Love the boots dolly, they’re just so so sweetie! Gay Camp: live and let live or time to move on?

First things first: there’s no logical - or biological - connection between someone’s sexuality and their general demeanour and behaviour. Such things are social constructs - part conditioned, part chosen.

It’s certainly not hard to explain why so many queers - either habitually or in certain situations - camp it up, both physically and vocally. Some aim to seek attention and acceptance; some to deflect and diffuse hostility; others to ironically subvert straight imagery; and most to adopt a social code that identifies and sustains a distinct sub-culture. It’s got very little to do with sex: few people fall for camp or seduce with it.

But should we judge gay male camp - and lesbian varieties can be analysed along parallel lines - as a charming, harmless and colourful social phenomenon to be treasured? Or is it - as many increasingly hold - all too often a self-perpetuating stunting stereotype that - left unchallenged - holds us all back?

Detractors claim camp is all part of a viciously circular cliché dutifully acted out by much of gay culture in reaction to the mainstream who in turn demand it at the crack of a whip. Seemingly premised upon heterosexist and narrowly defined gender roles and orientations, they say camp is, in part, Gay Man or Woman moulding themselves within - and then subverting - a straight image: an understandable reaction to straight reference points but not a positive expression in its own right.

Apparently the world has changed. It’s now confusing for gay youths to grow up with old camp clichés that swamp scene and mainstream media alike; it’s patronising when straight people expect you to “play gay”; and it’s just plain irritating when encircled by bods with tracks stuck eternally on Diva. Sooner we stop acquiescing in and perpetuating this hetero-foisted self-fulfilling prophecy the better: say they.

However, aren’t such moans premised upon and merely reinforcing the very hetero-assumptions they attack? Are not such detractors in fact tacitly suggesting that all gays should assimilate, conform and “play straight” like so many scratch-and-sniff blokes or dull grey suits?

The point is this: for a variety of reasons - code, defence, identity, insecurity, irony - camp is a well established part of gay culture both on and off scene. It even influences the mainstream from Forsythe to Llewellyn-Bowen. And it would be prescriptive and illiberal social engineering to either judge it harshly or seek to eliminate it. It’s fun, it’s there and it’s what many of us grew up with. You have to start with human nature and society as you find it. By all means explain it, but why judge and change it?

Society changes under various forces anyway. So question: if camp essentially emerged in reaction to a male-dominated heterosexist, homophobic society and the needs of queers to adapt and survive, then if society in our part of the world ever changes in this respect, might gay culture decamp?

Well, if so, it won’t happen overnight. It’d take a seismic shift in attitudes - further breaking down gender and orientation stereotypes - to properly counter the old straight-male-dominated reference points and our gay reactions to them. It’d take a world where tired Tarzan-Jane role-play no longer oppressively divides, for old codes and characters like Disco Dolly and Spanner Dyke to fade away along with White Van Man and the Reader’s Wife. A world that is in many ways fairer, but perhaps duller.

Adrian Gillan