Queer sex and gender was always going to drift towards camp, though. It's a necessary conjunction.
It's precisely because queer identity is distinguished by the need to construct an understanding of one's own self; the opposite of "queer" is "familiar." Pretty much tautologically, we're not in a position to accept the standard narratives uncritically, or to follow the usual paths in the usual way. As such, there's a necessary creative component to any queer identity.
And the thing about creativity is, people kind of suck at it by default? Creative self-expression is a skill (or a lot of skills, maybe), and like any learning process, the early stages are awkward, inconsistent, and often quite embarrassing. And queer people tend to have very diverse origins; there's no way to cultivate an inter-generational culture that makes young queer people especially good at this.
In other words, a queer community is a place where a lot of people are awkwardly engaged in a critically important act of creative self-expression; they're building themselves in a very real way, and a lot of them are going to be doing it rather badly. These communities depend on having a script and a culture that's permissive of these mistakes, and gives young people the space to get the dumb stuff out of the way while they're learning.
Camp is a face-saving way to celebrate low-skill creative work, jumping back and forth situationally between irony and sincere appreciation. Not the only way, maybe, but probably the most obvious and the most accessible. It's a fantastic tool for making the construction of identity feel safe, accessible, and welcoming in a community that otherwise can't make too many assumptions about the background of its members.
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