Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History of Camp: From Oscar Wilde to James Bond

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

As the old adage goes, attitude is everything. And if there’s one attitude that stands proud above the rest it’s the utterly fabulous, camp. Whether it’s embodied in Disney villains or Oscar Wilde, there’s a charm and defiance to camp that is both powerful and fun. In today’s episode, Kate is joined by Paul Baker, author of Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World, to discuss the origins of this fantastically outrageous trait.*Trigger warning: This episode features language which some listeners may find offensive.*This episode was produced and edited by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely for Twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning, because you need protecting. Protecting from me, protecting from my producers, definitely protecting from my guests, and most importantly, protecting from yourselves.

So here you go. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, and you should be an adult too. We're actually talking about the history of camp today, so I don't know about obscene. I mean, it's a hell of a lot of fun, definitely. But I just like doing my fair do's warning so much that I'm just going to keep doing it, whether or not they're offensive.

Ha ha! Let's do this! Morning breaks in 17th century, France. And we're in the Palace of Versailles. The campus building in the world, by the way. And Louis XIV, no less, is getting ready for a... busy day of swanning around his gardens and being fabulous. Before he can pop out and frolic through the fountains, he has a whole dressing ceremony. And I don't just mean putting a bit of slap on it or jumping in the shower. I mean that he has a hundred courtiers just there to watch him put on his

wig. It sounds like a TikTok video, doesn't it? But this really happened in real life. I mean, we can all relate to that, right? No? No. This was a palace of pomp and ritual like no other. The gold furnishings, the marble interiors, the extravagant mirrors, and yes, the extensive gardens all dialed it up to 11. Put simply, Versailles was extra. Was Versailles the outrageous origin story of the concept we know as camp? Camp, what does it even mean?

Where did it come from? Was it from Versailles? What does it mean today? And how extraordinarily brave are the people who have been camp throughout history? Today, betwixt the sheets, we are going to explore all of this and more in the history of the most fabulous way to be, darling. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie. And welcome back to Petricks the Shades, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister.

Here is a deceptively difficult question to kick things off. What does camp mean? Where does it come from? We might think that we know the answer to that, and certainly when we see something, camp, it feels very easy to go, that, that's it, that's what camp is. But trying to define that, what it is, what is the categorisation of camp.

It's actually quite slippery and tricky to do. One way of looking at the history of what it means to be camp is to look at the journey the word itself has been on. Firstly, it was used as a noun, like an army camp, standing firm and bold. Then, around the 17th century, it morphs into a verb, and our old mate Louis XIV's favourite playwright, Jean-Baptiste Molière,

declared in one play that a villainous character must, Camp about on one leg, put your hand on your hip and flash your eyes. I don't know about camp, I think that's just good life advice in general, but maybe that's just me. Then the word winds up as an adjective, popularised in the English and Irish gay subcultures of the late 19th century and beyond. As the word's use has evolved, its essence has remained the same. But what does it actually mean to be camp? What's the difference between camp and campee? And why are so many villains of TV and film, and definitely Disney, portrayed as camp?

Well, I am ready to find out if you are betwixters. Let's do this. Oh, and welcome to Betwixta sheets. I'm only talking to Paul Baker. How are you? I'm fine. I've got hay fever, but apart from that, I'm fine. Oh, no. How does your hay fever manifest? Have you got like block nose streaming eyes? Sinuses generally. It's that time of year, isn't it? Right, okay. Well, hopefully we can get through this. But we are talking about your book that is out. I'm waving it in front of the camera. Your book, Camp, the history of the attitude that conquered the world.

A slight exaggeration, maybe, but that's the point of camp to exaggerate. So I thought I'd go with it in the title. What was it that made you think, I need to explore this history? I need to talk about camp as a phenomenon. For me, it's been such an important part of my life, you know, from a very, very early age. And I talk in the book about, you know, my family members and many of them are camp in all sorts of different ways. And it's always been the kind of basis of friendships I've had growing up, you know, kind of the ability to laugh with somebody I think is so important. And, you know, growing up as a kind of nerdy kind of queer kid in the northeast of England and being a bit of an outsider.

camp was kind of a way of kind of maybe poking fun at the people who weren't like that, who didn't always make my life easy. So with my friends, we'd do that quite a bit. And I talk about that in the first chapter of the book as well. So it's been a kind of a source of power, I guess, and a source of joy for me for such a long time. And I wanted to talk about that and talk about how complicated it is as well. It's often seen as a kind of silly, frivolous, kind of shallow, surfacy things. But in fact, it's actually quite a complicated thing.

And the more I looked into it, the more kind of interesting and fascinating. got. So I wanted to do something that I enjoyed. And the book I'd done before was on Section 28, which was quite a grim topic. So I wanted a bit of a change, something a bit lighter and more fun. I've got to ask you the question that really, and it's a bit mean because it's the one that you're grappling with throughout most of the book. What is Camp? I knew that I was talking to today. I read the book and I was sat here for ages just thinking, how the hell do you define it? It's one of the weird things. I know it when I see it. Yes. I know it when I see what camp is, but trying to actually define it is so tricky.

