turquoise chain

I won Troy from his fiancé by accident. I joined their relationship for a time as a fun experiment, and when the fiancé fell away I found myself one on one with this big quiet beast. While he made short work of turning me into the cockhungry bottom boy I’d long dreamed of becoming, I was still entertaining high-minded ideas about alternative relationship structures. I endlessly imagined finding a little brother or a dad for us. Unemployed and working on my masters degree, I spent much of my time in Troy’s empty apartment, writing and chatting with men nearby on Scruff. There was a big hairy guy that lived less than a mile away who Troy and I chatted with quite often. He was tall and had a beautiful heavy cock and a rounded smiley face. He was built like a gladiator, chubby and stacked and 47 years old. We’d chat while Troy was away at work, always just missing each other’s opportunities to finally meet for the sweaty fuck we imagined together. But his primary partner was usually around and they were raising an infant, a topic that often came up out of nowhere during our nasty text exchanges. I wasn’t looking to share a dad with a child.

One day a puppy in San Francisco found my profile. Clicking on his thumbnail was like receiving a vision into ancient Greece and glimpsing the face of some beautiful youth kept by a powerful senator or high ranking general, the face of the god that would have embodied the boy lovers, the Eromenos, his golden essence beaming from the face of my phone. He was a bearded stripling with eyes of soft honey. He wore collared shirts printed with flowers buttoned up to the neck. His smile exposed a missing front tooth. We chatted all afternoon and I edged throughout as we sent nudes back and forth. I sent him pictures of Troy that he said made him salivate. I texted Troy pictures of the boy and he replied with a woof, but that’s the most enthusiasm he showed toward the issue. He asked if I was interviewing houseboys to clean the bathroom and serve us weekend breakfasts in a thong.

When the puppy, his name was Michael, passed through town some weeks later, he stayed with us instead of his family. He fit between us like the jam inside of a Poptart. None of us dressed in anything more than blankets all weekend and we couldn’t stop kissing. We’d cuddle and grind throughout Jarman films and concert DVD’s. We couldn’t keep our hands off of the boy, especially his soft hole, which we were tapping and fingering and sniffing throughout the weekend. We’d be laying around and talking when Michael, his head on Troy’s bare thigh, would pull Troy’s thick dick into his mouth to suckle and gnaw while I read aloud from take-out menus.

Monday morning rolled around and he hadn’t packed his things. He was supposed to leave by noon to get home in time for work at the leather bar he bussed. Instead, Michael sat beside me in the bed, silently watching Troy dress for work. Troy had the front door open, about to step out into the world for a day the office, when he turned around and asked Michael “What are you going home to anyways?” The pup jumped up from the bed and leapt onto Troy, clutching him like a little ape.

Michael got a job as a bar-back while I finished my masters degree and Troy made more money than both of us combined. Once I graduated, we were free to move into a larger space. After a month of scouring east Los Angeles for houses we couldn’t afford, we started to wonder what spaces beyond the city might have to offer. Troy came across a few properties in Ojai, a town close enough for us maintain an active relationship with Los Angeles. After looking for so long, we were prepared to put down a mortgage if we found the right place.

We arrived at an old farmhouse in a valley behind some hills a couple of miles off of the freeway. The owner stepped out before we made it to the front porch. He was taller and wider than Troy, came off as quiet and discerning, his eyes punching holes through all three of us as he shook our hands. He had messy black hair in his eyes and what was likely an eternal bristle at his jaw. He wore old jeans rolled above a barefoot ankle and a white t-shirt, yellowed in the pits and stretched across his broad shoulders. When his gray eyes fell on Michael, he looked back at Troy and me, then back down to the pup, a twitch of suspicion crossing his face. He turned to lead us to the house and my eyes fell to the pelt of wiry hair busting from his neckline. I looked at the boys on either side of me and mouthed “Back hair!” with wide eyes, licking my chops like a cartoon wolf.

