Posted on by ericajnelson

Coercive Coming Out

(This article was originally presented at the Foucault Circle in April of 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio at John Carroll University.)

In a chapter from History of Sexuality Foucault asks: “What if sex in our society, on a scale of several centuries, was something that was placed within an unrelenting system of confession?” October 11th has been celebrated as National Coming Out Day in the United States for nearly thirty years beginning in 1988. Every year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people across the country ‘come out’ or as or confess to being gay, transgender, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer, etc. And while some may find it liberating to be able to identify themselves by their sexual attractions, there some who believe that there are problematic elements about this day and about the narrative of ‘coming out’ as a concept which I am inclined to agree with. I believe that ‘coming out’ reinforces the idea that heterosexual and cisgender people are the norm, that ‘coming out’ often puts queer people in danger, and that forming an identity around sexuality is unstable and limiting as well as violating because our sexual experiences are laid out in the open for everyone to know; I will be mainly be using Michel Foucault’s “The Repressive Hypothesis” chapter from The History of Sexuality and James Baldwin’s essay “Here Be Dragons” to support these arguments. I would like to note that throughout this essay, I will be using the word ‘queer’ as a general term to describe non-heterosexual cisgender people.

            There is a fear in our community that those who resist labels and exist without them will not “know our history,” but the fact that labels and identity categories have changed over time and the fact that we still managed to preserve the history of these now outdated taxonomies thanks to queer historians, philosophers, sociologists, and those in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, this fear is unfounded and seems to come from people who have, in fact, forgotten parts of history and are also out of touch with the experiences of queer people in the academy currently. The word ‘homosexual’ does not come into use until the late 19th century[1]. Prior to this, those who experienced same-sex attraction (mainly males) were known as sodomites, and before that there were no names for such people, anyone could engage in sodomy without being labeled by this act. In the words of Foucault, “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy…the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species,” (322-3). Whereas sodomy was simply an act, ‘homosexual’ was an identity, an identity that was shaped around sexual acts, but now those acts had become an integral part of the person performing them; only those people performed sodomy, the people over there. This shift in paradigms (or epistemes in Foucault’s language) occurred in the Victorian Era when psychoanalysis began to rise in popularity (thanks to Sigmund Freud) which lead to homosexuality not only being and identity, but a pathology. Homosexuality in this episteme became a disease, a mental illness, that either had to be fixed or sequestered from ‘normal’[2] population in asylums and hospitals. Later in the Victorian Era, the discourse shifts again from labeling homosexuality an illness to making it a crime (Foucault 312). The point of explaining all of this is to say that homosexuality as an identity is unstable; it has changed over time and will likely continue to change. In Foucault’s words: “we are dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions,” (314), which is to say that even in the Victorian Era alone there was not only one single discourse, one single narrative, on what homosexuality was.

            Our current episteme has constructed two major models for looking at homosexuality: the essentialist model and the constructionist model. And here I am only giving a rough schematic for these models and reserve the issue for how they have been construct for now as I am more concerned with how these models are functioning currently. The essentialist model (which has been taken up more by popular culture), or what I refer to as the “Born This Way” model, insists that there is something within a person from before birth that destines them to be homosexual. This model is what had sparked the search for “the gay gene,” a biological aberration that would mark gay people as fundamentally different than straight people and that, if found, could altered; it is another way of pathologizing homosexuality in way that, if proven true, could root out gay people in prenatal screening and parents could then choose whether or not to have a gay child. The constructionist model (more favored in the academy) insists that homosexuality as an identity is shaped by the discourse surrounding it, which I am more inclined to agree with though there are some problematic elements to this as well, namely that the case for homosexuality being a lifestyle or a choice that could be changed through abusive practices such as conversion therapy is stronger here; but if the goal is to normalize homosexuality and other queer identities than this issue too will be solved in this model. The constructionist model is important (in my opinion) because it does allow for fluidity in sexuality. If there were some biological factor that decided whether or not someone was gay, then that person would only ever be able to identify as such, but when taking into account real human experiences of sexuality, this is often not the case. How people identify can change multiple times within their lifetime and while it could be argued that someone is merely ‘going through a phase’ before they ‘figure out who they really are’ this argument would invalidate that person’s experiences leading up to their current term for identification. For example, if a person identifies as asexual for much of their life, has told people that this what they are, perhaps has even written, spoken, and theorized about their life as an asexual person, then comes to find that are feeling a sexual attraction to someone, was that person ever asexual? Were they perhaps demisexual the whole time? Does that then invalidate all of their prior experiences as an asexual? At the very least, they would lose their authority in discussions of asexuality.

            James Baldwin also has a critique of queer labeling. He writes in “Here Be Dragons” that “once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself,” (68). Essentially, Baldwin believes that labels mostly serve to allow straight people to place queer people in categories that are intelligible to the mainstream heteronormative culture though it may not comprehensively capture the nuances and complexities of an individual’s sexual and romantic tendencies or gender performance. Baldwin also alludes to the trans-historical instability of queer identities when he says, “The condition that is now called gay was then called queer,” (68). This means that the labels that Baldwin used to identify himself likely changed during his lifetime. The implications of this fact are: one – that there may not yet be labels to describe everyone’s sexual desires, and two – perhaps there was once a label that once existed that described someone’s experiences, but longer does. For example, no one is identifying as an invert or sodomite these days, and while ‘queer’ was once a slur (and still is in some contexts), it has largely been reclaimed as an umbrella term for people who are not straight.