It is. So I'm really mean, but what is camp? And so many people have tried, and they all kind of get to different bits of it. So, you know, when I did a lot of reading around at the start, I was trying to see who was defined it and how they've done it. And there's quite a lot of overlap. So what I tried to do is kind of pull that together,

and I came up with a kind of a list of ingredients of it or kind of facets. You don't have to have all of them, but the more you have them more likely it's going to be camp. So one thing is maybe exaggeration, something which is kind of over the top, is too much, maybe like putting on far too much lipstick or something. And then you've got artificiality, which is, you know,

maybe wearing a wig or lipstick or something anyway like that. Then you've got maybe a failed performance in some way. So the failure to pull something off or going against norms or types. So, you know, men aren't meant to wear lipstick. So if a man putting on lipstick automatically is kind of going against society's norms or kind of what's expected of the man. So that can be seen as a bit camp. Maybe like an old lady being very flirtatious and sexy.

again, you know, other ladies aren't meant to do that, even though I think they should, but, you know, society says they shouldn't. So it's things that society says you shouldn't do, and then you do it anyway. And then there's a kind of sense of maybe silliness, you know, or funniness, which causes people to laugh. And it can either be intentional or not. And if it's not intentional, that's when it's camp. But if it is on purpose, that's often called campy, as opposed to camp.

And there's a kind of fine line between the two. There's a bit of a blurring maybe of the two. But, you know, the original camp. is that failure where someone's doing something and maybe not realising how funny they are. And then they are. Has it always been associated, well, in my mind,

it's primarily associated with the gay community. But then maybe that's not fair. Maybe that's because that's when you start to get into like, I thought I had it there and now it's gone again. Because I'm thinking like, well, everything that you said there, I'm like, yeah, that's definitely camp. And then I look at something like Joan Rivers or Judy Garland. And I'd happily call them camp,

but they're not gay men. No. So it's in the eye of the beholder as well. So it's kind of who sees somebody as camp. I could see something as camp, lots of people wouldn't. So there's no list of this is camp, this isn't. And when people start trying to do that, they fall into trouble. You know, and I talk about in the book, you know, imagine this party where you invite all their friends around and you say,

what's camp and what isn't or what's intentionally camp and what's not. And it's the biggest way, I think, to cause an argument and our people storming out in anger and things like that. We'll never agree on it. So it's very much a personal thing, I think, and it can change over time. There are some kind of shared aspects, I think. A lot of people will say a film maybe like,

whatever happened to Baby Jane is camp or drag race is camp or something like that, and it tends to be a shared understanding. People themselves can be camp and maybe not realize it, or maybe they have a sort of inkling of it and maybe they play that up a bit. So they exaggerate. And I think certain camp comedians might do that.

Comedians like, say, Larry Grayson from the 70s or Alan Carr, you know, they get laughed at and they think, well, I'm going to go with that. I'm going to turn it into a power and run with it. So there's a blurring. It's incredibly powerful, and I don't think we should forget that or underplay it. It's easy to, like you said, think of it as something that's silly, but there's a huge amount of power in camp, isn't there?

There is, and I think the people who are camp are the bravest, strongest people in our society. Because the ones who are kind of openly camp, who walk down the street, you know, they're kind of camp, and they're wearing flamboyant clothes and things like that, and they're walking in a camp fashion so everyone can see them. I'm not like that. I walk down the street and I kind of look boring and normal

and no one pays me any attention apart from the moustache, which kind of does get a bit of attention. That's my only kind of concession to camp. But I've walked down the street with friends who kind of do dress like that. And I've seen the shouts and the comments and the abuse they get. And they deal with that every day. Maybe they care, maybe they don't. But they're brave enough and strong enough to take it in their stride.

And then I look at myself and I think I'm not that strong. And then I look at maybe a mussely man who fits society's definition of what a proper man should be. And I think you walk through life and you have it easy. No one's ever questioning you or telling you that you shouldn't be what you are. And that's very easy. And there's no bravery in that to me, no strength. But then saying that, I've definitely seen super mussely men fall into the camp category. Ah. Well, that's the other thing as well. Yes, they are. So the more muslin you are, it's the more exaggerated you are. That's the one. Exaggeration. It's turning it up to 11. In that sense, they could be seen as camp, I think.

But maybe by people who have an appreciation like me, but maybe not their friends. Maybe their friends wouldn't see them as camp. They'd see them as brilliant. I love that. They unknowingly camp. Yeah. I love that.

That's like when you get guys that are so macho and straight and sis that then they're trying to express it and they do it so much, it comes across as quite gay, actually. Yes, yes. So it is complicated. I love that. Yes, it gets very complicated, doesn't it? To my mind, and it's certainly in your book, has Camp always been associated with the gay community?

