gay sensibility and humor is completely different from straight peoples’ in a lot of ways and i think thats a lot of why camp has been so misconstrued and distorted once it hit the mainstream. directors like john waters, and gay fascination with old hollywood, horror, melodrama, soap operas, new wave/pop color schemes, and in general B/low culture has informed drag and largely stems from a fascination with things that are barely marginal - things that exist in two worlds - almost crossing over but always defined within their genre. which makes sense considering homosexuality has been the same for most of modern history. what straight people who enjoy camp or john waters or drag dont understand is that its all done with love and appreciation. for example, gay people can see the ridiculousness of something like 80s teen movies but while straight people have spent the last 15 years ridiculing it out of a sense of superiority or loose grasp on cultural relativism wrt style (nothing anyone wears in the 21st century looks objectively “good” - theres no such thing!) gay men display an affection thats missing from straight send-ups. camp and playing on tropes of low culture as done by gay people can appeal to straight people - but their fascination often isnt the same as ours. their facination always has an air of ridicule at the other, at the grotesque.. its distinctly of someone looking IN on something else. while gay cultivation and employment of certain sensibilities has historically been of someone locked in with everyone else - laughing at the absurdity of it all but not holding themselves as inherently better - not slumming it. and as gay people continue to assimilate a lot of that is lost, a lot of that turns into mean-spiritedness, and rich west h*llywood (mostly white) queens making jokes that are racist or at the expense of poor people without any kind of affinity but strongly as part of the dominant gaze. the gay flippancy is the only remnant of gay humor here, but instead of being an intentionally misleading flippancy - a put on status that gays historically haven’t enjoyed - its become gay men desperate to elevate their status by acculturating into the dominant narrative and the flippancy becomes a real disdain, and a real lack of accountability. not that this hasn’t always been present, but its much more widespread and recognizable thing now that gay irreverancy often borders on cruelty - with no excuse that its a lateral exchange because many of the gay men who make these remarks have elevated themselves class-wise by ceasing to identify or recognize their perceived grotesqueness or status as an outsider. which should be a good thing in theory to most people, but it means theyve left any affinity with outsiders in the quest to be seen as “equal”. individual equality is not liberation - and this problems been highlighted for a long time. its just depressing that that section of gay sensibility is rapidly disappearing because of it, though im not sure what the “new” gay sensibility is within this generation. in the mainstream at the moment theres almost no trace of it at all. even in the 2000s you had the empowerment rom-coms like Legally Blonde and Devil Wears Prada but culture in this decade is decidedly extremely straight. the only area where a gay sensibility prevails is in pop music and (sadly) reality tv (which tends toward a more straight bastardization of gay spectacle and melodrama and a focus on extreme apathy and individualism), which is reflected in how many young queer people are so pop culture obsessed. that used to be one segment of gay sensibility, but at the moment it feels like the only real mainstream display of it. i think a lot of our culture now is deeply indebted to camp culture and gay tastemaking but its all been filtered through a straight gaze that leaves out any of the original affinity with the underdog, or love of spectacle and grandeur in a way thats artificial but still appreciated because that’s precisely the point. Gay culture in the 20th century was largely built on dreams - the dream of being “normal”, the dream of Hollywood with all its obviously sentimental and contrived plots and trajectories, the pleasure in knowing its all a dream, the pleasure in escaping, the contradictory of enjoying artifice and knowing its artifice. A lot of that is missing in current culture and gay culture... For the most part, the dream is dead.
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