What the hell is Camp?
And is it even a thing anymore?
I like to think that I’ve appreciated camp and kitsch since I was a child, but maybe that is just revisionist wishful thinking on my part; that even before I knew what good taste in bad art was, I had it. And yet… I still could not explain to you what that means exactly. When I try to come up with a definition or with qualifiers of good bad art, of camp, kitsch, I think of, perhaps aptly given the topic, of the words Potter Stewart wrote in the Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964,
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it,”
This is how I so often feel about good bad art, and about Camp. I know there are definitions, or attempts at definitions, attempts at explanations, most notable being Sontag’s Notes on Camp. I have read Sontag, I have scoured the internet, collecting essay after essay about Camp, disgust, kitsch, bad art, ugly art, good art, and everything in between. And here I am still wanting more. Wanting to understand why the documentary, Grey Gardens, feels campy? Why do I experience things; a TikTok with only a few thousand likes, a reality TV show, a hyperpop song, a current news story about something dystopian, a Youtube video of a man wearing a bad wig singing about sex acts, and think; this is Camp.
There is also the question of what Camp is today. John Waters, the Pope of Trash himself, has said he is unsure if Camp can even truly exist today in the way it did before. And he is not wrong; the Camp of the past is not the same as the Camp of today. “Camp” is no longer a secret word, it is was a theme for the Met Gala in 2019 (although I would argue that the very fact that an event such as the Met Gala titled it as such inherently makes it not very Camp). To quote Water’s himself “If you’re trying, like the Met Gala where everybody gets dressed up and spends a fortune, that’s not camp. That’s couture. It’s very different.”).1 Whether this theme itself and the outfits guests wore qualify as Campy or not, it is clear, Camp is no longer an underground phenomenon, it is mainstream enough to have an exhibition at the Met.
Does this mainstream acknowledgment, this self-awareness of something being Camp, in turn actually prevent it from being the very thing it is aiming to achieve? In a 2019 interview, Waters said;
"To me, camp was a secret word that gay people used and Susan Sontag exposed it in a great, great way. But then it was done. Once the secret was out it was over. I mean, what is camp today? Is there a movie out now that’s so bad it’s great? Maybe not, because everybody is in on it. It’s not accidental.”
It is true that Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp” brought the notion of Camp to mainstream consciousness. However, if we were to say that Camp ended in 1964, where does that leave us? What does that make Justin Timberlake and Brittany Spears’ iconic Canadian Tuxedo look at the AMA’s in 2001? What about the disastrous movie rendition of Cats in 2019, or the Twilight series, with the horrific CGI baby? What about Jojo Siwa? If these cultural touchstones are not Camp then what the hell are they?
This is a question I probably won’t be able to answer in a single sub-stack post, but I have been keeping a list of things I see that instantly resonate as Camp, and whether or not they are or are not is up for debate, but I do know it is a list that brings me a large amount of joy during a time where, in all honesty, not a lot does. So, enjoy.
A Camp List (Non-Exhaustive)
Glee (and anything Ryan Murphy at this point)
Caitlin Jenner’s rendition of Ke$ha’s Tiktok on The Masked Singer
Rupual’s social media presence on Tiktok
Elton John’s Tammy Faye Baker musical being shut down
Wendy Williams (specifically phrases like “Death to all of them” when she was discussing Britney Spears)
“I Think You Might Like It” Music video with Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta
I feel like it is important to mention that despite being one of the most notable figures in the Camp aesthetic, Waters did not even get invited to the Met Gala in 2019. It feels like a message; that whatever “Camp” means in this profitable instance must be separated from the non-desirable aspects that Water embodies.