ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, Susan Sontag published her famous “Notes on Camp” and dedicated them to Oscar Wilde. Aside from a few passing comments about Wilde within the essay, there is no explanation of the dedication, as if to imply that the link between Wilde and Camp should go without saying. Since that time, Wilde’s almost mythical status as the origin of modern gay Camp has been constantly reinscribed. Michael Bronski, for example, in his wonderful act of guerrilla scholarship, Culture Clash, honors Wilde as “perhaps the most important figure in the history of gay sensibility” (58), and associates him with several cultural trends leading to modern gay male political Camp. Stephen Gee’s history of gay activism suggests both Camp and Wilde as models of how to read moments of gay resistance hidden in history: “gayness might be suggested by the use of Camp as in Oscar Wilde, or in the dark fatalistic metaphors of horror films” (203). Jack Babuscio’s pioneering examination of cinematic Camp exhibits Wilde as an example of what is termed the aesthetic mode of Camp (42). Eve Sedgwick has placed Wilde squarely amidst “the intersections of sexual definition with relatively new problematics of kitsch, of camp, and of nationalist and imperialist definition” (132). At the same time that Wilde has been increasingly written into the history of Camp, Camp has been increasingly written into the history of gay male politics. While contending that much gay male politics simply imitates dominant orders, Gregg Blachford’s early theoretical address of the problem also suggests that
the processes at work in the subculture are more complicated than might appear at first glance, for there is some evidence that the gay subculture negotiates an oppositional challenge to some aspects of the dominant order. The best way to understand this innovatory style is to examine one phenomenon of the gay subculture-camp-and to show how it transforms conformity into a challenge.
