The month of June holds a very special place my heart. Warm weather, the joyo arrival of seasonal staff and mpers, and of urse, LGBT Pri Month. Pri is a time to celebrate the lbian, gay, bisexual, and transgenr (LGBT) muny and all the muni that support and affirm our thentic inti. For many mpers, that affirmg muny is their mp fay. Pri is a time to celebrate the progrs we’ve ma, but is also a time to remember the work we still have yet to do.
Contents:
- WHAT DO CAMP MEAN IN GAY TERMS
- IS CAMP JT FOR GAY MEN?
- CAMP BELONGED TO BLACK AND GAY COMMUNI BEFORE IT WAS MET GALA POPULAR
WHAT DO CAMP MEAN IN GAY TERMS
When gay and lbian people had to vent their own languag wh which to talk wh each other, mp led the way. * what is camp gay culture *
When the gay rights movement gaed tractn, tried to shove mp unr the g s ial sire for assiatn. “The gay liberatn movement had a very different perspective, ” said amic in Esther Newton, thor of the foundatnal 1972 book Mother Camp: Female Impersonators Ameri. John Waters began his reer spng mp and vulgary the late even though mp beme mastream the 1960s, the gay rights movement had moved away om .
As scholar Katr Horn wrote her 2017 text Women, Camp, and Popular Culture, mp was rejected by some gay artists and activists the ‘60s bee of s “effemate gtur, allns to Hollywood divas, and over-the-top performanc of genred inti” which were seen then “as a sign of ternalized self-hatred, reactnary, and ultimately hurtful to the new polil mands of the US gay rights movement. This was the ght experience for many gay men, lbians, and others who intified as queer durg a time when same-sex sex was a crime. Polari (or Parlary, Palarie, as ’s also known, om the Italian “to talk”) is one lost language om Bra that beme primarily associated wh gay men (and to a lser extent wh lbians).
IS CAMP JT FOR GAY MEN?
Gay culture is not jt an affectatn. It is an exprsn of difference through style — a way of rvg out space for an alternate way of life. * what is camp gay culture *
Acrdg to Pl Baker, foremost lguistic expert Polari, this secret language, far om beg a lorful fad that jt fell out of fashn (before beg cryptilly revived by Bowie) was val to the many gay men who ed to munite wh each other unr the radar—at least until homosexualy stopped beg a crime the late sixti, renrg the secret language somewhat obsolete.
CAMP BELONGED TO BLACK AND GAY COMMUNI BEFORE IT WAS MET GALA POPULAR
This happens a lot wh language created by margalized groups such as the gay muny. It’s a phenomenon that seems to replite across different cultur, such as Bahasa Gay, a gay speech style of Indonia, which has ma s way to mastream Indonian life whout the public beg particularly aware that gay people even exist. The spreadg of the sorts of gay speech styl might be thanks to drag queens and other queer performers.
The above clip for example, om 1938’s screwball edy Brgg Up Baby, shows what is probably the first appearance of the word “gay” wh a cidly queer, cross-drsg meang a mastream movie.
Ad libbed by the reputedly bisexual Cary Grant, mastream dienc would not have unrstood the slang term, and passed right unr the nose of the Hays Office, which strictly enforced the censorship of such unspeakable thgs as homosexual referenc film. It wasn’t until the Stonewall Rts of 1969 ( which drag queens played a proment role) that this slang meang of “gay” really took hold mastream English. San’s Sontag’s much celebrated 1964 say “Not on ‘Camp'” brought awarens to this hard-to-scribe emergg athetic of over-the-top yet ironic theatrily, attributg to gay culture.