[Camp is] terribly hard to define. You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Laotse's Tao... Once you've done that, you'll find yourself wanting to use the word whenever you discuss aesthetics or philosophy or almost anything.

-Charles Kennedy, in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1952)

A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed... To talk about Camp [is] to betray it.

-Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" (1964)

Why is "camp"—a word which both academic and mainstream media cultural critics feel free to toss around whenever discussing objects or situations whose popularity among hipsters is inexplicable to middlebrow standards of taste (e.g., "cult" movies, "ugly" clothes, "bad" art or music)—apparently so impossible to define? Is it because, as the quotes above suggest, camp is an intuitive, subjective sensibility, and as such can never be adequately defined in the same way that an idea can? Or is it because camp is inextricable from its Victorian origin as the shared set of concealed/flaunted postures (originally from Fr. slang camper, to pose in an exaggerated fashion), gestures, and speech acts of an oppressed queer culture, and as such can never be accessible to unsympathetic outsiders? Or is it because, once Sontag got intellectuals talking about it, they started using it to discuss... everything; to the point where, for instance, the '60s Pop art critic or slumming intellectual who used "camp" to refer to a paradoxical sensibility which simultaneously values and mocks "failed" cultural products couldn't today even communicate with the Gender Studies theorist who uses the same term to refer to the parodic performance method by which drag queens and others subvert the received 'normality' of gender and sexuality? And why does every (yes, every) twentysomething cultural columnist for America's alternative city newsweeklies think it's OK to use "camp" as a synonym for distinct aesthetic categories like "kitsch," "cheese," and even "trash"?

The sensibility question raised by the thinkers quoted above we can dismiss, because although it's certainly impossible ever really to understand and appreciate an alien sensibility, we've been discussing this one for years now. The queer question we can't dismiss, but we can pass over it: It's undeniably true that only through having one's "erotic drive [be] at variance with the fundamental mechanisms through which most of a society's people develop a sense of self" (as Frank Browning puts it) can one get that particular ironic perspective on the social construction of sexuality and identity; and Queer Studies types are absolutely right to resent the way Sontag and others have presented camp as an apolitical, aestheticized, and frivolous sensibility stripped from its context as a concrete means for a particular group to critique dominant modes of normality and simultaneously to produce "social visibility" for themselves. But this reduction of camp to its authentic origins, while a worthy project, leaves behind that aesthetic sensibility which still goes by the name of "camp," and it is this remnant which is precisely what needs to be discussed—because Sontag, et al have never gotten it right!

The problem presented by the various "uses of camp" (cf. Andrew Ross's article of that title) by all sorts of groups and subgroups, is easier: The kind of camp in which we here at Hermenaut are interested requires a very particular irony—one which is philosophically detached but not emotionally disaffected or passive; perhaps humorously trivial but never emptily frivolous. Once this irony is understood, whether you use camp to describe the construction of the self or the construction of a Las Vegas supermarket [see "Learning from Miami," this issue], we'll at least be able to communicate. Yes, the real hurdle to understanding camp lies in our culture's ongoing inability to perceive irony as being anything but an emotionally disengaged, passive, 'lite' reaction to a world gone sour; without a better appreciation of the rich emotional and creative possibilities of irony [see "The Irony Age," this issue], camp will forever be regarded as a clique-ish, "anti-hip" hipsters' put-on—which is not camp, but that which is inferior to camp in even its most degraded form: cheese. So it's with an examination of our pervasive inability, and at times downright unwillingness, to distinguish between camp, kitsch, and cheese that this issue must begin.

A couple of years ago, when The Brady Bunch Movie and Pulp Fiction were vying for popularity among the same demographic, our research team conducted a survey of articles in alternative city newsweeklies (which treat cultural issues more intelligently than do mainstream media sources, supposedly) in which the word "camp" appeared. Unsurprisingly, in their rush to explain what was then being called the "anti-hip" phenomenon, these supposedly with-it writers made a hash of the topic, precisely because of their deep inability to understand the meaning of irony—or camp.

In "Spreading Hip" (LA Weekly), for instance, Arion Berger makes a passing reference to Sontag's theory of camp in order to bolster (what passes for) his argument that "Hipness used to mean irony, which implied self-awareness; it still means irony, but now demands unwittingness. So it is, for example, in music, the knowing icons of hip (Frank Sinatra) gave way to the semiknowing (Tom Jones), who moved aside for the utterly baffled (Tony Bennett)." Now, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the subject would never lump Tom Jones in with Sinatra and Bennett, who are vocalists of a different era and order; and although Jones certainly puts on a more enjoyable show than Bennett, the latter is considered by purists—I'm not one of them!—to be more of a craftsman than Sinatra himself. But Arion's real blunder is to confuse what passes for hipness today with camp. People who enjoy kitsch (cultural products intended to be high quality, but seriously flawed in conception or taste) in a naive, relatively straightforward way may be out of it, but they are still to be sympathized with as fellow human beings who at least have not lost the capacity to feel. People who pretend to enjoy kitsch as part of some lame "anti-hip" put-on are, on the other hand, to be pitied and even despised: Their apparent hipness is nothing but the despair and rage of the emotionally disabled masquerading as coolness; this is cheese, not camp. One more thing, Arion: As the zine h2so4 helpfully pointed out recently, although the cheesy sensibility of anti-hipsters is typically described as "ironic" by youth-culture pundits, it is actually merely sarcastic, which is by no means the same thing.

Now, people who are lucky enough to be able to feel an emotional connection with the music of Tom Jones while simultaneously recognizing that it's not "good" music are practicing camp; theirs is an engaged irony which (as the best definition of camp puts it) allows one a strong feeling of involvement with a situation or object while simultaneously providing one with a comic appreciation of its contradictions. As Sontag puts it, "Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling." Get it now? Camp is a tortured but fabulous drag queen impersonating Dolly Parton out of a sense of identification [see "Leather and Lace: My Closet," this issue]; cheese is a drunken sorority girl in a karaoke bar imitating Dolly out of a sense of satire or contempt. Camp is a difficult-to-attain, possibly enlightened state of being; cheese is a passive, reactive stance which substitutes the art of the put-on for true emotion.

Need more clarification? To his fans Liberace was the epitome of cultured taste, but of course we know he was no such thing. Therefore, although "Liberace" and "campy" are constantly used in the same sentences, Liberace is kitsch. But that's OK, because at least Liberace is way too threatening to be successfully appropriated as cheese. (If, however, Liberace was a sort of cultural guerrilla subverting the dominant order, by the Queer Studies definition we'd have to call him camp [see "Viva Liberace," this issue]). Another non-camp camp idol is John Waters, whose excellent films are actually self-conscious kitsch so extreme ("trash," to use his terminology) that the viewer is not permitted to take a camp attitude towards them—which is also just fine, although it's not recommended that anyone else try to pull this off. The films of Ed Wood, on the other hand, which are a perfect example of—if not failed seriousness, exactly, then at least failed entertainment, really ought to be taken seriously, which is camp [see "I, Robot," this issue]. Last example: In the various queensploitation movies we've seen in the past few years, The Village People and ABBA are always on the soundtrack, but although it's impossible to be emotionally engaged with the Village People (because they've always already been cheese), ABBA are a great example of over-passionate, exaggerated, failed seriousness, and can therefore tap one's deepest emotions in ways that even "successful" art often cannot [see "Nancy &Lee and Sonny&Cher" and "Tiny Tim," this issue]. Having said all this, however, it's important to note that nothing is inherently camp or not-camp; if the drunken sorority girl really does identify with Dolly, or if the Village People actually do bring tears to your eyes, I think that's beautiful.

In the context of her search for an alternative, more "erotic" and playful mode of literary criticism (to oppose the ham-fistedly psychological mode then popular, which saw a phallic symbol in every cigar), Sontag wrote that "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'..." To her credit, Sontag couldn't have anticipated the eagerness of a debased culture to put everything into "air quotes" (as Spy magazine noted a few years ago), in order to stop taking anything seriously. How-ever, it's actually not camp, but cheese which puts everything in air quotes; in camp, a "rose" is always also a rose. The triumph of cheesy crap like Jim Carrey movies and The Pizzicato Five actually makes one long for kitsch, which may demonstrate a deficiency in taste and cultural capital, but (again) at least it's still human - mass-produced Ireland ashtrays and Sacred Heart statues weren't originally manufactured as a joke, after all, and even in these sloppily sentimental forms of nationalistic or religious engagement there is the possibility of transcendence (even if only, as Adorno says of kitsch, because "it sets free for a moment the glittering realization that you have wasted your life") [see "Semi-Precious Moments," this issue].

Other articles on the "anti-hip" phenomenon also fail to recognize the distinction between camp and cheese approaches to kitsch. In his article "Anti-Hip" (Boston Phoenix), Geoff Edgars agrees that to be truly hip one must now be anti-hip, and "pretend to like things that are campy (surf music), horrible (William Shatner's turn at 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds'), nostalgic (Molly Ringwald), square (Karen Carpenter), or ugly (poly-ester)." First of all, Geoff, get it straight: Shatner is campy, Karen Carpenter is horrible (grotesque, to be precise), surf music is nostalgic, polyester is square, and Molly Ringwald (despite Hatebath's protests to the contrary) is ugly. The article goes on to vomit out an array of objects supposedly embraced by the cheesy anti-hip, including Ed Wood, corduroys and turtlenecks, John Travolta, Juan Garcia Esquivel, The Monkees, vinyl records, Jonathan Richman, bad poetry, and unmatched socks. Either this guy is engaged in a put-on himself, or he's a CIA agent spreading disinformation: Either way, pal, get off Newbury Street!

Over in the mainstream media, Jeff Gordinier's "Camping Out" (Entertainment Weekly) uses the examples of Quentin Tarantino, Nick at Nite, Spike Jonze videos, and the other usual suspects (Tom Jones, lounge music, The Brady Bunch Movie, etc.) to claim that, "In the last year or two, the two halves of the entertainment universe have collided, and what's left in the debris is neither cool nor uncool but a mutant offspring of both: kitsch... All of a sudden kitsch defines cool." Jeff, kitsch has been cool for at least 40 years now; the problem is that because it became so popular to prize mass-produced "art" (from paint-by-numbers thrift store paintings to TV-show lunchboxes) in a campy way, mass culture now regularly parodies itself for profit, churning out sub-kitsch with the emotional distance pre-packaged for us (cf. OK soda, Nick at Nite's faux retro commercials, ad nauseam), all subversive parodic possibilities having been entirely neutralized, rendering us ever more shallow and disengaged [see "Model Urban Communities," this issue]. But you guys at EW already know that, right?

Worse than these wannabe H.L. Menckens, who seem to be simply clueless, are those self-appointed spokespersons for their generation who not only actually prefer cheese to camp, but can't seem to admit that camp is even possible. "Cheese started out being sort of mean-spirited, hostile like the hippies were to Middle America. It was a way of mocking the lame sort of conservative, blatantly superficial products of American mass-media culture," reminisces a student at Boston's Berklee School of Music (interviewed by Michiko Kakutani for her ground-breaking 1992 New York Times article "First There Was Camp; Now There's Cheese"). "The problem is," he laments, "people started to take Cheese seriously. They're not saying anymore it's so bad, it's a joke..." Young novelist Glasgow Phillips, writing in Might magazine recently ("Shiny Adidas Track-suits and the Death of Camp"), has a similar complaint: "I'm talking to those of you who claim to enjoy [Spelling television shows] genuinely, that you really, really like them... Burying your head in the sand of Camp sensibility is a logical move for a cultural ostrich, but don't imagine that it's anything else." (The relentlessly sarcastic editors of Might, of course, are responsible for the unreadable book For the Love of Cheese, which takes the savagely tongue-in-cheek tack of urging everybody to "discover your inner cheesiness and rejoice.") Glasgow, when you overheard the Hermenaut staff discussing Spelling shows at that swanky soirée you crashed, you obviously mistook those martini olives in our cheeks for our tongues. By now it should go without saying that the Spelling oeuvre offers its students a dizzying array of meaningful conversational topics; not to mention the fact that his shows are fun to watch [see reviews of Melrose Place paperbacks and Aaron Spelling: A Prime-Time Life, this issue]. Mean-spirited and hostile—yet outwardly lite-hearted—mockery is, apparently, perceived as the only valid mode of swimming in the mass-cultural sea for the kids today; worse, the very idea of camp seems to threaten them somehow.

This deep-seated fear of a sensibility which really can find value in kitsch (instead of just pretending to) could be frowned upon but dismissed, as Kakutani does, by noting that this is a generation that "grew up suspicious of sincerity; wary of making emotional, political, or artistic commitments; and whose cynical, defensive mantra is, 'Hey, I'm cool, you're cool, and we won't endanger our coolness by ever admitting to a genuine emotion or serious ambition.'" We could even allow these people to go on imagining they're being hip although they're just being re-sold all the bad records and shoes which no-one really liked 20 years ago—no skin off our noses. But the bad name that all this is giving to camp can't be allowed to continue. As evidenced in Gareth Cook's article "The Dark Side of Camp" (The Washington Monthly), among others, camp has become the word one reflexively uses to describe that which is the opposite of "serious." According to Cook, "These days... camp's irony and detachment are everywhere, almost to the point where they threaten to squeeze somber, reflective thoughts out of the national conversation... [Camp is] a way of avoiding choices and responsibility." Gareth, if the non-frivolous irony and engaged detachment of camp really were a part of our national conversation, we'd be much better off. The shallow put-on which is cheese is everywhere; the engaged put-on, however, is unfortunately increasingly rare [see "Earnestness Goes to Camp," this issue].

