Camp

The history of camp is fascinating, complicated and controversial.

Camp is one of those words we all think we understand until someone asks us to explain it. Then suddenly everyone is waving a fan, quoting Sontag badly, and looking for the nearest exit.

Paul Baker, writing in The Conversation, captures why camp is so hard to pin down. Camp can be an attitude, a style, a behaviour or a way of seeing the world. It often works through exaggeration, artifice, theatricality, rule-breaking, silliness and humour.

One useful distinction: camp may not set out to be funny, while campy usually knows exactly what it’s doing.

For gay men, camp has often been more than style. It has been armour, code, humour, protest, flirtation, survival and a way of making the unbearable briefly fabulous.

Camp has also split opinion inside gay culture. For some, it is liberation. For others, it has felt like a stereotype they were trying to escape. Both reactions tell us something.

Camp has been loved, mocked, exported, sanitised, reclaimed and misunderstood. Here are a few useful places to start.

Polari

Camp and Polari are not the same thing, but they share a family resemblance: wit, performance, coded speech, outsider humour and a refusal to be entirely respectable.

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