Because that's primarily where I see it as attached to however we're going to define it. Is that always been the case? Or is it more complicated than that? I think the gay community picked up on it and kind of adopted it and understand that it is a sensibility. And you'd even find the word being used by gay people in 19th century trials. Not a lot of gay people wrote things down. Wow, as early as that. Yeah.

So there's some kind of interesting cases that I can tell you about if you like. But I think before that, it probably comes from theatre as well. Oh, please, absolutely. There's one actually you've already talked about, I think, in another podcast. It's the case of Fanny and Stella. Oh, God love Fanny and Stella. They were two male cross-dresses. You absolutely can talk about Fanny and Stella, though.

Well, it was a letter that was read out in their trial. It used the word campish undertakings or something like that. But the one I will talk about in more detail is the Dublin Castle scandal, which took place in 1884. So this was a case of a member of parliament called William O'Brien, who was an Irish nationalist, wanted to cause trouble with the English rulers of Ireland who were all based at Dublin Castle.

And he had a newspaper, and he used it to insinuate or claim that various men who were involved with Dublin Castle, were involved in homosexual orgies and sex and things like that. So there was a kind of huge investigation, and it resulted in a trial for some of these men. And it all came out about their culture and their language and what they got up to. And there was one chap in particular who was called Malcolm Johnston.

So he was quite young. He was a sex worker. He was having sex with some of these men. And he talked about how range drag balls at his father's home. And the men had female nicknames for each other. He called himself Lady Constance Clyde or Connie to his friends. Another man was the marchioness Dame Street. Another one was called Lizzie.

Another one was called Mar Fowler. Anyway, there was a letter that was read out. and this was addressed to another accused man called James Pillar, and he called him his pa, which maybe was an older version of calling someone a daddy in today's parlance. Daddy, big daddy bear. Yeah. Yes.

So in the letter he says, My dear par, I have been in the hands of the police. Don't be frightened. Or rather, the other way. The police have been in my hands so many times lately that my lily white hands have been trembling, and I am utterly fucked out. Such camp.

So this was read out in this trial. I know. And they were like, my goodness, what does camp mean? They didn't know what it meant. So then he had to explain it. We have to have the correct definitions here. That's the really shocking bit of that. Very important, I think, for a trial to define your terms.

So he then said, you know, what does it mean? And he said, well, it means amusement. It may mean proper amusement or it may mean improper amusement. And I think probably the latter in his case. So, yeah, a nice example of it being used in this trial. And clearly within the gay subculture in Ireland and England, it was known in that way, but it wasn't maybe known outside of that. And we get it used in a dictionary in 1909 by a chap called James Redding Ware,

who wrote a dictionary called Passing English of the Victorian era. And he says it's an adjective. And he says it's used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character, which I love. I love. I'm trying to think, do I know any people of exceptional ones of character? I don't think I've dated a few. So it wasn't seen as a very nice word or a word that kind of mocked you out as being a very nice person. Very much of a kind of taboo concept almost and used by people who are on the margins of society.

Not like today where it's everywhere. What happened in that trial in Ireland? Like I'm invested now. Were they okay? They were not okay. No, no. It was all very sad. I think they went to prison most of the men and did not have a good time of it in prison as well.

So no, it didn't turn out well. They rarely does for gay people in the 19th century. No, it doesn't. I don't know why I held out a tiny flicker of hope there that that would have all been all right. But no, of course, of course it wouldn't be. Oh, imagine like that being your only legacy to history really is effectively a sext that got read out in court.

An old sext, yeah. I know. But you go back even further than the 19th century in your book, though. You land in France in, is it the 17th century? I do. Which when you think about it, it, yeah, that's a pretty camp. It is. So France is kind of where camp was invented, I think.

Which kind of is not that much of a surprise if you went to pick a country. Probably France would be one on my top five, maybe anyway. Italy, possibly. Definitely, yeah. No, even if you go into like a cake shop and look at how they do their cakes, they're so camp, you know. They're so over the top and pretty. Of course, you're right. Yes. So the book I talk about the Palace of Versailles, which is even when it was built in the 1660s

was the campus building. And I think it still is one of the campus buildings in the world, completely over the top. this ornamentation and extra. Extra is the word, yeah. Gold and the marble and the mirrors and the outsized paintings and the fountains and gardens. And then you've got Louis the 14th himself. There were all louis. There were so many louis. You know, the fashions that he surrounded himself, you know, there were kind of so many rules about what colour shoes you could have, for example, in your wigs that you had to wear. He had a whole dressing up ceremony every morning where about a hundred of his courtiers would watch him get ready and get his clothes on every morning

and have his wig fitted and stuff. All of these different social. for rituals, whether you wanted to go through a door, whether both doors could be opened or just one door, how you knocked on a door, there was rules about that and what chair you could sit on, whether it had arms or not. It was an over-the-top camp society, I think, and the palace was there in camp. There were also kind of failures to pull it off, which I find campest of all about Versailles. So one thing about it was that it wasn't built near a natural water source. So they had these ponds made, and then they had fountains everywhere. But there wasn't enough water to keep all the fountain's going at once. So when he went for his walks around the gardens, he had servants.

