Wayne Koestenbaum’s Seriously Campy, Anti-Dandy, Big Gay Collection of Essays

The virtuoso of queer theory’s rhetorically playful and nuanced prose on AIDS, Lana Turner, and the ‘imminence of nothingness’

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

In her classic essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” Susan Sontag suggests that camp is to gays what liberalism is to Jews: “Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a particular affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—of Camp.” The analogy, in Sontag’s argument, goes even deeper. Jews and homosexuals are both traditional outsiders in Western culture, and the artistic and political agendas they pursue are means of emancipation and integration. With their liberalism, “Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense.” With Camp—which Sontag always capitalizes, as though it were an ideology—“Homosexuals have pinned their hopes for integrating into society on promoting the aesthetic sense.”

Seen in this way, these two sensibilities are opposites, Sontag writes. “Camp is a solvent of morality,” evaporating Jewish earnestness into playfulness. Yet these opposites have worked together to powerful effect in modern American pop culture, which is to a remarkable extent a product of Jewish and gay creativity. Sontag herself is an example of how the two sensibilities, and the two identities, can inhabit the same person. To straddle irony and sincerity, camp and liberalism, is to occupy a privileged vantage point on the world, not despite but because of the fact that historically it has meant being doubly excluded, doubly vulnerable.

In My 1980s & Other Essays, his new collection of short prose pieces, Wayne Koestenbaum gives a master class in this kind of creative straddling. The word is not idly chosen: When it comes to metaphors, Koestenbaum prefers bodily images, drawn if possible from the domain of sexual experience. This is one of the things that marks him as a product of “queer theory,” an academic movement that, like all such movements, enjoyed its subversive youth and is now passing into serene establishmentarianism. (Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English at CUNY.)

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