Camp: Indecent Acts

A thoughtful piece on Consented by Tom Ana, but it confuses camp - an act or affectation - with effeminacy - how we are.*

* Well, some of us, anyway.

Camp-Shaming: Standard

A gaggle of muscled men in tiny briefs parades past, followed by a procession of Leather Daddies, complete with truncheons. Minutes later, a group of guys in dog masks fills their space, along with a human horse, angling his pleather hooves at the crowd. It could only be Pride in London [The photo's of New York Pride]. But despite the colourful costumes — and bare buttocks — on display, it’s an altogether tamer sight that prompts the man in a check shirt and chino shorts in front of me to grimace. He nudges his friend as a guy in Dorothy drag skips past, followed by a skinny, body-painted teenager in angel wings. The pair snigger.

For an outsider looking in, there’s never been a better time to be gay. Sure, at this year’s Pride celebrations there was the usual homophobic picketing, but those voices are growing fainter and less relevant compared with the widespread acceptance of LGBT people. The introduction of gay marriage in Ireland and the US appears further proof that, by and large, the war against bigotry has been won. Scratch the surface, however, and there are more pernicious battles being waged. Because while prejudice from straight people continues to dwindle, homophobia among gay men means that the community is in danger of eating itself from the inside out.

Gay men’s homophobia may sound oxymoronic, but it’s increasingly apparent in a culture that prizes masculinity and derides campness...

Joe Stone, The Standard

Oh Bakunin... along with 'Is drag sexist?', 'What's the point of Pride?' and 'Do fags have too much bum/drugs fun? - this has to be the most endlessly recycled gay subject matter for an article of all time.

We are our worst enemy, if only we didn't hate ourselves so much etc etc.

There's nothing new to say, let it go, dear.

And he quotes leading comedy gaybores Peter Tatchell and Owen Jones like they know anything about gay culture!

PS There's another evergreen favourite on Guardian online; Born This Way? Society, sex and the search for the 'gay gene'. This is rather good, though the truth is 'no-one has a clue'.

Headline Of The Day: A Camp Classic

Arkansas Online.

A New York Boy Scouts' council has broken new ground by hiring an openly gay man as a leader - Advocate.com

PS Think this one needs a bit more work, USA Today.

Thought For The Day: Graham Norton

'The only thing that makes me sad - and Alan Carr is sort of like this too - is that the most stick you get is from gay people.

'It’s always been the same, that there’s this sort of weird self-loathing in the gay community…

'But it’s heartbreaking, because you hear these people say ‘Oh he’s so camp and terrible', and you’re thinking, 'Oh god, you are completely unaware that you’re camp too!'

'There was a very sweet documentary once, and these little gay boys in Brighton were talking about how much they hated me, and it was heartbreaking because they were me.'

Attitude.

Groundhog Gay: Damian Barr

New Statesman.

Every other month since the dawn of gay time someone has written an article asking this.

There is nothing interesting left to say about the subject - as Mr Barr shows.

And why is the New Statesman publishing this?

It's basically Damian Barr pushing his 250 page love letter to Margaret Thatcher, Maggie & Me.

Next week in the NS: Andrew Pierce asks is drag sexist.

PS I do like DB presenting Front Row, though. *balance*

Camp: And The Damage Done

In his perceptive [sic] analysis of gay men's attitudes to camp (What Alan Carr taught me about gay men's prejudice, 21 April), Owen Jones suggests that an aversion to it is a form of self-loathing. But for many of us struggling to come out in the 1970s and 80s, it was camp itself which represented self-hatred. Comedians such as John Inman and Larry Grayson personified everything that I did not want to be. They were almost a third sex: grotesque pantomimic creatures, willingly collusive in the mocking laughter of the TV audience. My generation of activists wanted to show people that we weren't all hairdressers or ballet dancers, just ordinary blokes who worked in factories and offices and drove trains and buses...

From an actual letter someone bothered to write to The Guardian.

God, there are some top-flight gaybores out there.

Who wants to be 'ordinary'?

And all the poshgays be like; 'Oh Owen, you're saying what we're all thinking.'

'I also hate the gays cause the gays hate the gays, yeah, that makes sense.'

PS Pink News readers continue to gaybore for England.

Style: Straight Camp

Camp, in its original conception, has nothing intrinsically to do with effeminacy or show tunes or doting on one’s mother or having really great hair. It’s not strictly about sexuality, homo- or otherwise. Camp, according to Susan Sontag’s famous and still definitive Notes on the subject, of 1964, is a sensibility concerned with artifice. It prizes style over content. It sees everything in quotation marks. Camp is about performance, pretence — “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” is how Sontag 

It’s Sontag’s definition of camp that the Canadian writer Stephen Marche used recently to describe a new male phenomenon, the one that encompasses Clarkson, Ramsay, Putin and the rest. Writing in American Esquire earlier this year, he named this new masculine subcategory “straight camp”. By straight camp, he means fake manliness. Men who are not so much manly as “manly”, to borrow Sontag’s quotation marks again. Straight camp indicates an adopted, achieved masculinity, a masculinity worn much like a suit, or, more likely in this case, a pair of rugged outdoor boots, a chunky all-weather coat and a bushy beard, even though the wearer of all those manly accoutrements rarely leaves the comfort and safety of the city. Straight camp is the pose of unreconstructed masculinity struck by men who have been made timid and uncertain by a changing economic, social and sexual topography. But it is just that: a pose.

