The Gay & Lesbian Review

NEW. NOW.

ican public. Alarmingly, with the rise of gay conservatism, there is also another new category of camp to contend with: Conservative Gay Camp. A recent example is the Hollywood movie J. Edgar , featuring two wildly camp performances by presumably straight actors: Leonardo DiCaprio as longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and his reputedly platonic lover, Clyde Tolson, played byArmie Hammer. Written by a young gay screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, and directed by a classical heterosexual Holly- wood director, Clint Eastwood, whose macho posturing has al- ways bordered on straight camp, the film combines a serious, hyper-masculine style with a mocking, self-consciously queer contemporary sensibility that results in a strange confluence of straight and gay camp. The project of the film could be charac- terized as “conservative drag,” a loose reworking of Hitchcock’s Psycho that attempts to recuperate the ultra-reactionary, cross- dressing J. Edgar by presenting him as a pathetic, repressed Mama’s boy who could have been a great American hero if only he’d been allowed to have an open, sexually honest, and of course monogamous relationship with his handsome, doting right-hand man, Tolson. This is the essence of gay conservative camp—a baroque fantasy of revisionist history that projects contemporary homo- sexual conservative values and morals into the past in order to recuperate and reclaim these complex, monstrously pathologi- cal characters as themselves mere “queer” victims of a repressed and homophobic society. (Judi Dench as J. Edgar’s mother telling him she would rather have a dead son than a “daffodil” is quintessentially camp.) Aside from amounting to question- ably reductive pop psychology (the smothering mother, etc.), it belies the reactionary impulse to attribute sexually “deviant” behavior—cross-dressing, extreme aestheticism, dandyism—to a negative consequence of corrupt and oppressive systems, as opposed to instances of rebellion and revolt and a healthy act- ing out against such regimes. In other words, such “deviance” wouldn’t be necessary if only the system were liberalized and reformed to reflect a healthy, normalized, and assimilated ho- mosexuality, one that is indistinguishable from the heterosexual status quo save only for its preference for same sex partners— in a word, “homonormativity.” This kind of conservative camp tends to ignore or revise historical and political context in order to bolster its recuper- ative project; other recent examples would include, in post- feminist terms, The Queen and The Iron Lady . This new tendency runs in diametrical opposition to the impulses of classic gay camp, which sought to celebrate, elevate, and even worship the qualities of deviance, difference, and eccentricity that characterized the highly æstheticized homosexual experi- ence of past eras. If I have expressed a rather depressing and unhopeful analy- sis of camp, or perhaps what might now reasonably be termed “anti-camp,” I can only offer by way of an antidote an express wish to radicalize camp once again, to harness its æsthetic and political potentialities in order to make it once more a tool of subversion and revolution. Camp itself should almost be de- fined as a kind of madness, a rip in the fabric of reality that we need to reclaim in order to defeat the truly inauthentic, cynical, and deeply reactionary camp—or anti-camp—tendencies of the new world order. March–April 2014

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