            Who ‘comes out of the closet’? Anybody who is not heterosexual or cisgender, essentially (though according to Human Rights Campaign’s official website, people can ‘come out’ as an ally[3]), but why is it that straight people do not ‘come out’ as straight? It is because the sociopolitical culture in the United States (and most everywhere else) is largely hetero- and cisnormative, meaning that these are considered the default gender and sexual expressions and that anything else is ‘Other.’ The phrase “to come out,” as explained by George Chauncey in his book Gay New York, also originated as the moment when gay men would make their debut in society similarly to the way Southern women have “coming out” parties when they make their debut in society as a woman. This version of “coming out” has an entirely different and markedly more positive connotation compared to the current “coming out the closet” that implies that not “coming out” is to be in hiding from oneself and from society. Identifying as gay is a way a displaying one’s sexual proclivities in a way that straight people do not have to. Kristen Stewart of Twilight said of her coming out experience: “In that moment, to make it normal and cool and completely unashamed? It felt really cool.[4]” The fact that her coming out was in a way making her sexuality ‘normal’ is somewhat of a paradox. If her sexuality is ‘normal’ than why ‘come out’ at all? What purpose does it serve to ‘come out’ in that case? The United States is highly heteronormative; thus, people are assumed to be straight by default – straight is the norm. To come out something else is to disrupt the norm, to mark yourself as abnormal, it does not normalize other sexualities. While there are those who are not queer that have attempted to appropriate the language of coming out (atheists, apparently ‘come out’ as well[5], and those who are secretly practicing witchcraft are said to be ‘in the broom closet’[6]) the idea of setting themselves apart from the norm is a similar to the way queer people ‘come out,’ thought it may seem a bit silly and neither atheists nor wiccans experience systemic discrimination the way that queer people do.

Those in the LGBTQA, ETC. spectrum of gender and sexuality are disproportionately targets of violence and discrimination in most (westernized) regions of the world. This has its roots in imperialism and the spread of Abrahamic religions (mainly Christianity) into nations that had otherwise accepted genders outside of the gender binary, such two-spirit Native Americans and the Indian Hijras, and did not classify those who performed homosexual acts as a separate class of persons. The destruction of these practices by Christian colonizers has had long lasting effects on how queer people are treated all over the world. Sudan, for instance, has banned all homosexual activity and will sentence men to death on their third “offence” and women on their fourth[7]. But ‘coming out’ is considered a right of passage for queer people of all ages in the United States and those who do are often called brave for doing so. To call these people brave for ‘coming out’ implies that there is an inherent risk in assigning oneself a label under the queer umbrella and sharing it with the world, but despite this, there is immense pressure to ‘come out’ in ‘liberal’ spaces in the United States, such as in popular culture and in the academy (mainly in the humanities).  In popular culture, there are many celebrities with famous ‘coming out stories’ like Ellen DeGeneres, Ellen Page, Frank Ocean, and Neil Patrick Harris; and these celebrities often encourage others to do the same, but they do not seem to realize that their money and status provides them with some protection from discrimination and physical harm that laygays[8] do not usually have. Often, in more conservative and rural areas, coming out is not an option. According to a 2014 Rolling Stone article, Mississippi:

“orchestrated a fake decoy prom to keep a lesbian couple from attending and another banned a female student’s yearbook photo when she was pictured wearing a tuxedo. In April, Mississippi passed a “religious freedom” law that would allow businesses to deny service to LGBT couples.”

And in Texas, then Governor Rick Perry: “compared homosexuality to alcoholism: ‘I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.’ And as for Michigan “the state has a disproportionately high hate crime rate, with one survey ranking Michigan as high as second in the nation. These incidents largely target transgender women of color.”[9] To ‘come out’ in these areas is put oneself in danger, potentially risking one’s life.

            But the narrative in Hollywood is that coming out is liberating and truthful and validates one’s experiences as a queer person. From actor Matt Bomer on his ‘coming out’ experience “I thought, ‘If this person can live their truth, what am I doing?’” To actor Elliot Page: “I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission. I suffered for years because I was scared to be out. My spirit suffered, my mental health suffered and my relationships suffered. And I’m standing here today, with all of you, on the other side of all that pain.” [10]

The problem with stories like these is that they assume that the suffering ends when one puts their sexuality on display for the world and by deciding to keep their sexuality to themselves, they are somehow lying to everyone. This narrative implies that one owes it to the outside world and to themselves to ‘come out,’ and that, for some reason, other people (including total strangers) have a right to know who everyone else is or is not attracted to and/or what their genitals may look like, in the case of trans and intersex people.

