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Oh Mary! That's So Camp!

Presented by Stonewall Library and Archives at Stonewall Library and Archives

September 1-October 30, 2010

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Stonewall Library Museum Archives opens its largest exhibition to date, Oh Mary! That's So Camp! on Wednesday, September 1. The exhibition explores the phenomenon of gay camp, the singular most significant culturally pervasive trait of the gay community in the years prior to the Stonewall riots.

But what is camp? Camp is a bit like pornography. It is difficult to define but when you see it, you know it. It is the appreciation and celebration of the outlandish, the inappropriately serious and the exaggerated. It is the exaltation of inversion, the "Hey, look at me!" celebration of the self-consciously artificial.

Perhaps camp is most easily defined by example. Mae West, Carmen Miranda and the film Xanadu are camp. Annette Bening, Scarlett Johansson, and To Kill a Mockingbird are not.

The earliest expressions of a definable homosexual "culture' in the late 19th century were manifested as camp. Unable to express their sexuality openly (it was a criminal offense), camp became the behavioral means and the complex code through which gay men could identify and communicate with other gay men. Acting, speaking and dressing in that "certain way" meant only one thing. "He must be one of us."
 

The persistence of gay camp, as it ebbed and flowed during the past century, has maintained many of its earliest indentifying hallmarks. Drag, hyper masculinity and extreme everything still fill the pages of gay publications. Camp language, if not the lingua franca of modern gay men and women, still abounds in absurd gender reversal, bitchiness and runway strut. The fabric of gay culture has become more complex, more nuanced, but a bright camp thread remains.

Although many now see camp as demeaning, silly and outré, others argue that camp was actually a vital socio-political phenomenon that gave the community unity as it delivered an implicit message that gender roles are insignificant, a form of "never blend in" anarchy; power in difference.