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Camp is a lie that tells the truth.
--Philip Core (1984)
Introduction
To define camp may be the least campy thing in the world. Still, scholars, cultural critics, artists, and camp practitioners have been trying to do precisely that since Christopher Isherwood offered readers a delicious, albeit fleeting, description of "the gay sensibility" in his 1954 novel, The World in the Evening.1In a brief dialogue between two gay friends, Stephen and Charles, Isherwood distinguishes between two types of camp. Low Camp includes "swishy boys with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich . . ., but it's an utterly debased form." 2High Camp, he continues, provides
the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course Baroque art. You see, High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The Ballet is camp about love.3
This passage suggests in camp an inherent elasticity, but Isherwood offers a final stroke of definitional clarity:
Actually, it isn't [elastic] at all. But I admit it's terribly hard to define. You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao-tze's Tao. Once you've done that, you'll find yourself wanting to use the word whenever you discuss aesthetics or philosophy or almost anything. I never can understand how critics manage to do without it.4
Thus, Isherwood cues camp's entrance onto the stage of literary representation, although Fabio Cleto caught the gay sensibility peeping out from behind the curtain in (at least) two earlier documents. In 1869, "two famous transvestite figures, Lord Arthur Clinton and Frederick Park," referred to camp in an exchange of letters. 5J. Redding Ware included an entry for camp in his 1909 slang dictionary, making it abundantly clear that the term applies to those other Victorians, "persons of exceptional want of character."6And, of course, camp sparkled in Wildean witticisms such as "I like men who have a future and women who have...