Thoughts on Camp

[Angelabdc]

I was watching Strictly Come Dancing last night and thoroughly enjoyed the performance of La Voix and found myself laughing at the performers' post dance interview comments in the spirit they were made. I consider myself to be GC and wanted to do a bit of self-analysis and express possible contradictions in my own world view. I think it comes down to the idea of something being "camp" as defined by Susan Sontag and others as self-aware, frivolous and humorous. La Voix is usually Chris and has a clear boundary between his performing persona and his real identity. I do not personally find anything offensive in his drag persona anymore than I did with Lily Savage or Dame Edna but rather would characterise it as way to say the unsayable, or be bolder in a subversively funny way. I appreciate others will disagree with this and happy to engage with them on this. But I do think there is a fundamental difference between that kind of exaggerated self-conscious display and a doctor who solemnly tells a tribunal that they are literally a man because they consider themselves to be so, or to someone whose everyday drag consists of crotch grazing skirts and size 50G fake boobs. I think that stems from a lack of self-awareness and that is why it provokes such discomfiture amongst those of us who perceive it as delusional.

The point of Dame Edna was that she was mocking diva behaviour (which can be male or female) and given his physique it was funnier to be a glamorous (overdressed) woman than say a star operatic tenor. Modern drag just feels much more misogynistic (fishy anyone?) and woman face.

Interesting, I didn't know that. I did read a Catholic lady recently who lamented that 'men like Danny LaRue emphasised the elegance of women' in contrast to today's drag queens - presumably that was his panto act?

There's a distinction to be made between comedy and RuPaul styles of drag. Drag has a long history in comedy. Comedy performers can go to different places by putting on a costume to play a character. It reminds me of Chris Lilley, who's played many different characters throughout his comedy career: got toasted and outright cancelled for blacking up but is wildly adored for putting on a frock and pretending to be a teenage girl. All of his characters have heart and layers. When he's in character, he gives them a personality and a character arc and Lilley himself almost disappears: it's not laugh at the man, he's playing a woman, it's laugh at the things this particular character is saying.

On the other hand, RuPaul drag is shallow sequinned shit all about the performer's narcissism and vanity, has no merit, says nothing of value, is charmless and rooted firmly in misogyny and porn.

Also a lot of the roots of breeches roles in opera lie in gender inequality. Italian castrati cost a fortune so Handel's opera company would use women to keep the bill down with maybe just the one castrato in a headline role. Then when Napoleon banned the practice the young boy roles had to be played by women. Having said that I saw Sarah Conolley at Glyndeborne as Caesar and felt she seemed more masculine in the role than the countertenor who sang it on their recording. I suppose to a modern ear a counter tenor on stage can sound effeminate which isn't really right for a military general at the height of his career. (Probably not helped by the very camp portrayal of Tolomeo by a counter tenor......)

What people don't realise that RuPaul has also faced accusations of "transphobia" the early seasons of his show had an email section called "shemale", no way would that pass today. He also didn't want trans people to partake in his show has he basically felt that actual surgery was cheating.

He had to relent and then let trans people take part, like a female-to-male drag queen and even an actual woman being a drag queen in the UK series.

Drag is boring. It’s no longer funny, it’s no longer boundary-breaking. When every show has a drag performer it’s no longer got the cachet of being alternative. It’s dull and predictable. I’d be happy for a total moratorium on drag for at least ten years. It can go underground in gay clubs if gay men still want it.

I'm also bored with camp. Everything having to be playful, subversive, self-aware, frivolous: so tedious. I'm more interested in things being intelligent and serious these days. Parody has lost its point, if we must have something, let it be satire. But better still, create new things out of the best that we have, not simply badly imitate in a knowingly trashy way.

The reason why men dressing up as women is funny and women dressing as men isn’t (and why TIMs are considered vulnerable whilst TIFs aren’t) is that males are the more powerful class. Women as men are levelling up (makes sense/ aspirational) whilst men pretending to be women is ridiculous / humiliating for them.
Masculine apparel and mannerisms are not funny and not good comedy fodder, frivolous and silly women’s apparel and mannerisms = bloody hilarious.
Tgis is why I hate drag!

Panto is innocent and child oriented.
The dames I've seen have been all about smuggling in smutty jokes over the kids' heads.

Certainly, at my secondary school, the staff panto put several into Dick Whittington 🫣 - that was the actresses though. I can't speak for family pantos since that's the only one I've been to..

French & Saunders Fat Old Men series has a certain (disturbing) charm ... https://

I don’t watch strictly or any of the Ru Paul type of things…
In my mind, ‘camp’ is the realm of ‘effeminate’, mostly gay men who don’t parody women. I don’t know if there are many in mainstream media now - in my era the example would be Julian Clary. Afaik his spectacularly garbed pantomime characters aren’t traditional ‘dames’, they’re more ‘the spirit of…’ entities.

