i mean ok im not An Expert. and camp is just a feeling.. its a TENDER feeling you might say (susan sontag would say this: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html: 

but i always link to susan sontag bc…. very little has been written on Camp in terms of what it actually is! its hard to define. Its just a feeling. But i really recommend reading this vulture article: http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/why-are-so-many-female-projects-called-camp.html. 

It delves into why so many female led projects that aren’t camp, get labled camp. 

“Campiness, as a style and sensibility, comprises a set of widely appreciated characteristics: frivolity, a celebration of the ‘so bad it’s good,’ the overwrought, the histrionic, what Sontag calls ‘failed seriousness.’” Camp often walks the line between embracing its subjects and ridiculing them, or at the very least treating them with emotional distance. It’s something you can love and even admire, but never take seriously — it’s just a bit too much. In essence, camp is an aesthetic that privileges stylization over content, artifice over naturalism, and the visceral over emotional truth.

I think The People Vs. OJ Simpson is Camp but Feud is not camp. Sex and The City 2 is camp. John Waters is Camp. American Horror Story is Camp. Hannibal is Camp. Jackie is not Camp. The musical Cats! is camp. The character Prior Walter from Angels is Camp but the play itself is not. Little Shop of Horrors is Camp. Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard is probably The most iconic Camp character of all time, thats not from a John Waters movie. Mother! is an extremely twisted Camp. Can I entirely explain this? not really. 

Seph if you read this i really wish your blog with the tag on Camp was still around it was genius. 

Catherine Lord, To Whom It May Concern, 2011

Just as saying the words, “I do thee wed,” causes a marriage to come into being, putting into print, inside a book, the words, “I make you a gift of the words I have written,” causes that statement to be true. It tenders to another, in advance, the very object that the reader holds in her hands. It makes the gift upon the material that makes writing, and the gift itself, possible. Book dedications are gifts of labor and love. To dedicate a book is to hide the private in plain view, to splay intimacy upon a sheet of paper for any and all to see. This status, somewhere between public and private, is perfectly suited to the creation and transmission of “queer” culture. Coded, sly, witty, and polemical, these gifts turn queer into a verb. They queer “culture.”

No database indexes the dedications in the library of ONE Archive. The dedications used in To Whom It May Concern were found by a manual search. The books that contain the dedications have been returned to their shelves without recording bibliographic details. Information about authors, book titles and dates can be retrieved only by chance, or by another laborious search.

“I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions.” 

― David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals

A BLUSH IN A CHEST

You wouldn’t know it from most history books, but Brooklyn’s queer history is just as rich and colorful as Manhattan’s. But perhaps because it was working class, Brooklyn hasn’t always gotten the same respect. Until now.

For the Pop-Up Museum’s “On the (Queer) Waterfront” exhibit, artist and historian Sarah G. Sharp took to Google Maps to create an interactive digital tour of some of Brooklyn’s most potent queer historical sites — from the WWII lesbian ship yards and the cruising grounds of Vinegar Hill to the place where Leaves of Grass was printed, and where ACT UP demonstrators closed the Brooklyn Bridge. If you thought New York gay history was all Stonewall and Broadway, it’s time to take a stroll. 

View A Blush in the Chest: Queer Poets, Workers, Radical and Freaks in a larger map

Sharp hopes to open the map to contributors, not just to mark the headline grabbing stories or protests and poets, but the “soft histories” of the way gay life was lived by private citizens.

(You might also want to pair it with The Impalpable Sustenance, a 40 minute “audio excursion” in and around the Brooklyn Promenade created by Teamworks Unlimited.)

We hope that the map— like this spring's Google Map of the Lost Gay Bars of San Francisco — will inspire others to begin mapping their own neighborhoods, so this crucial history won’t be lost.

– Mike 

ABOUT SARAH G. SHARP

This is secret code used by 19th-century diarist Anne Lister to record her lesbian relationships! And underneath, and sample of her diaries. Anne wrote 6600 pages, or almost 4 million words of these diaries, giving us a treasure trove of information about her life, and one of the only first-hand accounts we have of female same-sex relationships in the 19th century.

Now you too can communicate with your friends in secret lesbian code!