The noun camp and the adjective campy refer to movies, theater, or a style or an exaggerated manner of creative or personal expression that combines high and low elements of culture. These terms were first used in the underground gay community, and may have originated from French se camper, which means to strike a pose. Camp was introduced into mainstream discourse by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origins of “Camp” and “Campy””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yeah, hi, this is Tim from Arlington, Texas.
And I’m curious about the origin of the term camp or campy, as in like camp cinema. Because whenever I hear, you know, cinema or theater described like this, you know, I picture in my mind like people around a campfire maybe telling ridiculous stories. Stories. And so, yeah, I’m curious how this came to be a descriptor of that sort of thing.
And what would you give as an example of that sort of thing? What would you describe as campy?
Well, to me, I guess, you know, I picture, you know, actors who are maybe hamming it up a little bit, maybe not entirely serious, not exactly the most highbrow sort of cinema or theater.
Right.
Okay. Makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. Long history. I’m going to trace it backward from the meaning that we have today, which is roughly what you’ve said. Dictionaries would probably say campy usually is a lot of overacting and perhaps an element of humor because of the overacting. Sometimes the campiness or the camp comes from ridiculous set decorations or just the whole premise is ridiculous, even if the acting is utterly normal and ordinary.
Right.
But before that, let’s take it back to by the time it appeared in the entertainment business in the 1950s, it had a notion of homosexuality. It was connected to the idea of exaggerated gayness and almost always meant male gayness or male homosexuality.
Okay, interesting.
And when it first appears in print, and I’m going to asterisk this and come back to it in a second, in the early 1900s, that’s exactly what it was. It was about stereotypical male homosexual behavior, just like really kind of playing it up. That asterisk is it’s probably much older than the early 1900s. Most words appear in mouths and ears before they appear in print. With slang, we know that they’re even older than just regular words. And with taboo words or words having to do with taboo culture, like anything from gay culture at the time, those are probably even older. So I would not be surprised to find that camp or campy in this way probably easily comes from, you know, 1880s or 1870s or even earlier than that.
So that said, why camp is in there, we don’t really know. There’s a bunch of bad theories, but the one that has the most validity, most slang lexicographers could kind of get behind is it might come from a French verb, which means to kind of camp out on a spot in a really dominating way, like a fierce, strong way. And it’s something you take control of the place and you do it in maybe a military fashion, not necessarily in a, have nothing whatsoever to do with the theater or any kind of entertainment culture. Kind of striking a pose. Being provocative, like owning a place.
Sure, sure. Wow, okay.
Yeah, and it really became popularized in modern culture with Susan Sontag’s essay from 1960.
On photography?
No, it’s called Notes on Camp, and she sort of brings it out of gay culture. Because for a long time, it was kind of like private code almost. Before that, you could see signs in New York City in gay establishments that said, are you going to the beach this summer or are you going to camp? A little play on words there.
Okay. Very interesting. Yeah, I had no idea it had any association with this kind of culture, especially as often as you hear the term, no idea whatsoever.
This is a really far field of language, but if you read about how gay people used to identify each other before gayness was as accepted as it is today, what’s really interesting is that some people believe that camp came out of that, that you might exaggerate certain behaviors that were not seen as heterosexual in order to send a really strong signal to anyone in the area that you were gay and you might be open to meeting. We call that dropping a hairpin.
Very cool.
Very cool.
Okay, great.
Thanks, Tim. We really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for calling.
Yeah, thank you.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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