Hey all my LGBTQIA++ brothers, sisters, siblings, allies, friends and family. I was on a medical leave from work last month and I watched a lot of social media while healing. I saw a lot about safe spaces. I saw a lot of our allies defending us. That was great. We all need a space to be open and not worry about the consequences. We need places to heal. A therapeutic relationship is or should be a safe space. Schools should be safe spaces or at least have safe spaces. We need friends.
All these posts were amazing but part of me felt so weighed down by the earnestness of the posters. I had to turn to comedians like Matteo Lane and other mostly queer comedians for relief. They were not too different from others mainstream comics but their edge relied on their queerness, the vague boundaries between “normal” culture and the alphabet team. And their audience was not safe from their commentary. Which leads me to camp, kind of.
According to the much trusted Wikipedia page on the subject, “camp is aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value”. Well, good enough as it goes. I would add it is a form of malicious compliance, particularly used by the LGBTQ+ when they were (and often still are) unable to be open, unable to be themselves, Camp practitioners will follow the norms of a society or group to extremes. In doing so, they subvert their compliance and turn it into a great big “NO” to the rules they are seemingly following.
In the middle of the twentieth century there was a literary and cultural critic names Leslie Fiedler. To present day readers, some of his work seems a bit homophobic and racist. However, his amazing essay, “No! In Thunder” . In the essay he says all great art is basically a repudiation of the culture it comes from. Great art says, “no” to the conventional world. Think of Huckleberry Finn, leaving the boundaries of his old world, learning that the black people around him, especially Jim, are people just like everyone else, though his family and neighbors would deny this. Think of Gatsby taking the doomed high road of love while the would be love of his life settles for a narrow, conventional marriage. In all great art, the characters move beyond their old worlds, their old spaces. Their broken souls see the it all.
Just remember the world is always broken, never perfect. Progress is two steps forward and one step back.
One More Bark in the Night 