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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 119
maid, tongue in cheek, explains, “Your tea, miss.” When Lady Enid insists that
she takes it plain, the maid says both caustically and knowingly, “That’s queer.”
To which Lady Enid replies, in a moment of camaraderie and with a
conspiratorial tone, “Queer?” (in Samuels and Quinton 770). Even in the absence
of such innuendo it is possible for particular readers to understand the text as
homoerotic. For instance, following the publication of Ludlam’s collected
works, Neil Bartlett—who had never seen an original Ridiculous Theatrical
Company production—wrote in his review of the collected plays that Irma Vep
is “an alarmingly true metaphor of the love between two men” (50–51).
Ludlam does not represent homosexuality by writing plays about gay couples.
Ludlam’s male actors flaunt their sexuality and their desire for each other in texts
he constructs out of pieces of classical and popular narratives. They play the
heterosexual couples that people these scenarios, flaunting and thereby
presenting the gay male under, alongside, and outside of the straight male and
female characters valorized in these canonized texts. Ludlam opens a window
in representation, takes the faggots he sees in the street, and puts them on the
stage making their desire for each other visible.
More importantly, perhaps, homosexual practice is implicit in this presentation
of homoerotic desire. Earl Jackson, Jr. argues that male homosexuality both
promises and threatens to disestablish “the transcendence of the phallus from the
penis, disinvesting male genitalia (and hence biological identity) of their former
privilege to universal principles of order and signification” (470). In a cogent
explication of the ways in which male homosexuality opposes, by not
participating in, the Oedipal triangle, Jackson states, “Male homosexual desire for
the penis does not require the penis to be hypostatized into a universal principle,
embracing female subjectivity and sexuality as well” (471). Ludlam’s makingvisible
of homoerotic desire signals homosexual practice, the subversive site of
all that phallocratic culture attempts to suppress, contain, and eradicate.
That a dominant culture venue such as a regional theatre could so effortlessly
erase, render invisible in its (re)production, any representation of the
marginalized group that generated the original cultural product, raises a plethora
of thorny issues related to appropriation, context, and address. But it also raises
questions about the nature of Ludlam’s texts as destabilizing forces, questions
about his theatre’s potential to subvert and disrupt dominant culture’s system of
representation.
In an interview I conducted with Ludlam during a subsequent run of Camille
in 1974, he argued emphatically two seemingly contradictory positions for his
production. He maintained that his rendering of Camille is not an expression of
homosexuality and, at the same time, that it represents a form of coming out. In
the space of these contradictions lies the operating principle of Camp. In his
comedies, Ludlam adheres to a set of aesthetic universals, one of which he
identifies as the theatrical convention of men impersonating women both
historically and across cultures. Ludlam casts his portrayals of women in the