            Baldwin speaks of a very different experience when he writes, “The fear of the world was bearable until it entered the bedroom” (685). ‘Coming out’ has become a way of inviting the world into one’s bedroom, so to speak. Often, the abjection that most homophobic people have to gay people is how they imagine gay people have sex. In this way, gay men are seen as the embodiment of anal sex, while lesbians seem to confuse people – the logistics of sex between two women is a mystery to Straight™[11]people. When one ‘comes out’ as gay, they are essentially sharing their sexual and romantic desires to other people, but no one seems to wonder why this information is the concern of anyone but themselves and their potential partner. In other words, when labeling themselves as, for example, bisexual, this is indication that they have a sexual interest in two or more genders; they lose the privacy of the sexual life that people who do not label themselves are afforded. By forming an identity around sexuality, one becomes something of a lowkey exhibitionist.

            Some theorists such as Mari Ruti have asked why queer people would want to be normal because the ‘normal’ has historically been oppressive to us. The answer to this is a simple one: we want people to stop killing us. As I have mentioned before, queer people are disproportionately vulnerable to the systematic and random violence that Iris Marion Young in “The Five Faces of Oppression” in a way that those who are ‘normal’ i.e. straight, are not. According to an article in “USA Today” 2016 was one of the deadliest years for LGBTQ people in the United States. The study they cite by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) says that hate killing had risen 17% and had over 1,000 cases of hate-related violence and this does not include the 49 people who were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting[12]. Apparently, 2017 was even worse. By September of last year, more queer people had already been victims of hate crimes than all of 2016[13]. This type of violence only occurs with people who are marginalized, which means people who are excluded from ‘the norm’. Without forming an identity around our sexuality, we (as queer people) would not stand out as an ‘Other’ and thus would not be targeted for our sexuality. This is not to say that this is our fault. Often we are labelled as ‘Others’ by the mainstream heteronormative culture who try to police our various form of sexual expression through socialization and legislation, but this is exactly why we must resist these labels. We should not let other people both on the right and left define us to suit some political or personal purpose that only puts us in danger. In short, we need to normalize ourselves as a means of protection. This is not saying that we need to ‘go back in the closet’ it is saying that there should be no closet to be in or come out of to begin with.

          Ruti also claims that there some queer theorists who are advocating for queer people to be negative and that by doing this they are being subversive to the ‘cult of positivity,’ that America is perpetuating (2). I do not argue that America is obsessed with false happiness and does not cover over negative feeling. I do argue, however, that American queers were never allowed to part of this aspect of American culture and that queer negativity is in no way subversive; it feeds directly into the mainstream narrative that queers can only ever be unhappy. Sara Ahmed explains this well in her book The Promise of Happiness:

“[Spring Fire] will be published, but only on condition that it does not have a happy ending, as such an ending would ‘make homosexuality attractive.’ Queer fiction in this period could not give happiness to its characters as queers; such a gift would be readable as making queers appear ‘good’…Somewhat ironically, then, the unhappy ending becomes a political gift: it provides a means through which queer fiction could be published,” (88).

Painting queer people as unhappy has always been a means of othering them. It is feeding in to the Straight™ culture’s idea that not only are queers unhappy, they are unhappy because they are queers and being queer is being unhappy because it is ‘nonnormative’. Perpetuating this idea of the queer negativity is only further alienating us into a space of higher vulnerability; when we marginalize ourselves, we are only making it easier to be oppressed and harmed. If we stop labelling ourselves as an ‘other’, if we stop ‘coming out’ we can have to chance to be happy or unhappy without it being implicitly tied to our identities.

            In conclusion, I am highly skeptical of the ‘coming out’ narrative that has been perpetuated in the liberal areas of American culture because these labels historically and culturally unstable (as Foucault and Baldwin would agree), that it makes queer people more vulnerable to violence and oppression, it reinforces the idea that heterosexuals and cisgenders are ‘the norm’ and that every sexual and gender experience and expression outside of these are ‘Other’, and by labeling ourselves by our sexual desires we are inviting the world into our bedroom in a way that straight people do not. The ‘coming out’ narrative as part of a person’s larger experiences as queer ultimately does more harm that good and coerces people to ‘come out’ even when it may not be safe or necessary to do so and makes queer people feel like they are lying or being untrue to themselves in some way by not telling everyone they know who they want (or do not want) to have sex with.

Works Cited:

  • Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.
  • Baldwin, James. The Price of the ticket: collected nonfiction 1948-1985. St. Martins-Marek, 1985.
  • Chauncey, George, et al. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. BasicBooks, 1994.
  • Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books, 1984.
  • Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out. Columbia University Press, 2017.

[1] Pickett, Brent. “Homosexuality.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 6 Aug. 2002, plato.stanford.edu/entries/homosexuality/.

[2] I use the word ‘normal’ here rather than heterosexual because heterosexual does not become an identity until the very end of the 19th century in 1892 and was not widely used until the 1960s.

“Heterosexual.” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/word/heterosexual.

[3] “National Coming Out Day.” Human Rights Campaign, HRC, http://www.hrc.org/resources/national-coming-out-day.

[4] Sheppard, Ciara. “14 Awesome, Funny & Inspiring Celebrity Coming out Stories.” Glamour, Glamour UK, 7 July 2017, http://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/gallery/celebrity-coming-out-stories.

[5] Berry, Robby. “Why Come Out As An Atheist?” Infidels.org, The Secular Web, infidels.org/library/modern/robby_berry/ycomeout.html.

