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90 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
It appears that homosexual social identity emerges after the trials as sodomites
and inverts inscribed themselves under the sign of Wilde. 7 Ellis described them as
taking “up a definite attitude” that resulted in observable and visible
manifestations of homosexuality proliferating throughout the praxis of everyday
life. Yet, as I have outlined, the only visible aspects of the homosexual sign were
Wilde’s own signifying codes of dress, gesture, and speech that were built upon
and preserved as the signifier of the new identity. I suggest that the performance
of these codes is what became known as “Camp,” a new word that appeared
along with the identity during the years immediately following the trials, a word
that was entered into J.Redding Ware’s 1909 slang dictionary and defined as
“actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis.” Camp, then, is the term used to
describe Wilde’s transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity after it was
transformed, through the forced ideological mediation of the juridico-legal
inscription, into the connotative signifier of the Name-of-the-Homosexual.
The last laugh is Wilde’s though, and we can hear him laughing hysterically
from beyond the grave. Because his codes were co-opted with a built-in and
already embodied Delsartean collapse of signifier and signified, Camp encodes
the unmasking of the ideological illusion even as it speaks The Name: the lie that
tells the truth. Peer beneath the surface and all you find is another surface. The
“depth” of the depth model is only the unspeakable, dark recess of the penetrated
body of the “posing somdomite [sic].” If only Oscar could see us now, his legacy
of Self, his body, indelibly imprinted on the surfaces of millions upon millions.
NOTES
I want to thank all the contributors to this volume for the many ideas they have
contributed to my understanding of Camp.
1 For a history of dandyism see Moers.
2 For a history of the Delsarte system see Ruyter (17–30).
3 This is will be familiar to many readers as an enactment of Hegel’s master-slave
metaphor (111–119). Within this dialectic, the master “achieves his recognition
through another consciousness” (116), by positioning (“camping”?) the slave as the
medium of desire. Because the slave (or “passive” sodomite in this case)
relinquishes its own being-for-self, “[The master] is the pure, essential action in
this relationship, while the action of the [slave] is impure…” (116).
4 For details of the courtroom drama, see the transcripts in Hyde 1956. I use the legal
title “attorney” as a convenience for the American reader.
5 Histories of the sexological and medical construction of The Homosexual are
numerous. For an introduction to this literature, known as “the medical model of
homosexuality,” see Bullough; Gay 198–254; Foucault 1980a; and Weeks 1979.
6 The ability of publicity to create a rupture in social consciousness should not be
underrated. A recent example of this phenomenon would be the spectacle of
Christine Jorgensen’s sex change. When Jorgensen had her surgery in 1953, there
had already been twenty-eight such operations performed, the first as early as