Maybe the males who parody women don’t have his talent?

I agree it is the mockery that is the joke and specifically the mockery of the less privileged or powerful in society, no longer acceptable in relation to ethnic minorities but fine if it’s women. There is another level which is the nature of the feminine behaviour and characteristics being mocked. These are based on the strategies women adopt to be accepted by men or attain social advantage i.e. sexualised dressing, big pouty lips, boobs, giggling, simpering, flirtatious behaviour - all grossly exaggerated in drag but nevertheless based in reality. So we have the more powerful class, men, mocking the behaviours women use to curry favour with men. It’s uncomfortable how much they despise us for it and how women go along with the “joke”.

So men who pretend to be women, but claim not to be pretending, instead claiming to literally be women, want to enter a competition for men who pretend to be women? Have I got that right?

This makes me sad. Susan Sontag was a proper feminist theorist and academic who used rigorous argument to back up her points. In the 50 years since she wrote "Notes on Camp" Social Science has been so debased by the like of Judith Butler and her acolytes that it's easy to dismiss any "expert opinion" and you see that being carried through to the thuggish way politics is conducted nowadays.

I'd say she meant his drag act tbh. There wouldn't have been much elegance in his Ugly Sister or Old Mother Riley!

Part of his brilliance was the unsettling contrast between his dress / make up / bouffant hair and his deep voice . And cockney accent . Although he was born in Cork he grew up in London. He remained a practicing Catholic though. There's no way Danny would have done drag for an audience of children.

Same with Paul O Grady ? He quietly retired Lily Savage . You might say he got ahead of the story.

I notice most of the discussion has been around drag, whereas the OP was about camp.

There was a time when portraying gay men as mincing, limp-wristed 'fairies' was considered deeply offensive, homophobic stereotyping. Which of course it was.
The counter argument was that gay men are just ordinary men, they come in all shapes and sizes and styles.

I've noticed a resurgence of campness amongst gay men in the media - the head tilt, the exaggerated pronunciation, the hand-waving, the posing, the dainty walking...
What's different now is that the performer of all this campness may well be wearing 'standard' men's clothes, and even a beard, so the campness is all in the gestures and behaviour.

It has just occurred to me that Jack in Will&Grace exemplified that, he looked like any bloke, until he started speaking and moving. [An absolutely brilliant acting performance, whatever you think of him or the programme!]
I wonder was he a leader, or was he expressing a trend already in existence amongst gay men in the US?

I saw something on TV recently that illustrated this: a gay man presenting a home makeover programme - very standard male attire+ beard, combined with incongruous camp gestures and speech. He came over all 'girly' when it came to using power tools, and very camply said he was too frightened of them so he'd leave them to the expert. Who happened to be a woman.

So he was too 'girly' to use power tools, but a woman isn't too 'girly'..

I too would like to see Chris dance as Chris some weeks. I think the novelty of the drag sex clown look is going to wear off as the series progresses, and will look particularly clunky with some dances.

It would be nice to see more camp men and butch women on telly generally.

Why is it that Chris has to dance in character? Or is that his choice?

Why Does Alex Kingston not appear as Dr Elizabeth Corday or River Song? Why does she appear as herself?

Surely the whole point is that one takes a variety of people... if they're a politician we get to see a different side to them; if they're an entertainer we get to see the real them?

It makes no sense that a certain type of entertainer has to perform on Strictly in character, almost as if the BBC is unwilling to allow anyone misogynistic on the BBC unless they are in full on misogyny mode.

I agree with this

Maybe the difference between different men dressing up as women is that some men seem to be getting off on it? In public? And some seem to just want to be nasty to women?

@MarieDeGournay- it occurred to to me that for those of us of a certain age, our first exposure to ‘camp’ was via the classic radio comedy shows, broadcast at prime time and full of double entendres etc. These were from a time when male homosexual acts were illegal in the U.K., so they were properly subversive - men pushing back against a repressive society, nothing to do with women at all. I’m not sure if ‘camp’ is very much related to drag at all.

yes, I remember hearing some of those shows, usually with my parents and tbh I'm sure a LOT of it was going right over our heads

Exactly. Susan Sontag said some worthwhile things in her essays and it's no self-complimemt to dismiss her so sniffily
I'd also recommend the recent bio.

I do find it odd. Gay men are often naturally a bit more feminine than the average man, which is fine. But no woman or man for that matter naturally behaves like that. Butch lesbians in contrast generally behave how they want to. There are some who act in a stylised way but that's a minority