone, pitch, fashion, exaggeration, and hyperbole. It was Miami Beach, art deco, Morris Lapidus’ Fontainebleau Hotel, Carmen Miranda, Desi Arnaz’ conga band, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films enjoy Flying Down t Sean Griffin Camp existed within same-sex attracted culture long before the emergence of a male lover civil rights movement. Some in the gay people, though, worry that camp is not only passé but dead to a new generation. Proclamations of camp’s demise mirror recurring announcements of the “death of cinema” over the past twenty years. Yes, cinema is no longer what it used to be—literally (analog) and figuratively (feature films in theaters). But it has survived and evolved (digital content on multiple platforms). Similarly, camp appreciation still exists, just under different circumstances and with different emphases. When the 2019 Met Gala announced “Camp” as its theme, commentators pounced on celebrity fashionistas who did not seem to get what camp is. The New Yorker headlined its coverage “It May Not Have Been Camp, but It Was Fashion.” To the question “Did the Met Gala Achieve Camp?,”Slate answered “Only occasionally and mostly by accident.” In the most classic camp tradition, social media pointed out who got it without realizing that they had gotten it. Because of its “from the soil up” origins in emerging gay subculture of the late 19th and first 20th centuri After being off Twitter for a several years, I’d forgotten how quickly it happens once the clock strikes 12:01 on June 1. One moment I’m lying in bed, pursuing my usual mix of performative race content and 140 character consider pieces, and then, suddenly, everything is rainbow. My feed is inundated with corporations’ annual efforts to pass themselves off as ‘in on’ queer tradition. Ah yes, the corporate pride tweets have arrived right on schedule. June is widely recognized as Pride month, originally to commemorate the Stonewall riots of June 1969. Now, it’s also develop a time for companies to utilize queer history to seem progressive or simply, well, market stuff. One low-light from this year came from the US Marines, who tweeted an image of an army helmet decorated with rainbow bullets. On the slightly ‘lighter’ side was a Burger King campaign selling burgers with “two matching buns”—two ‘top’ buns or two ‘bottom’ buns (clearly an accidental yet baffling misunderstanding of queer sex). Then there were the overtly ridiculous posts, like the NASCAR tweet that just read: “YASCAR.” The willingness to operate queer culture for profit without providing any tangible encourage for our communities during "Camp" is a term many know but few can define. You may have heard it as slang adopted by Gen Z or in context with the 2019Met Gala theme, but it has a much deeper history, particularly in lgbtq+ communities. Though “camp” preexisted American writer Susan Sontag, she produced one of the most seminal texts to define it in 1964: “Camp asserts that good appetite is not simply great taste; that there exists, indeed, a good appetite of bad taste,” Sontag wrote in her “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Camp is an aesthetic or expression of “inauthentic visual cues,” says Michael Mamp, an associate professor of Lousiana State University’s fashion program and the director and curator of the university’s textile and costume museum. In other words, "camp" isn't often intentional. It's expressing yourself earnestly and sincerely, but coming off as over-the-top to those around you. “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style,” Sontag wrote. “It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-wha
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