Gay History — The Rise of Camp
Like a row of pink tents
Wikipedia describes camp as “a social, cultural, and aesthetic style and sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledged theatricality.” It is all those things, and more besides, but it’s difficult to pin down. Nonetheless, we all know camp when we see it.
Camp is effete, it’s garish, it’s hyperbole and exaggeration, it’s shameless, crude, funny, and sexless. Camp appeals to the masses, yet is intrinsically associated with queer men.
Camp derives from the French se camper (“to pose in an exaggerated fashion”), and was first defined in 1909 in the Oxford English Dictionary as: “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals. So as a noun, ‘camp’ behaviour, mannerisms, et cetera.”
Although only officially acknowledged as a phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century, camp has been a recognisable entity for much longer. One only has to look at the molly houses of seventeenth-century London to find camp alive and well, long before it became mainstream. And it did become mainstream—it was inescapable on British and American TV through the 1960s and ’70s . It was Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served?; Lieutenant Gruber in ’Allo ’Allo; Shatner’s Kirk and West’s Batman. But it wasn’t just swishy or…