[6] Psyche. “Stepping out of the Broom Closet: Coming out as Wiccan or Pagan.” Spiral Nature Magazine, 12 July 2015, http://www.spiralnature.com/spirituality/steppingout/.

[7] Carrol, Aengus. “STATE-SPONSORED HOMOPHOBIA: A WORLD SURVEY OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION LAWS: CRIMINALISATION, PROTECTION AND RECOGNITION.” Ilga.org, Oct. 2016, ilga.org/downloads/02_ILGA_State_Sponsored_Homophobia_2016_ENG_WEB_150516.pdf.

[8] That is, those of us who middle class and lower, who nobody would defend or miss very much if something were to happen to us.

[9] Lang, Nico. “The 5 Worst States for LGBT People.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 24 Nov. 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-5-worst-states-for-lgbt-people-20141124.

[10] Sheppard, Ciara. “14 Awesome, Funny & Inspiring Celebrity Coming out Stories.” Glamour, Glamour UK, 7 July 2017, http://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/gallery/celebrity-coming-out-stories.

[11] Here, I am referring to a specific subset of straight people: a very stereotypical straight person who is ignorant of most aspects of Queer Culture and Theory who, if they ask questions at all, often ask for intimate details on the sexual lives of queer folks; these same straight people also have a habit of asking trans and intersex people about their genitalia.

[12] Dastagir, Alia E. “2016 Was the Deadliest Year on Record for the LGBTQ Community.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 12 June 2017, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/06/12/2016-deadliest-year-lgbtq-pulse/373840001/.

[13] Perraudeau, Mélissa. “More LGBT Folks Have Been Killed In 2017 Than In All Of Last Year.” Konbini United States, 14 Aug. 2017, http://www.konbini.com/us/lifestyle/lgbt-murders-increase-2017-compared-2016/.

Posted on by ericajnelson

A Response to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”

In her almost aphoristic list of points attempting (superficially) to describe Camp sensibilities in the essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” from her larger collection of essays Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag does not spend much time fleshing out her assertions and the lack of explanation for some of her points leave a lot to be desired as a theoretical description of Camp. For instance, Sontag ends her second note by saying that Camp is apolitical and does not explain why (277); I also think assertion is false (as my examples of Camp will hopefully show), but it difficult to argue against points like these because they are not contextualized or explained. However, Sontag does spend a great deal of her attention on the insistence that works of Camp can (and ought to be) divided into categories of Naïve and Deliberate Camp. But I do not believe this approach is pragmatic. To prove a person’s intention when creating works that are considered Camp is difficult; there is no real evidence to determine Naïve from Deliberate Camp other than a creator’s word. But even if one could prove innocent intent (which I will argue is not reasonably possible), pleading or assuming “innocence” itself is fraught, especially when harm has been done. To explore the particular problems of presuming innocence, I will use Elizabeth Wolstag’s aptly titled essay “Innocence.” Under the assumption that real Camp by definition is innocent, it is easy to let creators of problematic and hurtful works refuse responsibility and criticism for unintentional misdeeds under the guise of naïveté. For these reasons, I believe it is better to look at Camp through the lens of Foucauldian parrhesia as he describes it in his lecture series: The Courage of Truth, that is, as a mode of unrestrained truth-telling that involves a level of risk; a mode similar to the Cynical style that took social conventions to their logical extremes to make its point. Sontag alludes to this aspect of Camp throughout her notes when she argues that “[Camp] only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless cynicism, but a sweet cynicism)” (291), but this insistence that Camp is not cynicism relies on a misunderstanding and underappreciation for what real Cynicism is. Looking at Camp as an act of parrhesia helps to explain this “sweet cynicism” of Camp and to show exactly how this idea works in Camp, I will mainly be looking at two classically camp films: Pink Flamingos (1972) and The Birdcage (1996).

In her division of Camp into Naïve and Deliberate factions, Sontag seems to favor Naïve Camp on the assumption that it is in some way more authentic when she says that “probably, intending to be campy is always harmful,” (282) and “Camp rests on innocence,” (283).  To these assertions, I would respond with a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, he says: “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” (5-6). By “innocence” here, both Sontag and Baldwin mean the lack of malicious intentions behind an act, not in the legal sense referring to whether or not someone has committed a crime. But how does one determine someone else’s intentions? And to what ends exactly? The only way is to ask them and hope they are telling the truth. Otherwise, if one suspects that another person is lying about his intent, the conversation becomes a back and forth exchange of “nuh-uh”s and “uh-huh”s without any definitive resolution. One would literally have to be able to get inside the other’s mind which, to my knowledge, is still not yet possible. This also implies that any acts of deliberate Camp would have be excluded from the Camp canon, but this has not been the case for such Camp films as Pink Flamingos which the writer, director, and producer of said film, John Waters, called in a recent Vanity Fair interview “a terrorist act against the tyranny of good taste,”(Liebenson). Waters is implying here that Pink Flamingos was written to upset conventions of taste, which the film does through exaggerations of sexuality, femininity, and what it means to be “filthy,” or rather, what it means to be the filthiest person alive.

