burning matches, lifting latches

John and Paul during the Beatles' Time Magazine photoshoot, Hyde Park, 1967

We all know about John's Sword Swallower and featured-on-a-gay-magazine "Down With Pants" pins of 1967, but the eagle-eyed @gobnaits recently spotted another interesting one! The picture above is from a photoshoot the band did for Time Magazine on 18 May 1967 (Full picture here). John is wearing a pin on his scarf and there is writing on it, but I'd never looked closely at it until @gobnaits noticed a comment by Lizzie Bravo on the (now defunct) Beatle Photo Blog website. Lizzie Bravo was one of the superfans who used to keep vigil outside Cavendish, and she also kept a journal where she wrote about her Beatle sightings. She consulted the journal and noted in her comment what John and Paul were wearing that day:

With that information, when you look closely at John's badge, you can just about make out the words "Camp Here":

"Camp Here" isn't among the slogans on the badges featured on the cover of the December 1966 issue of Tangents magazine (where we find "Down With Pants"), but the use of the word "camp", especially in the 60s, is VERY suggestive.

Tangents LGBT magazine, December 1966

In the 1960s, "Camp" could have a similar meaning to what it has now, but it was also used as a synoymn for "gay". A report published in 1960 called A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain (quoted in Some Men in London vol. 2 by Peter Parker) said:

Camp is an example of a word in which the change of usage has amounted to a change of meaning. The word is said to come from the Italian campeggiare meaning ‘to stand out from a background’, and so it came to mean in turn, ‘theatrical’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘effeminate’, and now sometimes it is used as a synonym for ‘homosexual’.

In Some Men in London, several of the interview subjects refer to themselves or other gay men as "camp". And of course, John would later get into mild trouble with Melody Maker when, in his angry letter to Paul Linda, he responded to Paul's wish to meet without their wives by saying "I know you're camp! But let's not go too far!" When Melody Maker excised that part from the letter before publication, John made a note on the text asking "What was libel about saying Paul was camp?"💀

Combined with "Sword Swallower" and "Down with Pants", I for one am fairly confident adding "Camp Here" to the Gay-Themed Pins John was Wearing in 1967 List.