Camp

Theatrical, flamboyant and knowingly over the top; as a noun, the gay sensibility that loves artifice and exaggeration and enjoys them with a wink.

Camp is exaggeration with a wink. As an adjective it describes a man, a gesture or a voice that is theatrical, flamboyant and knowingly over the top: a limp wrist, a gasp, a "darling!". As a noun it is a whole style and sensibility, the love of things that are too much, too sincere or too artificial to be taken seriously, and are adored for exactly that reason.

A camp man is not necessarily effeminate, though the two often travel together; what makes it camp is the performance and the irony. And camp is not the same as bad taste: a 1960s B-movie, a Eurovision costume, a diva's fifth farewell tour can be camp, but only if someone is enjoying it with a raised eyebrow.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows for sure. J. Redding Ware's 1909 dictionary of Victorian slang defined camp as "actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis", guessed it was "probably from the French", and added that it was "used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character", which tells you exactly who was using it. The French link has never been proved. Green's Dictionary of Slang also quotes "campish" in a letter of 1868, and by 1925 an American writer was describing a man's "camping manner, copied from stage fairies".

In Britain, camp sat comfortably in Polari and in the music hall and pantomime traditions, and it reached the whole country through comedians and radio characters who were camp as a row of tents, as the saying goes.

Notes on Camp

The word moved from the bar to the university in 1964, when Susan Sontag published her essay "Notes on 'Camp'", calling it a "sensibility" and a "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration". She noted its close ties to gay men and set out its most famous rule: camp sees everything in quotation marks. Her essay turned a piece of gay slang into a term for critics, and it has been argued over ever since.

How it is used today

• Camp, adjective: "he's so camp", flamboyant and theatrical. In Britain and Australia it is everyday language.
• To camp it up: to turn up the theater on purpose.
• High camp: elaborate, glamorous camp, think opera and couture.
• Low camp: cheap, broad and silly, think pantomime dames.

Camp is close kin to drag and the natural language of the queen. It can be a joke at our own expense, but more often it is a defense: taking the world less seriously than it takes itself. Its opposite on the apps is masc, and the men who write "no camp guys" in their bio usually protest a little too much.

Related terms