Probably, Sontag thinks innocent Camp seems more authentic because it is done seemingly without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness does not take away from authenticity, it adds to it. It is a common experience to be surprised by one’s own actions and one learns more about oneself when reflecting on these moments. When one is offended, confused, and ashamed by oneself that person learns the limits of what behaviors they can accept about themselves and (more often than not) will attempt to change accordingly. It is only “the intensity of such self-accusation [that] shows the importance of being conscious of oneself and one’s vulnerabilities when one undertakes to do something,” (Wolgast 303). This self-reflection actually leads one to become a more authentic self. Therefore, if one wants authenticity from Camp, it is not found in innocence, but in the knowledge of the world a piece of Camp is created in and the self-knowledge of the person creating it.

Aside from that, “innocence” is often used a shield by those accused of malintent; their “innocence” absolves them of any responsibility for their actions and insulation from the reality that their actions have consequences. In a genre that defines itself on exaggeration, the danger of stereotyping and minstrelsy in Camp is an easy hole to fall into and presuming innocence when these things happen allows producers of such content to continue creating such material uncritically without any actual evidence or proof of innocence. To presume naivete, that a person who has offended simply did not know any better or has accidently done harm without malice, often “generally means exemption from moral criticism” (Wolgast 297). However, innocence is not inherently a good thing. When it comes to examining intentions through an ethical lens, innocence implies a lack of knowledge between “right” and “wrong”: the “innocent” is only that because he or she did not know what they were doing was “wrong.” Not only does innocence imply this lack of knowledge, it also allows this ignorance to continue. When one hides oneself behind innocence with phrases like “it was just a joke” or “I’m sorry if you’re offended,” he prevents himself from learning (and caring about) whether or not their actions were right and about the experiences of those people he has hurt, “what he is missing is not only self-understanding, but an understanding of those whose world is more complicated,” (Wolgast 304). He removes the responsibility from himself not only to do better, but also to know better. And to know better one must experience errors, but “it is that experience that innocents lack,” (Wolgast 305). He must know when he has erred and must want to know it to really learn from these lapses in ethical behavior.

It may seem pointless or not in the spirit of Camp to make such moralizing judgements about it, but this is yet another reason why it is important to drop “pure” intention as a criterion for Camp. When one questions another’s motives, the aim is usually to make a moral or ethical judgment about whether that person is “innocent” or “guilty” in their actions and if they can be absolved from the consequences thereof because “innocence” implies moral purity. Thus, there is always an impulse to vindicate or vilify someone and/or their actions when one presumes to know that person’s intentions. As Wolgast explains:

“if we want to view actions with their full moral import, we cannot view them as if done

by an impersonal x, from reasons a and b, with motive m… [it] will give a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional reality, caricature which cannot helpfully represent what needs to be understood,” (303).

But in a genre like Camp that is largely reliant on caricatures of reality, to moralize it does seem to be self-defeating and an attempt create something like “ethical Camp” to meet this kind of analysis would take away any possibility for innocence because it requires an understanding what is “right.” Innocence, in this sense seems to lie outside of the moral world but is still somehow able to keep its relationship to goodness. It is this paradox that makes intention a non-question in categorizing works as “Pure camp” (Sontag 283). Instead, I believe it is important to analyze how Camp operates rather than why.

What distinguishes Camp works from those that are simply “bad,” is that Camp employs a parrhesiastic modality akin to Cynicism as outlined by Michel Foucault in his lectures The Courage of Truth. To play the “parrhesiastic game,” (12) as Foucault calls it, there are three necessary elements: the courage to tell the truth, taking a risk by telling the whole truth, and an audience’s courage to accept a potentially hurtful truth (Foucault 13). But the rules on how these elements manifest in practice are not strict; like Camp style, parrhesia is a vague and fluid modality which Foucault says, “we should not think of as a sort of well-defined technique,” (Foucault 14). Like Camp, parrhesia is closer to what Sontag calls “a sensibility” (275) rather than a rhetorical style or specific genre of storytelling.

Defining Camp as a sensibility implies that Camp is more of a natural inclination rather than only an occasional act and performance. This is perhaps why some of the best performances of Camp tend to come from apparently campy people like John Waters, Cher, Andy Warhol, character actors like Divine. It is this correlation that likely leads to the impulse to analyze Camp in terms of authenticity and innocence. But I do not believe that people who appear to be “authentically” campy are necessarily innocent in the sense that their art is totally without knowledge or self-consciousness, rather they appear to others as more authentically campy because they practice more. They hone their camp sensibilities by practicing Camp more often than others, either for work or fun or both, so that Camp becomes a kind of truth-telling for them. The best Camp is then, like most other skilled performances, produced after much practice and experience— through practicing Camp as of a way of life.

Camp as a modality of life also draws a further connection with Cynicism. It important to note here that, despite the popular understanding, Cynicism is not merely pessimism or derision. To explain what I mean by Cynicism and how it further relates to Camp and parrhesia, I will turn to Foucault’s definition also found in The Courage of Truth:

“It seems to me that in Cynicism, in Cynic practice, the requirement of an extremely distinctive form of life… is strongly connected to the principle of truth-telling, of truth-telling without shame or fear, of unrestricted and courageous truth-telling, of truth-telling which pushes its courage and boldness to the point that it becomes intolerable insolence,” (165).

