Camp (style)

Camp is an aesthetic and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ culture and especially gay men. Camp aesthetics disrupt modernist understandings of high art by inverting traditional aesthetic judgements of beauty, value, and taste, and inviting a different kind of aesthetic engagement.

Camp art is distinct from but often confused with kitsch. The big difference between camp and kitsch is mainly that camp is aware of its artificiality and pretense.

The American writer Susan Sontag emphasized camp's key elements as embracing frivolity, excess and artifice. Art historian David Carrier notes that, despite these qualities, it is also subversive and political. Camp may be sophisticated, but subjects deemed camp may also be perceived as being dated, offensive or in bad taste. Camp may also be divided into high and low camp (i.e., camp arising from serious versus unserious matters), or alternatively into naive and deliberate camp (i.e., accidental versus intentional camp). While author and academic Moe Meyer defines camp as a form of "queer parody", journalist Jack Babuscio argues it is a specific "gay sensibility" which has often been "misused to signify the trivial, superficial and 'queer'".

Camp, as a particular style or set of mannerisms, may serve as a marker of identity, such as in camp talk, which expresses a gay male identity. This camp style is associated with incongruity or juxtaposition, theatricality, and humour, and has appeared in film, cabaret, and pantomime. Both high and low forms of culture may be camp, but where high art incorporates beauty and value, camp often strives to be lively, audacious and dynamic. Camp can also be tragic, sentimental and ironic, finding beauty or black comedy even in suffering. The humour of camp, as well as its frivolity, may serve as a coping mechanism to deal with intolerance and marginalization in society.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word camp was used as a verb since at least the 1500s. Writer Bruce Rodgers also traces the term camp to the 16th century, specifically to British theatre, where it referred to men dressed as women (drag). Camp may have derived from the gay slang Polari, which borrowed the term from the Italian campare, or from the French term se camper, meaning "to pose in an exaggerated fashion". A similar sense is also found in French theatre in Molière's 1671 play Les Fourberies de Scapin.

Writer Susan Sontag and linguist Paul Baker place the "soundest starting point" for the modern sense of camp, meaning flamboyant, as the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Writer Anthony Burgess theorized it may have emerged from the primary sense of the word, as in a military encampment, where gay men would subtly advertise their sexuality in all-male company through a particular style and affectation.

By 1870, British crossdresser Frederick Park referred to his "campish undertakings" in a letter produced in evidence at his examination before a magistrate at Bow Street, London, on suspicion of illegal homosexual acts; the letter does not make clear what these were. In 1874, the Manchester Courier printed the description of a ticket for a Salford drag ball, called the "Queen of Camp" ball. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definitive use of camp as an adjective in print occurred in the writing of J. R. Ware in 1909. In the UK's pre-liberation gay culture, the term was used as a general description of the aesthetic choices and behavior of working-class gay men. The term camp is still sometimes used in the UK to describe a gay man who is perceived as outwardly garish or eccentric, such as Matt Lucas' character Daffyd Thomas in the English comedy skit show Little Britain.

From the mid-1940s, numerous representations of camp speech or camp talk, as used by gay men, began to appear in print in America, France and the United Kingdom. By the mid-1970s, camp was defined by the college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary as "banality, mediocrity, artifice, [and] ostentation ... so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal".