The dark side of camp - analysis of camp style and society - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1995 by Gareth Cook

"Mommy, show them what they might win!" screams Babette from the front of the bar. Babette is the young game--show hostess, dressed in a frilly maroon dress and long silver gloves. A recent track from, Pizzicato Five (a Japanese mambo band) thumps loudly and out dances Bianca, a red head in a black evening gown. Bianca shimmies to the front with the next prize, a small (scented) gold crown. Bianca is a man.

Welcome to the grand prize round of "Drag Freak Bingo" at the Andalusian Dog, a Salvador Dali-inspired bar on Washington D.C.'s U Street. The rules tonight are simple: A set of bingo cards will cost you seven dollars. The broken crayons to mark your card are free. Bianca and his partner-in-drag, Biatta--he's the one with the pearls and the trumpet--call the numbers from a table draped with gold lame. And crowd participation is a must: If they ask a question, you will scream.

"How many people," Biatta asks with an ironic smile and a hand on his hip, "have country-western rumpus rooms in their homes?" Everybody hoots. Then laughter.

There's no question that "Drag Freak Bingo" is strange. But it's also strangely common. "Camp, an ironic taste for the outrageously tasteless, has gone from being an obscure sensibility with murky roots in the gay subculture to a cultural mainstay. Sure, bingo led by drag queens is mostly a playful and harmless diversion--I laughed until it hurt and I'll go back. But I have come to recognize that camp also has a nasty side.

It can be difficult to get a handle on camp. "It's terribly hard to define," says a character in Christopher Isherwood's 1956 novel The World in Evening, probably the first explicit discussion of camp. "You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao Tse's Tao." Anyone who has ever sent a tacky postcard to a friend, knowing that they would "get it," understands camp, but a more precise definition is difficult to come by.

The American Heritage Dictionary comes close: "An affectation or appreciation of manners and tastes commonly thought to be outlandish, vulgar, or banal." The word is derived from the French verb camper, to perform--to strike a pose, as Madonna would say. Camp usually has a "life-as-theater," quality to it. You show off tastes that everyone knows are not your own. Camp is often rich with exaggeration. It is always heavy on irony: I just love those bell bottoms.

Examples are everywhere. Most video stores now have a "cult classics" section for movies that celebrate the vulgar, like John Waters' gross-out Pink Flamingos or Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. Comedy Central's "Mystery Science Theatre 3,000" makes fun of old (and bad) sci-fi movies; and "Nick at Nite," with reruns of sit-coms like "Welcome Back, Kotter" and "Mr. Ed," is Camp TV. Meanwhile, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste is a national bestseller. And Pulp Fiction, the super-hip movie hit, relies on the audience to get camp--you're supposed to smirk when John Travolta and Uma Thurman go to the Jack Rabbit Slim's" diner. "The culture now," says Johns Hopkins critic Mark Crispin Miller, "is saturated with camp."

Funny as camp can be, its dark side is hard to deny. When Dave Letterman shines the kleig lights on seemingly clueless working class foils, teasing them for the benefit of an uber-hip New York audience, he shows that mass camp can be smug, snobbish, and even mean. Even Drag Freak Bingo got laughs with "white trash" prizes like the crown air freshener. Camp has come to play on--and feed--some of the nation's most damaging social divisions.

Gone Camping

Thirty years ago, when Susan Sontag described the then-obscure phenomenon in her brilliant essay, "Notes on Camp," she praised it. "Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation--not judgement," she argued. "Camp is generous." At that time, of course, the nation's economy was on a seemingly endless upward trajectory, and the middle classes were the prime beneficiaries. The spread of the old status markers--home ownership, steady, well-paying jobs, and access to universities, expanded through the GI Bill--seemed to point to a new social equality. There was hope that social class was receding as a dividing wall, that inheritance and the family name were being eclipsed in importance by achievement. ("I'm an American," says Pulp Fiction's Butch, "our names don't mean shit."

Another change was taken as a Positive sign: Taste was replacing the older, more permanent signs of social status. People are not "upper-class," the new thinking went, they just have great taste. And, unlike class, taste was something you didn't have to be born with--conceivably, everybody could have it. My Fair Lady, the most successful Broadway musical of the fifties, centered on the notion that taste could be taught: You too, it said, could be Eliza Doolittle. Just know the right wines, learn the right artists, and make a trip to (or at least read about) Europe. The foreign travel poster was a dorm room staple of the time.

Finally, in the sixties, as the counterculture mushroomed, many hailed the end of cultural elitism. As pop-nihilist Andy Warhol quirkily put it in his 1970 book, Popism, "It was fun to see the Museum of Modem Art people next to the teenyboppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors."