Introduction

Quentin Crisp dedicated his life, often enough in the face of open and potentially violent opposition, to the public display of his sense of self as a feminine homosexual male. He might be feminine in the kinds of sartorial and possibly sexual tastes he professed, but at least he was no mere hausfrau slaving over the toilet bowl with a brush. Such an understanding would place Crisp's beliefs on dirt in opposition to his camp performativity, an incongruous element in an otherwise faultless display of Crisp elegance. Christian Lassen describes a multi-functionality of dirt in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a film that has become canonical in any discussion of camp. In 1994, Moe Meyer's anthology The Politics and Poetics of Camp, and later, his collection of essays An Archaeology of Posing strongly advocated the reclaiming of camp as a queer practice in post-Stonewall times.