They were posted strategically and they'd sort of like signal each other like, he's going this way, turn on the fountain, and then he walked past it and it would kind of come to life. And it would go off once he'd gone past and then they'd do the next one. So I love that. Did he know they were doing that? Or do you just think all of his fountains were fine? I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe he didn't care as long as he could see the ones that work. That was okay. I love that. And it was very cold palace as well. It was very difficult to heat. You know, if you have a lot of marble, if you're rich, you'll know this. Marble is hard to heat. Yeah. You know. So it was cold and there wasn't enough water. Yeah. And so like when you were having your banquet, your glass of wine would freeze over just as

you got to a key point in your anecdote. So that wasn't much fun. Properly cold. Very cold. And there wasn't many bathrooms for the size of it and a number of people who lived there. So people would go to the toilet in hallways and corridors and, you know, things like that. So the servants had a horrible job having to clean up. So for me, it's those failures to pull it off, which make it even more camp, which take it to boss level camp, I think. That is epic. But at the time, have you got any sense of how it was being discussed at the time? Like, at the time, did people think that this was excessive?

Or did they think this was all completely normal? And is it only looking back that we go, what the fuck on earth was this? They were kind of in a bubble, I think, a bit. I haven't read sources from the time where people are going, like, my God, like, this is too much. I think they just had to get on with it. And if they did have opinions, they didn't write them down, they weren't recorded. but I imagine there must have been some conversations and some looks and things. There must have been.

Yeah, I think it was very normalized. And what you see around this time is the invention of, I mean, the word camp existed and it was an army camp. So you're having to camp as a noun. But you have the meanings shifting at this point and turning into the word camp as we know it now. And this is, it goes on a journey this word. So it starts off as a noun. And then it becomes a verb. And it gets linked to the concept of doing what army camps do, which is standing firm, protecting the village or whatever.

you know, a bold, provocative stance. And then it kind of shifts from this bold stance into something which is a little bit maybe exaggerated or dramatic. We find it appearing in the theatre. Louis XIV's favourite playwright, Jean-Baptiste-Mollier wrote a play in 1671. And one of the characters is actually a villain, and he's coaching another character on acting like a villain. I'll read it out in French. My French is not brilliant. So I apologise to French readers. But he says, Enfons-tompéééééé enchant-garsen-pierced, mele-a-a-maun-a-a-wear-a-a-ha-ha-ver-bo. And he basically says, wear your heart like a bad boy, camp about on one leg, put your hand on your hip and flash your eyes. So it's that use of camp there, that camp-tois-a-and-peer to camp about on one leg.

What does that mean? How did you camp about on one leg? Well, it's that provocative, bold stance, I think, the over-the-top stance, you know, which kind of stage villains would have. And I think that's maybe one of the earliest uses of camp in this play, which kind of links through to how we would understand Camp today. This is all the way back to 1671 in France. And it shows that it wasn't a word that had to be explained.

It's a word that the audiences in France would have got. They would have understood what was meant by that. So they were kind of understanding Camp long before the English and Irish gay subculture was doing so in the late 19th century. And long before, you know, everyone is understanding it now in the 21st century. They had it tapped. I'll be back with Paul Baker after this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb

And on my podcast Not just the Tudors from History Hit I try to make sense of everything That baffled our early modern ancestors Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbour's wall You're going to cause rising damp Would Henry Ape ever consider executing his wife

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Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I just thought of then when you read that out, and obviously I understood the French original. Of course. Thanks for the translation. I'm sorry I'm looking at it. Such a pleb, Kate. I just thought then of Alan Rickman Sheriff in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, who often gets called Camp, that he's a camp baddy. Well, villains are so camp, and that's the thing, I think.

And it's a way of kind of not making them necessarily relatable, but making them kind of fun. In the book I talk about, a lot about children's TV. and cartoons and how you have all these villains who are actually quite terrifying, but they're also camp, so that makes it okay. So you're probably too young, but do you remember a show called The Perils of Penelope Pitstop?

Just about, yes. It was a cartoon, I loved it growing up. They showed it in the kind of 70s and 80s. She was this, like, heroin, very camp in herself, based on like 1920s heroines, and there was this horrible man called the Hooded Clor who was trying to kill her each week

to inherit her money, and he'd set her up in all these complicated traps, you know, he'd tie her up and things. and there'd be like a cutting machine about to kill her. She'd always escape. But he was actually trying to kill her. And he was this very camp villain. Yeah, that's not fun.