The owner started with a tour of the downstairs. He and Troy got to talking about the history of the land as they poked around the kitchen, leaving Michael and me free to wander the home. I was excited and a bit out of breath, whispering at Michael about the sexy fucker as we mounted the stairs. We found ourselves at the start of a long hall lined with closed doors. At the end of the hall was the only open door and we poked our heads in to find the master bedroom. I first noted that the room was spotless, not a stitch of cloth out of place and the glass in the windows so clean that they even resisted the glare of sunlight coming through. The room was warm, baked through like an oven, intensifying the soil-scent of the man who slept it. In the corner of the room, over the bed and through the open closet door was a dirty clothes hamper filled to a mount with the man’s whites. On top of that pile sat a pair of worn out jockeys.

I charged forward like an owl dropping from the sky for a kill, not feeling Michael’s hand on my arm or his hushed protests. He fell silent when we arrived at the closet, as he watched me lift the briefs to my face. They were a bit damp from a morning of working in the sun. I held my treasure, the cotton was soft and fragrant, and I felt a surge of something like tears. I pushed my face into them, inhaling like I was taking my first breath after nearly drowning. I was instantly drunk. I stuffed them into my mouth. Now Michael rushed me, he was freaking out but also laughing at how ridiculous this was. He pulled them out of my mouth, and I wasn’t sure whether it was to put them back or to take his turn. I don’t think he knew either. He had them open in front of his face when we heard the bedroom door fly into the wall.

Troy and the man stood in the doorway. Troy was shaking with fury. The man stared at us, his face cut into what might be a grimace or a smile, as if he were regarding two poorly trained dogs. “How the hell do you manage these two?” he asked Troy without breaking his gaze. Troy furrowed his brow and turned his head to the man. “Not lightly,” he replied, comprehension breaking over him. The man pointed to the bed and said “March.” When we stared back in confusion he stomped over to Michael, grabbed him by the back of the neck and threw him to the bed. The daddy sat down and pulled Michael by the arm over his knee. “YOU TOO” he shouted back at me, as he yanked Michael’s khakis down under his ass cheeks. I approached the bed slowly, hypnotized. Michael stared up at me through the mirror, his face painted with a puppy’s mindless grin.

The three of us had planned on camping between open-houses and so we did, in the field that lay between the man’s home and the woods that crawled up the mountains behind it. We saw no other houses that weekend. The four of us fucked and cooked and hiked, going in and out of role play as a family or a pack of wild dogs. One night, when Troy and Michael had fallen asleep in a heap on the couch before the fireplace, Dad lifted a pack of cigarettes from a shirt pocket and shook them at me. I grinned, grabbed my glass of bourbon, and followed him out to the back porch with a blanket over my shoulders.

We stood facing the tree line, his porchlight at our backs and the moon down our fronts. We were silent for half of a cigarette until he asked me how I’d orchestrated all of this. I scoffed and took credit for nothing but he didn’t buy it. He told me that he’d dreamed of something like this in his twenties, as all boys do, but he’d never found it, so he moved away, out here. I told him how often I think of disappearing, and that these boys are my attempts to anchor myself to the human world, lest I get lost at sea. He replied that certain magic systems requires their practitioners to shape their own reality, to break through systems or beliefs that practitioners have not built for themselves, to always build anew. I told him that it was this little pack or death. He nodded, eyes to the stars, and kept quiet for the rest of the cigarette.

The weekend turned into a week until finally, by our second Sunday, we began to collect ourselves for our return to the city. We were finishing last swallows of coffee, about to step out the door to hit the road, when the man, his name was Harry, casually asked if we were at all interested in the house. Everyone was speechless, as if we’d forgotten why we’d come in the first place. We just stood there for a moment, the car packed up, Troy and Michael halfway out the door. I stood next to Harry, an empty mug still in my hands. I turned to look at him to find he was staring at me, as if I were the one to give answer.

