The End Of Camp ?

An article in the Guardian dated 30 November 2010 entitled The end of gay men being camp observes the apparent demise of the camp gay man as "straight-acting" gay men gain the ascendancy.

The author also states as FuelMix did sometime ago in this blog, that the term "straight-acting" itself implies a fake. Sort of like "spray-on-butch" which one of the commenters of the above article used. (FuelMix thinks that one's pretty good).  But the author goes onto say that the frequent use of "straight-acting" is part of the psyche of gay men, which collectively has a deep rooted fascination with the masculine straight man.  Interesting point particularly when one looks at gay erotic art of the 1940s and 1950s or going further back, the adoration and glorification of the naked Olympian athletes.

But is "straight-acting" the right label or concept to replace camp?  The author says:


"And what if the pressure to be "straight-acting" gradually squeezes out camp behaviour? Will we have lost something important? Perhaps we should be pleased to see it go, an unnecessary relic of a time when gay men risked prosecution and when a lisp and a limp wrist were a relatively safe way of communicating your sexuality to other men. Or maybe it would be a sell-out, allowing ourselves to be railroaded into behaving like straight men – and, what is more, the kind of straight men who are most likely to give us homophobic abuse or a beating.

Perhaps gay men should view "camp" in the same way as we view a minority language or regional accent, something to nurture and encourage, even if we don't speak that way ourselves."

But here's FuelMix's question: Is "Straight-acting" really the opposite of camp? Or is it really the opposite of "effeminate"?  Have gay men got it wrong?  And how does one define "camp" in contrast to "effeminate"? And what about those Muscle Marys who appear to be both camp and effeminate? Gay men need to re-visit Susan Sontag's seminal work, Notes On Camp.

The last point about camp being a minority language is also interesting. "Camp" indeed has its own patois, known as Polari.  This "language" was initially spoken as slang by those working  in the English theatrical world in the 19th and early 20th Century, before being adopted by English gays fairly quickly as a means of identifying and communicating with each other when gay sex was illegal.

Polari appears to be a mish-mash of  Gypsy, some kind of bastardized Italian, English, a sort of Yiddish and other bits and pieces such as maritime slang. Researchers at Cambridge University listed Polari as one of the languages headed for extinction. Polari slang is on a free website by the World Oral Literature Project.  Some Polari words can also be found on http://www.polari.org.uk/ 

Fags will instantly realize that bits of Polari are now in mainstream fag patois.

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