I know. When you describe it, and you know, to somebody, and you don't say it's a cartoon, you say, you know, a woman has been stalked each week

by this man who hates her and wants her dead and puts her in bondage and then like sort of gloats about how he's going to kill her in detail. Like, it sounds horrific, doesn't it? I mean, it's just... That's a whole other show, that isn't it? It's a whole hashtag, isn't it? Like, do not go there.

But, you know, for children, And this was entertainment. And because the guy was so camp, voiced by an actor called Paul Lind, who was known for this very camp voice, he was in another sitcom Paul Bewitched, where he played Uncle Arthur. They got away with it, I think.

So in a way, you're kind of making villains palatable for children, it's camp. You know, so think about, say, Ursula from the Little Mermaid. I was just thinking of Ursula as you were talking right then. And you never got to see the gay community of men, because I reckon they'd have all been Team Ursula. They certainly would. They've been egging around with me, they?

They would. I had like a whole gaggle of them. Yeah, you never heard from them. Tell me, what makes Ursula camp? Because again, it's that thing of, like, you can see it. I know she is, but when it comes to define it, it's really difficult. It is. Why is she camp?

She was apparently modelled on Divine, the drag actor. Oh, well, that'll do it. I've heard that. I don't know if that's true or not. But so her body is exaggerated. You know, she's big. Her gestures are very dramatic. Her voice is not like a traditionally feminine voice. It's quite deep for a woman's voice. And it's a strong voice as well. So it's using femininity in a kind of interesting way. It's going against our expectations of what a good woman is supposed to be. And the bad girl character is camp in itself. Because girls are pleased in terms of their behaviour. They're meant to be nice. So any girl who's not nice is instantly in that camp category. And John Waters himself, who directed Divine in lots of films, played on that by having lots of bad girl character. pushing over Christmas trees on their mums and things like that,

being scandalous and drinking and smoking at school and stuff like that. So all of that, if you're a girl, you're breaking the norms and then you're camp. That's something Disney do a lot, actually. I mean, Ursula immediately popped into my brain there, but Disney have often been called out for their coding of villains as queer, which is often because they are quite camp. I mean, Scar, quite camp. Yeah.

Captain Hook, quite camp. It goes on and on and on. Camp. Yeah, definitely. And I think there's a tension there because I think it's saying, well, it's kind of coding queer people as villainous for one thing as well, which is a very, very long trope in popular culture. You know, the queer person is either the victim, they die at the end or they're the villain and they die at the end anyway. So that's that's kind of way of othering and saying that these people are not like us and we don't have to identify with them. And then you kind of make them funny as well. And then it's a kind of kind of kind of stuff you're laughing at them as opposed to with them as well. So they've got a court jester role as well. so they have a double role to play. But I don't know. I think, though, that becomes quite subverted because then you can sort of actually start twice

say, well, actually, I find those characters the best bits of the show. They're the bits that deserve the best round of applause. They steal the show often these villains to the point where maybe you start identifying with them and wanting them to win, you know, and finding the other characters quite boring. In the book, I talk about The Devil Wears Prada.

Then you've got this kind of monstrous magazine editor, Miranda Priestley. Yeah, played by Meryl Streep. And when reviews came up a bit later, after the film came out, people were actually arguing that, you know, she was not the villain. She was not the devil of the film. It was the main character herself was the bad character or her boyfriend. But, you know, they were defending her. And I think there's a sense of, you know, subverting that narrative while actually identifying with the villains and saying, no, actually,

they're the best bits. I love that. There's something pantomimey about it, which in itself is quite camp, isn't it? Yes. I thought that was really interesting what you said there about, it's about making the villain safer somehow, because, like, you can't just have a homicidal maniac who wants to torture everybody in a Disney film. No, it would be horrific. You know, you can't go into the realms of true crime and Texas chainsaw massacre, but with a jaunty song, it's like you have to like rain, rain it back in somehow. Maybe that's what the camp is doing.

It is. I think it's making it's that kind of spoonful of sugar. It's the kind of making villainy palatable, I think. Maybe a kind of sense that they're not going to be very effective because, you know, camp people are maybe not. They don't have their act together. You know, they're so busy wearing about their hair. that they're not going to be able to kind of create a machine that kills, I don't know.

But no, I think that's wrong. Yeah, they need to be much more focused and organized than they actually are. Okay, so take me back to the 19th century, because I'm interested in how the word is being used there, that it's turning up in trials. And you get sort of towards the middle to late 19th century. Well, I mean, there's lots of persecution of homosexuality, but it sort of revs up towards the end of the 19th century.

after this, is it the Laboucher amendment? And that's the one that caught out Oscar Wilde. Was Camp a concept in his trial? Because that's got to be one of the most famous moments of LGBT history. It certainly is, yes. So the word Camp doesn't occur in the Oscar Wild trial, although the trial itself is notable for having Camp as Oscar Wilde's defense, I think. A writer called Chris Freeman has talked about how Wilde used Camp to argue his case,

but it also shows the limits of camp in that kind of 19th century Britain in that it didn't work. So I think most people know about Oscar Wilde and then they know that there was a trial, but it's so fascinating looking at the transcripts, looking at what he actually said and how that went down. So a bit of background. He'd been in this relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a younger good-looking young man who he called Boise. Boise's father was the very butch-Markey of Queensbury who gave his name to a set of boxing rules. almost like the opposite of Oscar Wilde and absolutely hated Oscar Wilde, and it particularly hated his relationship with his own son.

