Writing in Friday's Wall Street Journal (online for WSJ subscribers only), cultural critic Bret Stephens links together both the legacy of crypto-lesbian Susan Sontag and C.A. Tripp's outing of Lincoln. Well, someone had to do it, right?
Referencing Sontag's (in)famous "Notes on Camp," Stephens calls
it:
...basically a manifesto, masquerading as an analysis, of one type of homosexual sensibility. Camp, she wrote, was disengaged, apolitical, ironic, lighthearted, extravagant, a "solvent of morality," the antithesis of tragedy. "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious," wrote Ms. Sontag. "One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious." In other words, gay.
Then, turning to Tripp, Stephens writes:
Mr. Tripp's book treads a well-worn path of various social and political movements in America that have claimed Lincoln as one of their own: Christian evangelicals, temperance societies, progressives, socialists. The historical claims made on Lincoln were almost always false, but the spirit animating them was usually decent. By contrast, the worst political movements in America have been the ones that rejected Lincoln's legacy, such as Southern segregationists and the Black Power movement, and the trends that ignored his legacy altogether - like Camp.
Which brings me back to Ms. Sontag. Though she presented herself as the consummate voice of intellectual seriousness, she was, in fact, a popularizer of her generation's worst ideas, a champion of all its wrong impulses. And these ideas and impulses were ones that, sadly, characterized much of the gay movement for almost 40 years. Mr. Tripp is wrong to insist that Lincoln was gay. But gays are right to insist that Lincoln belongs to them as much as to anyone else.
Now some may find Stephens' critique of camp a slap against gays, but I've come round to a similar view of this particular aspect of gay culture. For what set me off most recently, see below.
Will & Graceless.
The apotheosis of mass media campiness has got to be NBC's "Will
& Grace." Take last Thursday's episode, in which Will's police
officer boyfriend recounts how he got fired. The "hilarious" setup:
a Saks clerk was shot during a robbery because the cop/boyfriend,
sent to disarm the thief, on entering the store spots a pair of
fancy gloves and just has to stop and try them on (we never learn
if the clerk survived or not, the matter of his life or death being
wholly irrelevant). Camp as the "solvent of morality,"
indeed!