A good illustration of this point, actually, is Neal Karlen's article "Terminal Kitsch," which appeared last year in The New York Times Magazine. Karlen confesses he'd shared with his fiancée "a long-standing love of the campy [he means cheesy] esthetic that recycles the lowest of pop culture—the Brady Bunch, Pop-Tarts, and Wayne Newton—into hipster icons." Recounting how the two of them traveled to Las Vegas to "celebrate our marriage amid the tackiness," he notes that when Newton himself graciously welcomed the newly-weds, something changed: They suddenly felt ashamed of themselves. And a few months later, their cheese marriage broke up. "Hip is not necessarily from the heart," Karlen admits, "One should not mock Las Vegas singers who are nice enough to send Champagne upstairs to honor the marriage of the mockers. And... irony [he means sarcasm] is a terrible companion on Valentine's Day." Karlen's article is helpful, but misguided: Of all the things which can break up a marriage, it's hard to believe it was aesthetics which broke up his.

Maybe if Karlen had admitted this to himself, he would have been on the cutting edge of what we can only call the seriousness backlash against the cheese End Times [see "Apocalypse Already," this issue] that is seemingly well upon us, instead of on the tail end of the twentysomething freelance writer camp gravy train (isn't there a German word for that?). Let's hope that the next generation of hipsters doesn't swing all the way over from the frivolous to the grave; from the light-hearted to the somber; or from the silly to the severe. We've already seen this misguided approach in the writing of Norman Mailer, who wrote in the introduction to his book Existential Errands (1973) that the nudge-nudge, wink-wink variety of Sontag-era camp had sucked everything out of the intellectual "air" except for "gesture, role, costume, supposition, and borrowed manner." By tackling things like heavyweight boxing and bullfights, Mailer hoped to create an air so "livid" that "Camp [would be] stripped of its marks of quotation, and put-ons shrivel." But of course this sort of project is doomed to fail, because a cultivation of seriousness is a defense against cheese, not against camp. (Mailer's saving grace, according to Hamrah, is that in the future his film work, his genre novels, his celebrity profiles, and especially his poetry, will be "read" as camp; clearly, his protests only signal how close to camp he already is.) Although the wishy-washy "irony" of cheese probably is some base form of humor, the engaged irony of camp - while funny - does not exclude seriousness; in fact, engaged irony holds humor and seriousness together in a vital, life-giving tension [see "The Art of Being Uncomfortable," this issue]. One might even classify camp as a species of gravitas, not levitas.

Why don't more people understand the important form of seriousness which is camp? Sontag is at least partly to blame. She writes, for instance, that "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to 'the serious.' One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious." "More precisely" —huh? The second half of her statement accurately describes engaged irony, which is camp [see "Hermenaut of the Month: Oscar Wilde," this issue]; the first half describes disengaged sarcasm, which is cheese; and her mush-mouthed confusion of the two, repeated throughout "Notes on Camp," has helped get us into the mess we're in today. If only Sontag had been able to deal with the paradox set forth by Isherwood a decade earlier ("You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it"), we'd probably be in better shape now.

So what is this seriousness which is not sincere, which is not earnest, which is not even "serious" in the sense of sober, grave, or severe? It's a seriousness which demands a difficult, almost religiously playful yet engaged detachment. According to Philip Core, "Camp is first of all a second childhood." As another camp theorist puts it, camp "does not merely invert the opposition between the trivial and the serious; it posits a stance, detached, calm, and free, from which the opposition as a whole and its attendant terms can be perceived and judged." One comes to see the opposition itself as absurd, this writer goes on to say, "based on a higher and more encompassing sense of absurdity." This higher absurdity [see "Dr. Exstaticus, The Master of Irony," this issue] is what engaged camp is all about. The editors of Motorbooty put it in contemporary terms for us: "Irony is not making fun of Elvis, it's making fun of people who make fun of Elvis." Get it yet?

We need to contemplate the difficult notion of engaged detachment, and vigorously oppose apathetic disaffection masquerading as the same thing, much like Oscar Wilde himself did by having his character Lord Illingworth remark that "People today are so absolutely superficial that they don't understand the philosophy of the superficial." So the next time you're about to reflexively scoff at something you don't understand - whether it's Margaret Keane's Big Eye paintings, Mexican wrestlers, truck drivers, ladies with elaborately decorated fingernails, Green Acres, bowling paraphernalia, the Masons, elevator music, religious candles and medals, or Jerry Lewis—stop... the love you save may be your own. Welcome to Hermenaut #11.