So he turned up at Wilde's Club in 1895 on February the 18th, just down the road from the Ritz Hotel. And he left him a card and it said, for Oscar Wilde posing so Sodomite, which he spelled incorrectly, but never mind, we'll put that aside. And so Wilde was advised by friends to leave the country for a year or so, let it all die down. But he was a fighter.

And he was like, no, I'm going to sue this guy for libel. I'm going to clear my name. Oh, see, that's something that Rebecca Vardy should have learnt that lesson. Yes, I know. Someone should have sent her information. Right. The Wikipedia link or something about Wild, yeah. Even though it's spelt wrongly and a horrible thing. He's doing the thing. He's being a cute. What was he thinking? Well, I think he was thinking, I'm so good at speaking and everyone loves me. And all I have to do is just kind of show up. Say if you can't buy pets or whatever and, you know, have everybody laughing and they'll love me and there'll be bouquets of flowers.

and I'll win, basically. I think that was his strategy. And it kind of worked a bit to start with. So early in this libel trial, the first bit of it, Queensbrook has a solicitor called Edward Carson who knows Wilde the world and really doesn't think much of him and has done his homework as well. And he starts off by asking questions about Wilde's plays and books, trying to paint Wilde's a moral degenerate. And he says that, you know, picture of Dory and Gray perverted novel. And Wilde said, that could only be to brutes and literates, the views of Philistines on Art are incalculably stupid. Oh, good repost. Yeah, drawing room repartee that worked in his plays. And if it had been a play, brilliant, but it wasn't. And then we get to this little bit of the trial later, where Carson has got these evidence from some of the young men that Wilde has apparently had sex with.

And he starts asking questions about them. So he says, did you kiss Walter Granger, who's sort of 19-year-old young man? And Wilde, again, uses camp as a defence and says, oh, no, never in my life. He was a peculiarly plain boy. I pitied him for it. And again, you know, it's a good joke.

You know, you're saying, I wouldn't have kissed him. He's not good-looking enough to be kissed. Oh. But the lawyer... Oh, I see what you mean. The lawyer didn't go with that. He kept on pushing the point and saying, why did you say that? Why? Why? Why?

And kept going at him like a little dog, you know, with something in his teeth. And he broke him. And I think, you know, that's the worst thing to do with Camp is your defense is to break. And Wild was like, you sting me and insult me. At times, one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously. I admit it. And it just went, that. was it. It was over, basically, at that point. He had to drop the case, but the Marcia

of Queensbury wasn't going to let it drop. And he then gave all of his evidence to Scotland Yard. There was another case where Wilde was trying for gross and decency. He was very cowed during that second trial. There was no attempt at being funny, you know, playing up to the gallery. He was found guilty, went to prison for two years, had an absolutely rotten time. And it kind ruined his life really. So it does show camp is all everyone in its place, but you have to know your audience and know when to use it, I think. It's not good as a legal defence, is it? No, but maybe that holiday in South of France would have been a better idea in hindsight. It always breaks my heart when I hear about Oscar's trial and what happened to him because the whole thing is so vile and cruel.

I had never once thought that he was relying on the force of his personality and that he was going be endearing and charming and make people laugh and that would be enough. And to be fair, I can see why he would think that, because we are much more forgiving of people that make us laugh. Yes. And people that we

like, right? He was hugely popular. He was a star and I think that maybe he thought he'd get away with it because he was a massive celebrity as well. It's not a nice ending the story, but there is a little bit of sweetness at the end. So he died aged 46 in a miserable hotel room in Paris and he said, my wallpaper

paper and I are fighting a jewel to the death. One of us has to go and they were his last words, I think. So it does show that right up until that very end, that sensibility never left him. He was still complaining and making jokes about the wallpaper, which, you know, if you're going to go, I think, you know, stay true to who you are, and he did, and right up until the end. Wow, I mean, that's a hell of a last line, isn't it? It is. And we remember him. We don't remember Queensbury. Yeah, we do. Yeah. So that's something. And like, when you look back at his work and you look at his quotes and the things that you were saying, And I know I'm looking at it from a modern advice,

but it's really difficult to look at it and just got, of course he's gay. Oh my God. He's like, he's gay, gay, gay, gay, of course he's his super camp. It was like when George Michael came out and people were surprised. It's like, did you not see what we've been seeing? But even at the time, was Oscar Wilde known for his campness and his theatricality? Or was this something that people didn't realize about him? I think they did.

