Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

by W. David Marx

From the nineteenth century onward, gay subcultures have spearheaded the camp sensibility—described by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” including great sympathy for the “old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé.”