My eyes met his and I realized we never asked Harry why he was trying to sell the house. I suddenly felt the size of this land, all around me, the acres he owned and its emptiness, rolling out from us in all directions. At some point he’d decided to leave everyone behind, but it wasn’t enough. I saw him in my mind, walking out the back door on a cold morning in a flannel and boots, a pack over one shoulder. I can feel the cold on his face and hands and it feels good. The leafless trees around him are curling toward the sky like heralds blasting a silent song. He follows a trail uphill. Near the top of a crest, he sees an old tree that he’d always thought was twisted and tumored in a familiar way. He sits down against its trunk. He drops his pack in front of him and pulls out a half empty bottle of good scotch and a revolver. He sets the pack aside and takes pulls from the bottle, staring into the overcast valley below. He feels good. He’s not sure the liquor is doing anything because he still feels a bit jittery from his coffee. But he feels good. He thinks about smoking a cigarette, but the air smells so clean. He imagines the cold as a young man stroking his cheek, ready to embrace him. He picks up the revolver and pushes the chamber open with his thumb. The vision broke and I found myself in the silent kitchen again.

I turned to Troy and Michael who were now also staring at me. I told them to go back to the city, back to work, that I would stay here to discuss our next step. Troy nodded and Michael followed him out the door.

We wrote up a deed to the land that put all of our names on it, including Harry’s. We were fully moved within a month. Harry had been a high ranking park ranger until he moved into a consulting position for the Federal Land Management Commission. He owned most of the mountain range around us, had bought it up his whole life through as residents of other plots moved. Harry taught us how to stalk local wildlife, for hunting and to monitor land health. A young nomad arrived on our porch with a pregnant dog and asked if she could give birth in our barn. The morning after he and his dog disappeared, Michael took the litter into house and Harry got to work on a corral and a small-scale version of the barn for them to sleep in. We purchased a pair of baby goats, the start of what would become a small herd kept for milk and meat. We protected the local deer population, not that there were many hunters in the area. If the deer were healthy, the land was healthy. Harry showed us to the area’s fox and wolf dens, each one made recently empty, Harry mentioned, by the sound of our approach.

We waited for his tenants to leave their lots and we kept them empty. We used to the land to grow apples and corn and kale and carrots that we sold at farmer’s markets. We maintained all of the homes as vacation rentals so that when we wanted all of the land empty, we could have it. One by one, Troy, Michael, and I quit our jobs in the city.

We’d been living together in the house for two years when the last of us came home from his final day working his city-job. It was a night in early spring and we spent it emptying bottles and screaming through the woods until we were naked and caked in soil-thick sweat. I was riding Dad’s greased up cock while Michael blew me, and I blew Troy, the four of us a faggot hieroglyph, when I recalled the Kingmaking Ceremony. I recommended it the next morning as we ate breakfast. None of the others knew what I was talking about. I told everyone to prepare to camp, that we wouldn’t need tents, just blankets, a fire, and a few other materials I’d prepare myself. At midday, Harry, at my instruction, led us to one of the trails the local deer used often for travel at this time of year. With Harry at the head of us, we waltzed into the heart of the woods, a basket of materials at my back and the others draped in blankets.

We set our things down at a clearing and built a circle for a large fire, one that would lick out the sky. We three younger men took the older man into the middle of our triangle and, by my lead, adorned him with the antlers of a buck we’d felled the year before. We tied them in place on his forehead and he swung them, too and fro, making sure they were secure. After a few adjustments they were stable. We removed the rest of his clothing and he stood there, naked in the dawn gray drifting through the trees, his skin alive with goose pimples. Troy removed his clothes as well, revealing two knives tied to his thigh: one long and wide, the other short and quick. I pulled a pot of goat’s blood out of my sack and handed it to Troy. He opened it and, dipping a thumb into its middle, set to painting Harry in a network of small circles, lines, and words whose letters were laid one over the other. When he was finished, Harry did the same for Troy.