There wasn't TV and radio, so people kind of weren't seeing him day after day. you know, on Instagram or whatever, as we have now. But enough people had seen his plays. There was a lot less maybe understanding of what a gay person, gay humour or gay culture was about. So maybe people didn't always get it. They just thought he was funny, maybe rather than gay as we understand it now.

Even by the time you rolled into the 20th century and even like the mid to late 20th century is Camp is acting in all kinds of strange ways because you've got like characters on TV, for example, at time when it was criminalised, gay. It was gay men were still being thrown in jail and being treated up paulingly. And yet you've got camp characters on TV. And I'm always fascinated by how does this work then? How are people reading these characters against a backdrop of, well, it's illegal to be gay? Some like drag balls,

for example, like, we're so RuPaul's drag races all over the place and it's been a proper game changer. But there must have been a culture before that. Of course there was. What was camp doing at the 20th century? Well, it was there. So you have the villains and you have have them, often camp people would play cameos in films and things like that. I mean, you know, thinking about the carry-on films. God, yes, of course. And you've got, say, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hortry, who played camp characters. They played sort of heterosexual or kind of asexual characters. They weren't sort of listening up to men, but you'd have to be very naive, I think, and innocent to have not understood what was, what those characters were,

how they were acting and being used. And also, Kenneth Williams, you know, had a radio sketch where he played one half of Julian and Sandy on this radio sketch show called Round the Horn. And And they were, you know, very, very camp characters. And again, they didn't come out and say they were gay, but they used so much slang in innuendo and euthanism that it was very, very clear, even more so than the carry-on films. And this was a kind of Sunday afternoon comedy show. Families were listened to it after their Sunday's dinner.

And it was the best bit of the show, people loved it. And they got away with it week after week. So I think maybe it shows that people were ready for decriminalisation. The law was homophobic. Maybe society wasn't as homophobic as the law wanted them to be. Maybe it was about making something safe. again as well, is that they're not ready to have these conversations yet about homosexuality or lesbians more sexuality, but camp somehow makes it a bit safer for everybody to talk about.

I think it does, definitely. I remember, you know, as a child watching a show called the Larry Grayson's Generation Game, it was so popular in the 70s. And Larry Grayson was, you know, amazing camp compare. You know, he was wonderful. And everyone I knew loved him. But at the same time, I mean, he was what I heard a lot of the word puff when I was growing up. And people said, oh, he's a puff. And nobody wanted to be a puff. That was the thing in the, you know, nobody wanted you to be a puff. But at the same time, he was a puff and he was loved.

And I could never really get past that tension or that contradiction, I think, between loving him but not wanting people to be him, which doesn't make sense. I think people like him, they were groundbreaking in that they did make homosexuality appear funny and safe and cozy as well and not this kind of scary and known kind of thing, which I think was so important for the time. So what do you think the future of camp is then? That's a tricky question that one, isn't it? Because camp is, well, it hasn't exploded.

It's been around forever and ever and ever, but it has become increasingly more mainstream. And we've seen the rise of RuPaul's Drag Race. And when the Met Gala a couple of years ago, their theme was Camp. And you can see there's a distinct backlash coming our way, especially in America at the moment, where they're like, right,

no more drag queens can read to children ever, but guns are fine. And it's like, that's a strange pushback. But what do you think the future of camp is? Well, it's a difficult one to decide. I mean, in the book, I give kind of four possible scenarios or four possible futures based upon society becoming a utopia or a dystopia or they've been an apocalypse

or they've been a business-as-usual scenario thing. And each one camp would be a bit different, I think. All of which are probably going to be completely wrong anyway because I'm not a psychic. But it's nice to clay with the idea, have a thought experiment about where it could go. I kind of quite like the idea of artificial intelligence and robots being camp. Camp robots.

I don't know if you've experimented with chat GPT at all. I think that everyone's saying is going to destroy the world. Not yet. One of the things about it, I find, is that it's their camp in itself because it's not that good yet. And so what I've been doing with it, I've been getting it to kind of make scripts of some of my favorite TV shows and films and saying, like, make a sequel to this film.

And then it just does it. And because it's not brilliant, it doesn't create works of art, but it creates quite wood and bad dialogue. that in itself is quite camp. So I got it to create a sequel to a Joan Collins film called The Bitch. And it came up with a brilliant sequel called The Cougar. And it had some amazing dialogue and very sassy lines, quite believable plotline and a killer ending.

And I thought, actually, this is better than the original film, which in itself is kind of a bad film. And that's why I love it because it's so camp. But I thought, you know, there's a role for artificial intelligence here to make things count and to kind of continue that. So I like the idea of us in the future, surrounded by robots, you know, who kind of have been programmed to be funny and to entertain us and be great. And they're coming out with lots of camp repartee, camp lines at us. And I just quite like that.

