Camp! Quotes

“Tucker highlights that 'white names and sensibilities are used as lube for the ears and sensibilities of white audiences dying to be penetrated by Black experience'.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering. And so does Garland. She's been through fire and lived - all the drinking and divorcing, all the pills and all the men, all the poundage come and gone - rothers and sisters, she knows.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“I'm not sure what [campy] means, but I guess if my plays have elements of old movies and old-fashioned plays, and I'm this bigger-than-life star lady, that's certainly campy. I guess what I rebelled against was the notion that campy means something is so tacky or bad that it's good, and that I just didn't relate to. - Charles Busch”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“In 1937, [James Laver] wrote that the same costume will be Indecent ten years before its time, Shameless five years before its time, Outre (daring) one year before its time, Smart - (in the present day), Dowdy one year after its time, hideous ten years after its time, Ridiculous twenty years after its time, Charming 70 years after its time, Romantic 100 years after its time, beautiful 150 years after its time.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“Camp ... was weaned on surviving disdain - she's a tenacious old tigress of a discourse well versed in defending her corner. If decades of homophobic pressure had failed to defeat camp, what chance did a mere reorganization of subcultural priorities stand?”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“Blithe Spirit is perhaps the most accessible of Coward's works, and the ending has one of his trademark stings in it - the message being that a normal heterosexual marriage is a fate worse than death.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“As Hafizah Geter writes, 'Camp is a negotiation of horror, grief, and the absurd - it requires allowing yourself he space to look at what else gazing into the abyss calls up in you.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“you thought it meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles they call that camping ... You can call [it] Low Camp ... High Camp is the whole emotional basis for ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art ... High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. 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. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“As Bruce LaBruce puts it, 'Camp is now for the masses. It's a sensibility that has been appropriated by the mainstream, fetishized, commoditized, turned into a commodity fetish and exploited by a hypercapitalist system.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“You don't need to be clad in a towel at the New York Continental Baths watching Bette Midler sing 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' to connect with camp.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World