Originally appeared in the Chicago Free Press on May 3, 2000.
Susan Sontag put gays on the cultural map in her magisterial 1964 essay, or so the familiar story goes. In hindsight, however, "Notes on Camp" can be seen as neither as impressive nor as gay-friendly as it seemed at the time.
IN 1964, A VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN 31-year-old named Susan Sontag made something of a slow motion splash with a 20-page article titled "Notes on Camp."
With a great display of learning, dozens of wide-ranging examples, and a host of distinctions and unexpected connections, Sontag's article took the notion of "Camp" seriously enough to analyze it - to explain what it was, where it came from, how it worked, and what its effects were.
Among her host of examples were Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, "Swan Lake," "King Kong," old Flash Gordon comics, Noel Coward plays, Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Oscar Wilde's epigrams (the essay quotes several), feather boas, Ronald Firbank novels, and "All About Eve."
Sontag argued that there was more to Camp that just silliness or pretense or fake elegance. According to her, Camp is a whole sensibility that evaluates the world strictly in aesthetic terms.
More specifically Camp is characterized by a love of the theatrical, the artificial or exaggerated, which "converts the serious into the frivolous." It represents "a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality," producing a kind of moral and political disengagement.
Perhaps most significantly for the time - five years before Stonewall - Sontag pointed to gay men as the primary conduits of Camp taste, its "vanguard" and its "most articulate audience." In fact, she said:
"Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. ... The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."
Sontag's article, widely read and discussed in the next few years, certainly popularized the idea of camp, both the awareness and the use of it. The article even achieved enough notoriety to be parodied by humorist Fran Lebowitz in a piece called "Notes on Trick."
In retrospect, Sontag's essay does not hold up well. The show of graduate school learning seemed forced, more intended to impress than illuminate, and limited to the parochial knowledge base of the literary elite of her time. The categories often seem arbitrary, the generalizations too sweeping, the distinctions artificial, and examples often ineptly chosen.
For instance, Sontag seems unable to recognize her subject matter. Despite her claim, "Swan Lake" is hardly Camp. That it is so often parodied should prove that; how could you parody Camp? Samuel Barber's fine opera "Vanessa" is hardly Camp just because gay men wrote it and it contains stylized elements.
No one could say Alexander Pope's poetry was Camp if he read more than "The Rape of the Lock," which maybe Sontag didn't. Nor would anyone who loves music say that "much of Mozart" is Camp. Where did she get these bizarre notions?
At some point you begin to suspect that Sontag's knowledge is limited and her appreciation is shallow. In short, she does not know what she is talking about. And the essay begins to fall apart.
Nevertheless, reading the essay in pre-Stonewall America, many gays felt that Sontag was their champion. They felt she had put them on the cultural map, so to speak, and given them legitimacy. They had always wanted to believe they were an important and valuable creative minority and now Sontag seemed to affirm to everyone that they were the bearers of a major sensibility.
No doubt too many gay men found the article useful as a guidebook to social climbing. They picked up useful tips on what to read and see and what to think and say about what they read and saw, regardless of their own personal reactions.
But gays who felt affirmed and legitimized, even lionized, by "Notes on Camp" overlooked several troubling facts.
For one thing, Sontag's essay was published in "Partisan Review," at the time perhaps the premier organ of moral seriousness in political and cultural matters, Camp's chief rival sensibility. In short, "Notes on Camp" was intended as a reconnaissance map of the enemy's territory.
For another, Sontag acknowledged that although she felt drawn to Camp, she also found it offensive and even felt "revulsion" from it.
Further, the analysis of Camp seemed rooted more in many then-current, condescending stereotypes about gays rather than in any serious inquiry into the basis or coherence of Camp's purported properties. For instance:
Gays are playful because they are immature and refuse to grow up and become responsible adults. They are duplicitous and devious, always posing, not wishing or able to be authentic. They exhibit "the psychopathology of affluence" - too much money, too easily bored, too little purpose for living. They are frivolous and shallow, lacking emotional depth and attracted only to the superficial.
Then too, many casual readers failed to notice that Camp turns out to be not really an independent sensibility at all, but derivative and ultimately parasitic on the whole natural, moral basis of human existence, including serious art, undermining and destroying what it depends on.
Finally, Sontag viewed Camp as the core of what might now be called "the homosexual agenda," that is, a concerted effort to undermine morality so people would have no basis for objecting to homosexuality.
"Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense," she wrote. "Camp is the solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation. ..."
A decade later Sontag viciously attacked Camp and its aesthetic sensibility because it was corrupting and "the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous." But for those who read carefully, that was her view from the beginning.