To call Camp a type of truth-telling is sticky because one of the few well-defined features of Camp is its inclination towards exaggeration, but I do not believe that exaggeration is necessarily untruth. Rather the particular types of exaggeration presented in Camp -those of gender, sexual, and sartorial expression- are more like an over directness or frankness about the object of exaggeration.  Cynicism also relies on exaggerations of social norms to show how ridiculous and irrational many of them are. Foucault briefly alludes to an anecdote in which the Cynic Diogenes, who was arguably a Campy figure himself, puts this type of truth-telling into practice:

“There is Diogenes’ famous gesture, recounted so frequently in Antiquity, of masturbating in public and saying: But why are you so scandalized, since masturbation satisfies a need, just as eating does. I eat in public, so why should I not satisfy this need also in public?” (171).

Foucault refers to Cynicism of this type as a “broken mirror” because it is “the reflection of what it is and should be, and of what [one] is and would like to be,” (232). Cynicism reveals hidden parts of the world in way that does not simply reflect it exactly. This imperfect reflection is also present in Camp, but rather than a broken mirror, Camp is more like a funhouse mirror. It exaggerates certain aspects of culture and society sometimes to the point ugliness and grotesquery, but it does not show anything that is not there, but rather chooses to magnify aspects that already exist. Diogenes, here, is subverting the norms around which needs can be satisfied in public by an exaggerated performance of his own sexuality. Similarly, in the John Waters film Pink Flamingos (1972) there are several sexual and bodily boundaries that are crossed in extremely disturbing performances that are designed to subvert sexual norms. I will not get into the details of what those acts were, but I will say, for the sake of grounding this assertion, that one of them involved incest and another, a live chicken. These acts are revolting to most people, but it forces the audience to reevaluate the puritanical values of the mainstream culture. Through this reevaluation, the audience learns some new about themselves; the limits of what sexual acts they can accept, and which will send them screaming and running from the theater.

            To turn to a somewhat more wholesome example of Camp as a method of truth-telling, the 1996 film The Birdcage uses exaggerations of femininity and traditional gender roles to reveal underlying assumptions about what constitutes a “normal” American family. The movie juxtaposes the Goldman’s, Armand and Albert, two gay men who live above a drag club called The Birdcage which the somewhat campy Armand owns, and the very campy Albert performs in, with the Keeleys, Kevin and Louise, two hyper-conservative Republicans whose patriarch is a senator that founded the “Coalition of Moral Order.” For most of the film, The Goldmans are hiding their queerness (reluctantly and which great difficulty in Albert’s case) from the Keeleys and posing as a nuclear family for the sake of Armand’s son, Val, who is engaged to their daughter, Barbara, but when Val’s biological mother, Katherine, gets stuck in traffic and cannot perform her role as mother, Armand’s partner, Albert, steps in. In full drag, he is able to convince that Keeley’s that he is Val’s mother, earning glowing compliments from Senator Keeley. At least until the real Katherine shows up. When the ruse has been uncovered, Senator Keeley is confused and upset and goes to make a quick exit with Louise and Barbara. After Barbara sadly tells the Goldman’s that she would have loved to be part of their family, Kevin opens the door to reporters waiting to catch Senator Keeley coming out of The Birdcage. Unable to leave, the Keeleys sit with the Goldmans and try to figure out how to leave unseen. Albert suggests disguising them as drag performers who are part of that night’s act to which they have no choice but to agree. As the Keeleys dance their way through the club (to the tune of “We Are Family”) with Senator Keeley looking like “Betty White on steroids” or “Bea Arthur on a bad day” according Armand’s actor Robin Williams (Interview 1996), they are able to leave unrecognized with Goldman’s (both Albert and Armand in now suits) escorting them.

The most blatant moment of parrhesia is the scene where Val is literally compelled to “tell the whole truth, hiding nothing of the truth, telling the truth without hiding it behind everything,” (Foucault 10) in regards to his family:

               Senator Keeley: How many mothers does he have?
               Val: Just one. [Putting a hand on Albert’s shoulder] This is my mother.

   My father owns the club downstairs. My mother is the star. We lied to you, Barbara     and I. And everyone lied for us. These are my parents.

               Armand: This is my wife. [Gesturing to Albert]

               This is the lady who had Val. [Gesturing to Katherine]

               (The Birdcage 1996).

The deconstruction of the nuclear family is one of the most prominent themes throughout the film (the opening scene is tour of The Birdcage is also set to the tune of drag queens performing “We are Family”). The nuclear family as an ideal and an American value is shown to be merely traditional social construct, but what constitutes “family” can, in reality, take many different forms. Later, even before Albert is performing motherhood for the Keeley’s he is extremely protective and maternal towards Val, expressing deep concern about his engagement and cries over a family photo album, lamenting how quickly Val has grown up. Katherine, Val’s biological mother confesses that she has been absent for most of his life because she is not very maternal (while popping champagne bottle between her legs) and Armand assures her that he and Albert are both maternal.