I undressed Michael and sewed his hair and beard in little purple flowers, draping a white hooded cape over his shoulders and tying gold ribbon up his arms. He threw my green wool cloak over my shoulders and set a crown of wire and crystals onto my head. The four of us turned to face each other at the same time. Michael and I dropped to our knees and started to sniff at the men’s crotches until they were at full mast, bouncing with blood. We ran the tips of our tongues up the underside of their shafts, lingering for a moment on their piss slits. We rose when we heard the sounds of hooves not too far off, and stood aside for the men to break into a run through the trees.

I closed my eyes and followed them with my mind, to see what they saw. The sounds ripped through the forest. From the other side of the clearing came the rustle and yipping of wolves come to join the hunt, their excited griffs and bounds through the underbrush like thunder, though they remained only gray and black flashes through the trees from our vantage point. Michael, his lips doused in dad’s pre-seminal fluid, took some of it onto his finger and painted it onto his third eye and under his arms. He started something like a dance, convulsing, trying to set the rhythm of the deer in their running panic, trying to draw our dad and older brother closer to them.

I stood over my little brother and watched his flailing. His jerking became so violent that I worried he was having a seizure, but I would not break the equation we’d loosed, so I let him be. I took up the jar of blood from the ground and held it before me. The wolves had gone silent. I could see, when I closed my eyes, that they were waiting amongst the trees in a great circle around the men and the deer, the two parties now fifty feet apart and facing each other. Time stopped when Dad and our brother, a beastly buck and the his herd, and the circle of wolves were all frozen, regarding each other, hot breath curling from faces, muzzles, and snouts, until the buck stomped the ground and all parties came crashing together in a bustle of pink flesh, limbs, fur, horns, and blood. Dad body-slammed the Buck, their prongs locked. I choked out a scream when it looked like Dad might have broken his neck, but by some magic his spine held firm. Troy led the wolves to scatter the herd, then to tear at the Buck’s sides. Dad and the buck held each other in place, the buck’s body waving like a flag to fling the wolves from him. Finally, the animal reared up, ready to kick those knife-like hooves into Dad’s stomach, but Dad’s arm followed swiftly upward to plant the great knife into the buck’s heart. Troy leapt onto its back, drawing his small dagger across its throat, loosing a waterfall of blood onto Dad.

They dragged the carcass back to our camp, the wolves trailing slowly after them, licking their chops, where they found Michael and I tangled up in one another, covered in the goat’s blood. At the sound of their approach, I pulled my fingers from Michael’s wet hole and stood over him, pulling his legs backward to expose his ass, offering him to them, thankful that our Father returned with his life. Harry and Troy took to Michael quickly, and we were surrounded by the wolves. We were all dizzy and high by now. I couldn’t tell if the wolves were devouring the Buck’s corpse beside us or taking their turn with Michael’s body as well. Our little brother was filled with cocks and everyone stank. Dad was about to cum but our big brother and I grabbed him and pulled him out of the boy. We pinned him to the ground, his arms over his head and his legs spread for all of us, the wolves included, to dig our noses into his pits and ass crack while he struggled against our licking at his sweat and stench pits. We took turns sitting on his upright pole for a few pumps, holding our loads as long as we could stand, hypnotized and falling in and out of time-awareness as night fell, until it was just the four of us in a pile on the forest floor; the wolves gone, the carcass half eaten, and all of us licked clean of blood and sweat, just the cold night air remaining on our skins. We awoke the next morning and returned to the house, our king acknowledged.

We repeated this ritual in the spring of every year onwards to name a new king, a new gilded maiden, a new warrior, and a new priestess. We went through countless rotations in this way, joyous until that spring when the King Stag conquered one of us, instead.

We’d been living on the land for close to twenty years. Troy and I were nearly 50, Michael had just turned 42 and Harry was 73. Troy was the first to fall. His neck had been broken in a clash but his body was intact. We stripped his arms and thighs of their ample meat, partially for our own consumption and partially to burn, pulverize, and fertilize our crops. We buried his heart at the top of our mountain and his cock and balls deep in a cave, marking both with shrines. The rest of his body was laid in a grave at the edge of the clearing where we held our rituals. We said a few words after we’d packed the earth over him. We drifted back to the house to sit the porch and sip, one of us sleepily mentioning in our mourning that it was a miracle we’d lived this long taking turns battling deer.

