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120 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
great tradition of transvestism in the classical theatres of the Greeks,
Elizabethans, and Japanese. Of his form of impersonation, he says:
This is nothing new. It has nothing to do with homosexuality. I use it as a
theatrical device. It distances the performer from the role. It takes more art
to play a role that is very unlike yourself. You must use everything; you
must use your imagination to the utmost to create the impression. 12
And the impression he creates undeniably works for “mixed audiences.” “It is not
a gay audience,” he explains. “Although a lot of gay people do see it, an
enormous number of straight people also come—couples clutching each other
and weeping at the death scene, hugging each other all the closer.” He thinks this
is true because Camille “transcends gay. It’s a love story. It’s a story of Adam
and Eve. It’s the romantic ideal questioned and rethought.”
Ludlam locates the “homosexual overtones” of his Camille in the narrative’s
dynamics of forbidden love. But his rethinking of the romantic ideal is manifest
in his (re)casting; if Camille is the story of Adam and Eve, Ludlam’s version has
two Adams. Of his casting choices, he says:
I think it’s presenting a positive image. I think it’s coming out on a certain
level. But I don’t think it’s gay. It’s a matter of being able to see the story
freshly, without prejudice. It’s a matter of giving the audience a new vision
instead of reinforcing fixed habits of thought.
In other words, the play is not gay inasmuch as its address is not exclusively
homosexual, but within the dynamics of the production the machinations of
homosexuality surface, “come out,” and are rendered visible in the pockets,
gaps, and fissures of an ultimately less-than-monolithic heterosexual
configuration. This is Ludlam’s way of dismantling prejudice, of gesturing
toward a new vision, of negotiating a partially closeted, partially out-of-the-closet
artistic and political stance, a stance played out in the contradiction of Camp.
Dynes writes: “Undeniably, camp is subversive, but not too much so, for it
depends for its survival on the patronage of high society, the entertainment world,
advertising, and the media” (189). This may help to explain why lesbian theatre
work produced on the other side of the Village has not moved, as Ludlam’s work
has, into mainstream venues. The Milwaukee Repertory Theatre is unlikely to
present plays with titles like The Lady Dick, The Well of Horniness, or
Paradykes Lost.
In her essay “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” Sue-Ellen Case delineates a
strategy within lesbian discourse and performance practice aimed precisely at
challenging dominant culture and the violence of its attendant discourses. Camp
is a central player in an argument that picks up where Teresa de Lauretis ends in
her essay entitled “The Technology of Gender.” In this essay, De Lauretis makes
an important critical move in distinguishing and moving away from the