 It is only when Armand tries to force everyone to imitate the more traditional gender roles akin to the Keeley’s, that his performance—as well as Val’s and their houseboy’s—seems artificial and stiff. This plays off the Keeley’s apparent taste for the artificial, made apparent by the Senator’s avid lust for candy going so far as to eat some out of a trashcan; both Kevin and Louise have difficulty seeing through the performance, even though it is obviously failing.  It is only Albert, in his performance as Mrs. Coleman (changed from Goldman to hide Armand’s Jewishness as well), that Senator Keeley admires. Albert is used to performing in drag and is so over the top even off the stage that he is far more comfortable than the others and is able to purport conservative ideas about abortion and the military that he does not believe by exaggerating those as well. As Val says: “Excuse me. I assure you…Mother is just following a train of thought to a logical…yet absurd, conclusion,” (The Birdcage 1996) which precisely how Cynicism (as a form of parrhesia) operates. Albert is actually pointing to the truth of the absurd political beliefs that Senator Keeley wholly supports and the hypocrisy of his morality, but he is only able to do this successfully through Camp. This performance also reveals something of her husband to Louise after he begins defending Mrs. Coleman and criticizing Armand for the way he seems to be treating her. Louise says: “I’ve never really seen you before. I don’t even know who you are!” (The Birdcage 1996). Thus, it is seeing the Camp performance of a “normal” and “moral” family by the Goldman’s that causes Louise begins to see through the artifice of her own relationship to her husband and the traditional conservative values that they had, until this moment, shared. It is also only after the Keeleys do drag themselves that they are able to connect to the Goldmans and finally agree to let Val and Barbara get married.

            Both Pink Flamingos and The Birdcage are trying to break through the artifice of morality and conservatism (both political and personal) through camp performances the distort these values to their logical extremes. Thus, these films tell the audience truths about their personal values and societal norms and the inconsistencies therein.

            Referring back to Foucault’s definition of Cynicism, that it must be done without fear or shame, I would argue that Camp must also be done this way; that there is no room for fear and shame in Camp. Sontag alludes to this point when she is discussing “failed” Camp, she says “When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish,” (283). Foucault also says that, in parrhesia, “the subject must be taking some kind of risk [in speaking] this truth,” (11). So, fearlessness in Camp also comes with risk. “Risk” for the Parrhesiast can be anything from jeopardizing a relationship with someone by offending to literally risking one’s life. Because of Camp’s ties to queerness (specifically gay men), it seems fairly obvious how a campy person may be at risk of violence and homophobia at the very least, but as I mentioned before, Camp often runs the risk of offending people in various ways and in itself can be harmful.

            There is not a single scene in Pink Flamingos where either the actors nor characters exhibit any outward signs of shame. In a movie where the protagonist declares herself “The Filthiest Person Alive” and competes with another couple who want to be the filthiest people alive, shame is not even a possibility. To clarify, to do something without shame is not to do something with self-awareness, it is do something totally aware, but without fear of how it will be perceived. The film revels in its own shamelessness, the characters smiling and laughing their way through moments obscenity such as when Divine, as Babs Johnson, hides a piece of meat between her legs to steal it or another scene involving Divine, as herself, and (real) coprophagy. The shamelessness continued even after the film’s release, John Waters was so delighted by criticism and revulsion to such scenes that, instead cutting them, he began handing out Pink Flamingos brand barf-bags (Konow 97). Of course, this shamelessness was met with backlash. It was banned in some countries, censored in others, and earned Waters nicknames like “the pope of trash” from William S. Burroughs (Katz 2010), but the film still managed to sell-out multiple weeks and has embedded itself culturally as a cult classic. Both risk and shamelessness pay off in for the film.

            The Birdcage deals with shame and risk as themes in the, but their presence often leads to a failure of performance (for the characters, not the actors). It is the overarching fear of being discovered by the Keeleys that makes Armand’s performance as a straight man so profoundly unconvincing. But Albert’s performance is totally shameless, he relishes in the character of Mrs. Coleman and derives great satisfaction when he is able to convince Senator Keeley that he is Val’s mother. Alberts performance has a risk too, he is convincing for the most part, but there is always the chance that he and the rest of the family will be found out and having taken up this role is what leads to the confusion when Katherine arrives. Also, referring to scene described earlier when Val confesses the truth, he is speaking without shame, proud to call Armand and Albert his parents and proud of who they are, but by confessing in this way, he risks losing Barbara (which he very nearly does).

            In short, both Pink Flamingos and The Birdcage move beyond shame to give successful performances and while there is a risk to this shamelessness, the performance cannot work without it. With Camp especially, the shamelessness seems to come from a place of fun and celebration. It is this element that makes Camp its own type of parrhesia and why I specifically argue that Camp is only similar to Cynicism and not exactly the same. Camp, to me, appears to be a type of parrhesia with an added element of fun or joyous delivery, “a mode or enjoyment” as Sontag calls it — a “sweet cynicism” (Sontag 291).

