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.

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..."

Gays Against Gaga: Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

"I hate it already. A gay anthem, whether it’s 'I Will Survive' or 'The Man That Got Away' or 'And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going', BECOMES a gay anthem because we find ourselves empathizing with the singer’s passion or pain or exuberance. It’s the realization that their pain is our pain too, that their joy is our joy etc. It’s that our commonality has brought us together.
“It’s ALMOST NEVER because it was written FOR GAY MEN TO HELP GAY MEN DEAL WITH BEING GAY MEN. That’s just cynical and obvious. It’s like bit like Susan Sontag’s explanation of “pure camp” being something that strives for greatness but fails spectacularly, while “contrived camp” is something that intentionally sets out to be bad and cannot, therefore, be as satisfying.
“Gaga here isn’t allowing us the choice of deciding whether or not this song will be a gay anthem (like 'Bad Romance'), she’s TELLING US that it is, and that makes it somehow less pure and less satisfying. It’s contrived. I haven’t heard the melody yet, and although I’m sure it will be a foot-stomper, I already feel manipulated."

The lovely James St. James, quoted on the great new Tumblr Gays Against Gaga.

• Image from I Hate Gaga by David M. Buisán.

• Many thanks to Buy Kurious for the tip-off.