Susan Sontag Reader (Vintage, 1983). For all its flaws, "Notes on Camp" is one of the most important essays in twentieth century criticism, if only because it challenges anyone else who'd like to define a sensibility to match its level of insight and research. She also took Wilde's frivolity seriously, which was helpful for the rest of us. Here's an interesting historical note: Sontag's husband Philip Rieff wrote a great essay, entitled "The Impossible Culture: Wilde as a Modern Prophet," as an introduction to a "radical" collection of Wilde's essays in 1970. After their work, Wilde studies should have become as big an industry as Eliot or Joyce studies, for instance. What happened?

Camp: The Lie That Tells The Truth by Philip Core (Plexus, 1984). Core wrote an exhaustive insider's encyclopedia of camp apparently in the hope that an A-to-Z historical account of a sensibility might collectively add up to a definition. His book is entirely subjective - there's nothing inherently campy, after all, about zebra-striped fabric or the decade of the 1950s - but it's still extremely helpful and informative. Plus, the more than 150 amazing photographs of everyone from the sinister Fatty Arbuckle to Ludwig II (the Swan Prince of Bavaria) definitely make this something worth owning.

Kitsch in Sync: A Consumer's Guide to Bad Taste by Peter Ward (Plexus, 1991). That title: ugh. And it's difficult to trust an author whose publishers describe him as a "schlock guru," isn't it? Worse, Ward is altogether too forgiving of contemporary cheesy attitudes towards kitsch; and he definitely fails to distinguish between cheese, kitsch, and trash at important points. But this coffee-table book does offer an accurate (if brief) history and explanation of the idea, and of course the illustrations of inappropriate uses of high art in the manufacture of souvenirs are great.

The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste by Jane and Michael Stern (HarperPerennial, 1991). Now, this is more like it. Although kitsch aficionados like It's A Wonderful Lifestyle's Candi Strecker resent the Sterns' revealing the secret pleasures of meat snack foods, driftwood souvenirs, and nodding-head dolls to the deep-pocketed suburban hipsters of America, Jane and Michael are to be commended not only for their obsessive attention to the origins and manifestations of things like fuzzy dice and celebrity death cars, but for presenting their findings in a relatively uncritical manner, as is only appropriate for an encyclopedia. This book belongs in your library.

Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality edited by David Bergman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). A collection of all the best scholarly articles ever written about camp, including Jack Babuscio's "Camp and the Gay Sensibility," Bergman's "Strategic Camp: The Art of Gay Rhetoric," Scott Long's "The Loneliness of Camp," Esther Newton's "Role Models" (from her book Mother Camp), Pamela Robertson's "The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me" (about Mae West), and Andrew Ross's "Uses of Camp" needed to happen. But Bergman's introduction makes it clear that he has no idea what ties all of these various uses of camp together, which is too bad, because it makes the collection seem scattered and discontinuous, when it really isn't.

The Politics and Poetics of Camp edited by Moe Meyer (Routledge, 1994). This is an excellent collection of scholarly essays about Camp, not camp—the former being (in Meyer's definition) "a suppressed and denied oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer identities," the latter being the "fossilized remnant" left behind when post-Sontag uses of the term have erased the queer at the moment of appropriating Camp. Meyer takes this tack in part to correct the tendency of those who have stepped forward recently to pronounce camp dead because a) since Stonewall, queer signifying codes have become less and less necessary— perhaps even detrimental, according to those who regard queens as self-hating "Auntie Toms," and b) mainstream consumer culture has pretty much appropriated every last queer signifier by now [see "Is Camp Dead?" in the zine Inquisitor (issue #3)]. By reclaiming the discourse of Camp from straights Meyer hopes to revive it as an effective queer political strategy of subversive parody.

For the Love of Cheese by the editors of Might Magazine (Boulevard, 1996). This collection of nonsensical lists— "evil cheese," "dork cheese," "screen cheese," and so forth—will undoubtedly some day be used by extraterrestrial anthropologists to demonstrate how accurately The Closing of the American Mind described the cultural knowledge of the MTV generation; just read "science cheese," for example, to get a complete picture of how utterly our education system has failed. Other than that, it's utterly worthless. The cheesiest thing about it? To get the book contract, the editors probably had to pretend they really cared about this material. But it just goes to show that the Man only wants to hear this kind of voice from the kids these days...