            The third part of Foucault’s definition of Cynicism, and the final point I will make, is his point that cynicism, because it taken to such shameless extreme, that it becomes “intolerable insolence,” (165). Camp often brings behaviors, fashions, and attitudes that are dismissed by the mainstream because they are “intolerable” to the forefront; as Sontag explains, “[Camp] offer[s] for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards” (286). Camp is Camp precisely because it is not the norm or mainstream, rather, it subverts these categories and throws them back on themselves; it brazenly holds up that funhouse mirror to upset the norms on those who adhere to them.  It is this type of insolence which largely constitute the “risk” in Camp and the particular type of unrestrained and exaggerated truth-telling is what makes Camp so “intolerable.”  Even Sontag admits that “[she is] strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it,” (276).

            This kind of “intolerable insolence” is readily apparent in Pink Flamingos. Aside from the above mentioned scenes, the film also displays act of incest, sexual violence, exhibitionism, and voyeurism; things that mainstream society would find intolerable (and with good reason). Audiences were indeed nauseated, disturbed, and horrified by what they were seeing on screen and indeed other films like Caligula (1979) and Showgirls (1995) who have tried to capitalize the kind of sexual “filth” in Pink Flamingos and achieve a similar cult following were too intolerable and failed miserably. I believe this largely because: 1. No other film has ever been able to achieve that level of filth and 2. More importantly, because Pink Flamingos does not romanticize these acts in order to be shocking. The film knows that these acts are normally intolerable and frames them that way; all of these acts contribute to each character’s “filthiness.” By naming these acts as “filth,” Pink Flamingos is able to tell the filthy truth about them while still using them for its insolent purposes of unsettling norms. The film does not advocate any of these things necessarily, it more so brings things that do actually happen but are not often spoken of and enlarges it to the point where it must be confronted one way or another.

            The kind of “intolerable insolence” in The Birdcage is less conspicuous, but still present. It is campiness of the Albert and much of the settings that both intolerable and insolent within the context to film and these things that must be hidden away in order to for the Goldmans to seem acceptable. Albert mannerisms and gestures allow him to take up a lot of space and as drag star and gay man, to take up space in this way is insolent because he belongs to two subcultures that were largely invisible to the mainstream until recently. Thus being visible as a highly feminine gay man would very likely be intolerable to the conservative Keeleys; especially considering Albert’s defiant dramatics and flamboyance annoy even Armand at times. Such as when Albert walks in on Katherine (to whom they had gone to ask for help with their ruse) drunk and touching Armand’s chest. He takes the car and drives home (badly) and arrived after Armand who took the bus and says that he only came home to get his toothbrush and then he was leaving. When Armand asks where he was going, he replies

Albert: To Los Copa.

Armand: There isn’t anything in Los Copa but a cemetery.

Albert: I know. That’s why I’m packing light.

Armand: I see. You’re going to the cemetery with your toothbrush. How Egyptian.

Albert: Good-bye, Armand.

(The Birdcage 1996).

Albert’s theatrics make his threat appear empty, but the point here is to make his distress known to and to upset Armand, which it does because Armand does chase after him when Albert leaves. But Armand can mostly tolerate this sort behavior because he lives in the same subculture that Albert does and is used to theatrics (an indeed performs some himself). The antics would not be permissible to a more conservative family and so they must be hidden away along with “happy objects” as Sara Ahmed would call them in her book The Promise of Happiness: Armand’s many statues of naked men, his painting of a man in a dress with a rose and, ideally, the Grecian bowls that depict men having sex with each other that find their way to the dinner table anyway; they are objects that display “queer intimacy [which] leave an impression on the walls…these objects betray their secret,” (109). But as insolent things and people are wont to do, they make themselves apparent despite these attempts to hide them. Albert, against Armand and Val’s wishes, dons his Mrs. Coleman garb and seats himself at the dinner table eating soup out said Grecian dishes. Later, when the charade is over and the Goldmans are all made visible as they really are, the Keeleys are unable to tolerate it until they have no choice.

            The film itself had come out shortly after the apex of the AIDS crisis which had heightened conservative beliefs that gay people were immoral and sick, and much of the queer produced media at the time centered on the crisis and a somber political call to action. But The Birdcage changed the tone of the conversation by upsetting this “unhappy queer” (Ahmed 88) narrative. The humor and fun of its characters defied the idea that gay equals depravity and perversion and, unlike most other queer films and books at the time, none of them had to die (Ahmed 88). The queer subjects and objects are not the only insolent pieces of the film either, many conservative members of the audience could have seen a version of themselves in Senator Keeley, but he is framed as profoundly oblivious and hypocritical that to acknowledge shared beliefs with that character would be likely be seen as more intolerable that identifying with the Albert or Armand. The films insolence lies equally in making happy gay men visible both within the context of the film and without, as well mocking the hyper-conservative political aura surrounding gay-related issues of the time without fear or shame.

            In conclusion, the theoretical framework suggested by Susan Sontag can be useful in understand some aspects of Camp, but it is not developed enough to be the definitive reference for defining Camp her section on Naïve Camp vs. Deliberate Camp—Camp that rests on innocence, is not pragmatic in analyzing Camp because it is not possible to truly know another’s intentions and the notion “innocence” can be used, rather insidiously, to excuse certain acts of Camp that do cause harm. I believe rather, that Camp is better analyzed as mode of parrhesia, as defined by Foucault, because it fulfills the requirements for parrhesia in style similar to Cynicism, but differs largely through its more playful tone. 

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