It was our first year without a king. We decided we were now subject to the land and ate no meat beyond what we took from Troy’s body. The wolves disappeared during this time. Losing Troy was the loss of our champion, and the loss of the true love of my youth. It was here I remembered that he and I had once been a couple living together in the city. After that, I mourned my husband on my own, wandering the woods and sleeping in the cave that held his parts for a month until I was malnourished and needed to tend to some ulcerations that had developed from remaining in one place for so long. We’d never have another warrior. From then on, he who would be king fought the stag alone. We took this as fact and mourning was over– he was sacrificed as payment for all the years of joy we’d been granted.

Five years later, Michael returned from a trip to the city with some young men in tow. He’d found them in the sauna of a Russian Spa and seduced them with tales of our lives out here and they were eager for a weekend of fag-revelry. We spent the first night getting very drunk with them on our front porch. There were six, a collection of dirty twinks and bear cubs in their early twenties that formed members of a noise-metal band. We’d been sipping from a batch of bourbon that we’d infused with a small amount of LSD for special occasions. It wasn’t far into the night before they were all naked and barely forming words, emphatic and gesticulating, making out and climbing trees. One of them was licking out my ear and grinding his bare hole on my bone when he whispered that we should never let them leave. I thought of Troy and his desire for a houseboy. I signaled to Harry and Michael and we led the boys, naked and stumbling, out to the woods. We strung them up to the trees and took turns with them, lubing up their throats and holes with spit for several fuckings. They were drowning in our scents, their eyes half open, able only to beg by lurching forward into us. We finished and left them there for the night.

When we returned the next day, they were all laughing hysterically, their limp cocks shrunken and bouncing in the morning cold. We took them down one by one and gave each a sandwich and a blanket before sending them to scamper off into the forest. Hours later, when they were finally coming down from their trips, they attempted to return to the house, hungry and uncertain of what they’d found themselves doing. They arrived to find us on the porch with their breakfast ready. We offered them ground goat meat and chopped vegetables in silver bowls painted with psilocybin paste. We did not let them rise from their hands and knees. They returned for this meal several times a day for two weeks, and every time we’d give them a little less of the paste, until, eventually, they’d fully adapted to their new lives, sleeping in piles in caves and bathing in rivers, joining with the wolves under the full moon. The following spring, the pack of wild striplings took the role of the warrior in the Kingmaking Ceremony and they performed beautifully. Amongst ourselves, we wondered how much of what these boys became was performance and what was genuine wildness, not that it mattered.

Michael was the next of us to fall to the King Stag. He had the wild boys with him, but in their successful takedown of the Buck, Michael took four points of a prong clean though his stomach and chest. We mourned and tried to workout the math. Who was king of the land now? In which direction did we owe sacrifice, or had it been paid? Harry and I talked as we watched Michael’s body burning on its pyre. We went out looking for the wild boys to find out who’d killed the stag. We found them clustered beside a small snapping fire at the mouth of their cave, curled around limbs and joints, quietly gnawing and cracking bones open for marrow. I asked aloud who had delivered the stag’s killing blow. None stirred or even looked up from their meals except one. The smallest of them came forward, nuzzled at Dads leg and licked at my palm. We lead him away from the group, back to Michael’s pyre, which was now spewing more smoke than fire, in great twisting plumes that soared up through the branches and into the sky.

Harry got to his knees and started winding cords of rope around the boy, and the wild boy leaned forward to nose into my crotch. I unbuttoned my fly and my prick dropped onto his tongue. He fed, nursed, and gulped with hunger as Dad finished the last of the knots. Dad stood beside me and loosed his cock as well. What started as a slow and sloppy bj became a bile-burping face-fucking. The boy gagged on our cocks, his face held firm to the walls of our pubes, until his throat and stomach were coated in a thick glaze of saliva. I was about to blow my load down the boy’s throat when Dad, seeing how close I was, popped me a left hook in the jaw, sending me stumbling to the side, stars in my eyes. When I stumbled back I found Dad, too, on the edge. He met my gaze and nodded, and just as his face was going to break with ecstasy I delivered a heel to his stomach, knocking him backward, a whip of saliva torn from the boy’s lips.