Hello Sailor, Alex Bilmes, Sunday Times Style.

Behind the Murdoch paywall - ask your library for free access.

Similar points have been made before, but this dude makes them rather well.

Marriage: And You, You Won't Be Queen

Daily Telegraph.

Sadly, Telegraph readers can't leave comments about this medieval tomfoolery, that would have been META!
But great to see the return of the 'Gay couple's disembodied hands' stockphoto.

PS Lucky Telegraph readers are also treated to that classic straight newspaper gay feature cliché; Why does society stil have such a problem with camp men? Zzzzz...

Graham Norton: Notes On Camp

Does he think of himself as camp? “Yeah.”

Has he always been? “Yes. But I didn’t always see myself as that. It’s a much harder thing to accept than being gay. Gay is easy. Being camp is difficult in that it comes with judgment all round. That moment when you realise that you are quite fey and quite camp, it’s a difficult one because these are not qualities that are admired by anybody. As you move forward you can own it and camp it up to the hilt or you can try and tone it down.”

When he started doing stand-up he played up to it. Norton remembers seeing a programme where young gay men in Brighton criticised him for not being a very good role model. “Bless these boys, they were so camp and it broke my heart because I kind of thought, 'I was you’. And in a way it’s about self-loathing, the dislike of campness. Because actually the people who dislike it are normally quite camp. And it’s sad that every gay personal ad is all 'straight-acting’. That’s a weird thing for a sexuality to be based on. Something else.”

Graham Norton profiled in the Telegraph.

Compare and contrast to self-styled "masc" gay and all-purpose pouty right-wing shitbag, Michael Lucas writing recently...

Russians love Johnny Weir. He’s their kind of gay: Liberace of the ice. He’s the “fabulous” gay, the mascot, the gay who knows his place and stays in it. (Weir waited until publishing a memoir in 2011 to admit that he was gay at all, which everyone already knew.) The Russians don’t mind token flamers like Weir; what scares them are everyday people who happen to be gay. They’re scared of homosexuality becoming normal, not staying outrageous like Weir.

Oh Michael, who wants to be "normal", if it means being boring and annoying like you?

PS Seriously thinking about starting a new Twitter account, From The Gay Media Message Boards... 

Just seen on Queerty; "WTF so many feminine creatures? Gay=/=woman".

King Ludwig II: He Never Married

Ludwig never married, and the subject of his sexuality has long been the subject of speculation.
Throughout his life he formed close friendships with numerous young men, from actors to courtiers.
It seems almost certain that Ludwig was homosexual...

Dan Cruickshank drops a bombshell in this BBC4 documentary, The Fairytale Castles of King Ludwig II.
Fagburn loves the wonderfully mad queen, King Ludwig II of Bavaria fame, and this programme on his monumental follies is a tragedy-filled hoot.

PS "Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration..." Notes On Camp, Susan Sontag.
See how many of Sontag's 58 points you can tick after watching this.

The Sunday Times: Notes On Crap

In the Sunday Times, one Colin McDowell asks, "What is camp?"
And then proceeds to show he doesn't have a flying fucking fondue-set what it is.

"Camp is a vicious and theatrical world of gossip and character assassination, often styled around gender confusion. Popular entertainment adores camp —think Les Dawson trussed up as a northern housewife, or the performers Graham Norton or Julian Clary...
"Put a bunch of gay men together and the feminine side comes to the fore — everyone is sweetie, darling, honey, and female names are soon bestowed on each other. However, camp is not confined entirely to gay men — I once met a huge truck driver in drag at a party who informed us all that his name was Janine, for the evening at least, while passing round pictures of his wife and two daughters...."   

No it's not, you posh idiotbox.
Do you really think Les Dawson doing Cissie and Ada over the garden wall, or gay men saying "sweetie" - like we all do, obvs, like a decade's old copy of Absolutely Fabulous that's got stuck in the DVD player - defines camp?
Or, indeed, has anything to do with it?
"I've seen them at some of Ollie's dinner parties, and I can tell you, the feminine side comes to the fore, they even call each other by ladies' names..."
Oh FFS! etc.
But perhaps the kind of hilariously unself-aware gormality that this article exudes is a kind of camp in itself?

• Susan Sontag - Notes On Camp. Ever countered, never bettered. "To talk about camp is therefore to betray it..."

Jedward: Even Gayer Than Steve Pafford

And that's saying something.

Jedward's just an exercise in camp, isn't it?
Bless!

Chris Crocker: Leave Femme Gays Alone!

This has been posted on various American blogs, but I thought I'd post it here cause I like it a lot.
And yes, it is the "Leave Britney alone!" guy.
Ironically she's a lot less femme than she was four years ago, but then again, aren't we all?