I think that would be a nice way to spend your older years surrounded by camp robots. I like that one. What about the apocalyptic ending? What happens there? What happens to camp in the apocalypse? There's not a lot of it. I think we're all too busy, I think, fighting for survival, fighting the robots. I think some of us, the strong ones, would maybe use camp to get. through the worst of it, you know. And often you find that in drama films or action films where the hero will give a camp line when something's going wrong, you know, to sort of show that they don't care or whatever. James Bond does it a lot. Yes, action heroes. Use camp, yeah. James Bond. Yes. You'd need that in apocalypse, wouldn't you? You would. You'd need that as a coping tool to

survive. So I think there'd be a bit of that, but I think on the hill, we'd be too busy running. Yeah, you're right. You know, or collecting firewood. Far too busy running to be doing makeup and things like that. No, you're quite right. Do you think there's a danger that camp, because by its nature it's subversive, but as it becomes more mainstream, it's harder to be subversive when everyone's going, oh, we're not, that is, that's fine. Or do you think that it's just going to evolve and find new things? It is harder, I think, and that's the problem with it.

I think, I mean, I talk about in the book how by about the 1990s, there was enough awareness of it, that it was harder to find real-life examples where people are camp and they're not aware of their camp. So what you have instead is campy, where, you know, people are doing it on purpose. And that's fine. And that's something like RuPaul's rag race is actually campy as opposed to camp. And what I talk about in the 90s was people at my age when I was in my 20s. We kind of run-sacked the past to get our fix of true camp. So we went back to like the 1970s.

And me and my friends would have 1970s parties in about 1988 and 89. And we wear our parents' clothes and stuff. And we danced to disco. And we did it because it was so bad at a time that was all seen as very unfashionable and uncool. And so we had these bad taste parties playing with the 70s. that's the kind of thing that you can do. You can go back into the past and draw on when camp was proper camp. And it's easier to do that than ever because of YouTube and things.

Do you think things are mostly camping out that it's self-conscious? I think they are. I think it's very harder to find unselfconscious things. Yesterday I was on the tube and I was kind of going up the escalators. You know how they have all those posters up to sort of entertain you as you're going up to stop you from being bored when you're going up the escalator. I thought I'd count all the ones that I camp and the ones that are not. And I think only two of them were not to camp in some way. The rest of them all had some kind of camp thing

that they were kind of doing to get your attention. And I thought, oh my God, it's everywhere. It's like air. Yes. It's campy. They know what they're doing. They're using it to get us to buy stuff. And then once that's done,

then it's how long can it last? I think my example of something that is camp because it doesn't mean to be. In fact, it's trying very hard not to be, was a tweet put out by Andrew Tate, misogynist and mens right activist of par excellence, after he'd got out of jail. And it was a tweet of him,

shirtless, with all his muscles, and he was smoking a massive cigar, right? And he was listening to Judy Garland. Oh, no. Bless him. Well, yes, he is very, very calm. And his whole thing was about like, oh, yeah, I'm out of jail now, like, you know, back on my freedom. And you're looking at going, this is the most objectively gay tweet that I have ever seen in my whole life.

Perfect. I don't know if he's camp, though. I think he is. He wouldn't like that. No, he'd hate it probably. But I think he very much is. And I think, actually, a lot of Twitter is camp. I think of all of the different social medias that they're all, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok,

Facebook. I think Twitter is the campus of the lot, I think, because there's so much fervent, kind of serious debate on there. And people take themselves ever so seriously and they try to present themselves in certain ways. And it often fails, I think. And people exaggerate. They turn up the volume to kind of get their message across as well. And they know that. They'll get more likes than what outrageous they say. So you have that kind of sense of people being outrageous and over the top. And then maybe unintentionally representing themselves as well. That thing where people do that hand clap emoji between words, I find that very camp. I don't know if people are always doing that and they know how camp it is or whether they mean it seriously.

But I love it. It's never occurred to me that was camp before. Oh, Paul, you have been a ridiculous amount of fun to talk to about this. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you to send you clapping tweets and Instagram? I do have an Instagram. It's called Camp the Book. So you can go and look. And what I'm trying to do with that is have it as a repository of some of the video clips and things that I talk about in the book itself.

So rather than having to go and find them, you can always go to my Instagram. They're all there. And I'm on Twitter as well. I think it's underscore Paul Baker underscore. But I try not to be camp on Twitter. No handclaps for me. Give us the full title of the book. So it's camp, exclamation mark, the story of the attitude that conquered the world.

Thank you so much for talking to me today. I have had a ridiculous amount of fun with you. You too. I know, that was great. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Paul for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe,

wherever it is, that you get your fabulous podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject, or if you just want to say hi, you can email us. You can get us at betwixt at history hit.com. To give you more of a flavour, we have upcoming episodes on everything from Mozart's sex life to the history of lube. This podcast was produced and edited by students.

Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, you wonderful bitches. The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.