Our balls aching and bruises swelling, we hoisted the boy up into the branches to hang over the burning pyre. Harry made some adjustments with wood over Michael’s body and the fire roared back to life. The wild boy smiled through the flames, even as his body churned, as he screamed and vomited and choked. Finally he lost consciousness, so I climbed the tree, pulled him up to my branch, and slit his throat. I jumped back to the ground in time for his blood to splash over Michael in a great burst of sun-white fire, reaching up to engulf the boy’s body. Harry and I sat side by side and watched the pyre burn itself out. We could hear the wild boys take their places around us in the dark. A little further out, the wolves too joined to watch the flames. Only the charred ropes remained by morning. Not even bones could be found among the burnt sticks.

I spent the next few nights alone in the small-scale barn Harry built all those years ago, kept warm by the dogs, now several generations on from that first litter. Harry came to me on the fifth night and presented himself as a sweet little bottom-boy. He curled up into my bare crotch in the hay and called me ‘Father’ like he hadn’t in years. The times I had claimed kingship were few, but sometimes, when it was just me and Harry, he’d whisper the title in my ear as I shot my load into his guts. That night he straddled my rod and rode me with the moon at his back until he howled with my load pumping into him. He pulled up off of me and curled up at my side, scissoring his legs a bit to work my seed into the walls of his rectum. After an hour of staring out the open door at the stars he started to whisper again. He said that the land had asked for something greater that night, greater than he or I or anyone alone could give. He said that the last of him had been delivered to each of us, and that now it was preserved in me. Then he sat up and looked at me again in the way he’d looked at me that day I had my vision of him with the revolver. He looked at me as if I were the one to give answer, to give him permission to chose the time of his own death.

He stood and walked out of the dog’s coral and I followed. We arrived at the front porch, facing the woods. He looked up at the moon for a minute before dropping to his knees, pulling the large ceremonial knife from his waistband. He offered it to me and I took it from him. He pulled the smaller knife from his pocket, whispering his own secret prayer, and, as he looked up and our eyes locked, both of our faces wet with tears and snot, he jammed the small blade into his belly and struggled to draw it across, left to right. He lurched and jerked as intestines followed the well of blood spilling from the red seam in his abdomen to the floor, a pile of skinless pythons glistening in the moonlight. When he doubled over, I raised the great knife over my head and brought it down through his neck with a throat-scream. His head tumbled down the porch steps, his face splashing through the river of red, and we shat ourselves simultaneously. One wolf emerged from the trees, then another, and another, slipping from the shadows, licking their chops and approaching the body. I stood over it, my blade dripping onto my bare feet, unable to move as they got to work.

I cleared the lower half of the farmhouse of its furniture and filled it with straw, every room save for the kitchen, which I preserved. The remaining wild boys came and lived there, sharing the space with the wolves. I trained them to care for the dogs and the goats, to continue breeding them, for food and companionship, to sell their meat and their puppies at the farmer’s market in town. I shaved all of their heads and needled a pair of blue snakes up their arms, a crest of four black sigils on each left breast, and an empty blue crescent above each brow.

I took up residence in the barn and slept with the goats, staring into their faces, hoping to see some aspect of a god hidden in there. I collected mushrooms from the goat’s stool and subsisted only on these. I hallucinated that a goddess came to me as a beast the size of a house with swollen hermaphroditic genitals, cackling and rolling around, cumming and bleeding. She stomped over to the main house and pointed, laughing at my wild boys, making to pluck one of them up to devour him. I screamed at this and when she turned around, she was standing before me. She had the gentle face of an infant goat and wore a clean white gown on a supple, pregnant body. She spoke softly in a language I’d never heard and kissed me deep with that thin goat’s tongue.

