Death of Camp?

My sister and oldest nephew were here for a long weekend, and Sunday my husband and I took them to see Newfest’s screening of The Cockettes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its premiere. (If you haven’t seen this film, you really really should. I know it’s on Amazon but you can find it on other streaming services too.) My second eldest nephew lives in the city now, and he was with us as well.

I didn’t get a chance to talk much with my older nephew, who is somewhat conservative but thoughtful and openminded, about the film, but he told me that for the first 30 minutes or so he felt like he didn’t know where he was or what was happening. I think the idea of people who look and act like that kind of blew a hole in his idea of what the world is like. My younger nephew who lives here now commented that my generation — I don’t consider myself really to be of the Cockettes’ generation, but kids under 25 lately don’t seem to make any distinctions between anyone born in the 20th century — my generation’s conception of non-binary identity is about combining the two extremes, whereas for his generation it’s about being somewhere in between. I told him to keep in mind that the Cockettes were performers and a very small sample, that we had no shortage of the type of nonbinary queer people he was claiming as something new, but in our day they called themselves butch lesbians or “Mary,” or some such.

Anyway, that’s not what I sat down to write about. After the film, the festival held a Q&A with the filmmakers, Bill Weber and David Weissman, who is a friend. I don’t remember what the question was, or what David was discussing at the time, but in the course of his answer he said something about camp and that it’s “not really a part of queer culture anymore.” Just a casual observation in the middle of a sentence about something else, but I felt for a moment like I couldn’t breathe, that, like my nephew, I was suddenly in a world I didn’t understand. David is just a few years older than I but he has close relationships with queer people who are older and who are much younger (check out his Conversations with Gay Elders). His observations regarding history and these generational differences are consistently wise and measured, and compassionate.

For me, there’s no separating camp from being gay. That a sensibility, an aesthetic of anarchic humor and playfulness, hyperbole, theatricality, irony, extravagance, all of it, could set me apart in a positive way, a superior way, could be a powerful statement of protest, of refusal, saved me and I don’t mean that rhetorically. Maybe that change in the culture is just one way in which I often feel at sea in the newer younger “gay community,” but it’s also possibly true that it is the whole of what makes me feel left out, or I should say makes me want to be left out.