A Rare Crab-Form Tureen and Cover, Qing Dynasty, Qianlong Period (1736-1795); width 8 ¾ in.; 22.2 cm.

Study for The Archers, John Singer Sargent

I think that when a lot of people think of camp. They link camp and irony together right. They think that its an attitude of superiority. And they’re not entirely wrong. Because gays will feel superior about anything related to taste. But they do think of it as to look at something where the emotions are larger than life and snide at it, or turn your nose down on it. Shut it down. Which is why so many projects about women (where the emotions on screen are always bound to be more explosive than anything with men because of social conditioning of what’s acceptable for men and women to show etc) get wrongly labled as camp (great article on that here). 

I think another thing is Judy Garland is still well linked to camp. And today in the 21st century, outside of The Wizard Of Oz, people’s main perception of Judy Garland is probably from SNL sketches where she’s portrayed as a fast talking neurotic emotional woman erratically popping pills to laugh at. So the impression one gets is Judy Garland = camp, camp = laughing at the ridiculousness of women and their emotions or big emotions in general. 

I think what camp is for me, it’s not really “failed seriousness” like Sontag said. Camp for me is….. in an absurdist, heightened world to find real emotion, whether that is laughter or tears or both. Because “the gay sensibility is about holding qualities together that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity. The sensibility holds together intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a deprecating sense of its absurdity” (Dryer). The insanity of being a homosexual or a queer is so random, nobody is raised to be one. You just have the day where you go “well shit” and now you’re stuck here. And it’s really such a banal thing right at the end of the day, who you’re attracted to or how you identify. And yet the far reaching outcomes of it are so extreme and come so quickly that suddenly you don’t recognize the world you were born into. And you build these tools so you don’t get “tagged” as different for your safety, you start monitoring your own behavior and you contrast that with your “straight” peers’ behaviors so that you don’t stand out. But now you really are “different” in a way where you FEEL all these extremities. Because you notice things that straight people don’t, you feel constricted in ways that straight people don’t and you feel that no one but you is noticing the insanity that is occuring every day because of all these “rules” and “rituals”. So you keep people at an emotional distance and start to walk the line between embracing your straight loved ones and ridiculing them and their structured lives. Which is where camp thrives. You know nothing is natural about heterosexuality so you prefer artifice, visceral vs emotional truth. Which is why camp is claimed by gays even if not all camp fans are gay or all gay people get camp. 

Judy Garland was not “a star turned into camp” like a drag queen imitating a female star but someone who embodied camp attitudes. Garland was positioned as “the girl next door” during her MGM days, she was supposed to be ordinary. But problems “were surfacing, exactly expressing the way in which a ‘below-surface’ became part of the surface of the image itself. Once this ‘below-surface’ was available, it became possible to look at the films and discern, or think you could discern, not straightforward ordinariness but a special relationship to ordinariness”. Garland’s public image is now inseperable from her drug addictions, her suicide attempts, and her death. So you watch these early films and something seems…… off. 

Queerness is always there. Even repressed it is always there. When you weave in the sense of difference that was always there but is now finally recognized, it becomes possible to recognize all the effort that went into maintaining that artifice of “ordinariness” (i,e, heterosexuality) in the first place.

Garland’s irreverent attitude towards these two times in her art where she expressed intense theatrical emotion is to puncture it, to show the reality of the pretense of ilusion. To emotionally distance yourself from it so you are not overcome by this sadness. Garland often expressed ridicule at the idea that she was some “tragic” figure. And you can see in these moments why. The joy that comes in poking holes and trivializing these narratives, that heterosexuality is valid or that there is only one way that woman can exist as or any other culturally dominant oppressive idea and ultimately taking away some of their original power is what defines a lot of camp. It’s to create or see this illusion, and its not that the emotions in it are not real or that the emotions don’t matter. But you take your needle point and you POP! And now you can see the strains. And now your emotions and the artificiality of the illusion sit next to each other. But they don’t cancel each other out. They create a more interesting picture than there was before.