All of this talk about C.A.M.P. – but what is “camp”? The only hint we get from the C.A.M.P. series is that the “C” stands for “sucker”.
But what about the “camp” phenomenon? The word isn’t so mainstream today but we still hear it. The theme of the 2019 Met Gala was “camp” (see Fabio Cleto’s introduction to “Camp: Notes on Fashion”). A lot has been written about it, but what is it?
Susan Sontag attempts to address this question in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”. Professor Dave Bergman disagrees with her, as he explains in his essay “A Note on ‘Notes on Camp”.
Fabio Cleto, academic specialist on popular culture and Professor of Cultural History and English Literature at the University of Bergamo, Italy, wrote the forward to That Man from C.A.M.P.: Rebel without a Pause and wrote the introduction to Victor’s memoir, Spine Intact, Some Creases. He has also written several other pieces regarding the “camp” phenomenon. See his into to Camp Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject.
Below is the forward to That Man from C.A.M.P.: Rebel without a Pause where Fabio discusses spies and camp. Hold on tight because this post is about to get academic!
“Of Spies, Diamonds, and Queens” (or, acting like an editor)
Foreword to That Man from C.A.M.P. Rebel Without a Pause
What’s in a spy? Well, a spy is a spy is a spy is a spy, we might say, echoing a highly distinguished literary rose. Such iteration, however, brings forth no commonplace factuality: it is rather a statement of the threefold soul of the secret agent, of the mobile, flexible, and performative identity inherent to his or her clandestinity, to an “under-cover” existence led on the fringes of legality.
First of all, lexicographers tell us, a spy is a secret voyeur on people and things, someone who stealthily seeks information from hostile motives, prying for military, political, technological, or industrial information about “the enemy”; in short, the secret agent, detecting, collecting, and transmitting reserved data, is the root of modern intelligence.
Second, and consequently, even when he or she does not indulge in double-crossing, the spy is ethically ambiguous—and doubly so: on one side, intelligence is based on masquerade, disguise, and deceit; on the other side, the spy’s moral value depends on who is the enemy, the spy or the spied. In other words, it depends on who the spy plays for. A spy can thus be regarded as a secret agent of good or evil forces, a traitor or savior, someone whose secrecy is a necessary way to keep evil plots under control; a necessary and exciting way, novels and movies tell us, for the spy can indeed break taboos: he or she is licensed to kill, drink, and gamble, but especially, we must admit we all noted it, to be promiscuous. Not for personal pleasure, of course: just for the sake of the nation, no doubt about it.
And yet, unsurprisingly, there’s more than meets the (sp)eye. Given its meaning of “informer,” the word spy can be stretched in some languages (for instance, in the Italian spia) to mean not only the subject but also the object of the prying gaze, i.e., what the spy-observer detects. As an informer, a spy is metaphorically close indeed to circumstantial evidence, to a clue, trace, peephole, symptom, or telltale sign.
So, there’s something queer in what a spy is, after all. The more so when the spy’s name is Jackie Holmes, and the agency he works for is the esoterically named C.A.M.P., a secret organization created in 1966 by young author Victor J. Banis (appropriately publishing Jackie’s adventures under disguise, under the byline Don Holliday), who had published just one gay novel at the time, and would rapidly become a major figure in queer pulp, with an impressive record of books—well over a hundred gay and lesbian pulps, gothic romances, and many other “connoisseurs’ choices”—under an equally impressive number of noms de plume of both genders. Every now and then, he resorted to the “explicit veil” of anonymity, or used the most cunning impersonation of Victor Banis, a mask echoing the “earnest” tradition of Oscar Wilde’s Ernest. It was the Man from C.A.M.P. book series, however, that boosted indeed this talented-writer-in-disguise into hyperactivity on the paperback mass market of the late 1960s and 1970s, making him a most appreciated figure in the paperback culture industry (I guess he must have had many “this month’s employee” prizes in the pulp factory of Greenleaf, Corinth, and other publishing houses he worked for), and—just like his dear creature, Jackie Holmes—a sort of underground celebrity.
There are definitely many queer things about Victor Banis’s serial spy fiction. The secret organization C.A.M.P., and its top agent—due to appear in eight novels in the following two years, plus a cookbook, and an astrology guide—were in fact dedicated to “the protection and advancement of homosexuals”: no predictable, straight stuff like “Bond, James Bond” and his many look-alikes. Jackie Holmes was thus both good (well, excellent) and very evil, according to contemporary cultural standards; and his agency, C.A.M.P., can be taken as a clue, a superb telltale sign of, oh, a number of things—let’s just say here, the cultural history of the 1960s.
We are surrounded by spies. Their pervasive presence, certified in the past hundred years in cinema, television programs, and literature, has been turned into an all-too-evident issue by the recent burgeoning of international terrorism, peopling our streets with endless potential spies, and with even more secret agents and devices of surveillance than those we had uneasily grown accustomed to. Our age is the age of CCTV and of Echelon, God’s ear, the all-listening surveillance network chaired by NSA, an age in which business, state affairs, and wars, are conducted by means of intelligence rather than with mere investments, diplomacy, and armies.
Our fictional as well as our physical landscape, as a matter of fact, is jam-packed with secret agents. Every week or so another action thriller film is released, starring new moles and secret agents, or bringing back to celluloid life charming ghosts—Charlie’s Angels, Ethan Hunt, Emma Peel, and John Steed are just a few worth mentioning—from the golden age of pop villains and heroes, the 1960s and 1970s, engaging them in more and more Missions Implausible. While such comebacks, as seriously as they may take themselves (in some cases, at least), are largely justified in their bearing witness to the charms of ingenuity of times gone by, they often exploit the camp flavor of the originals—when they don’t straightforwardly indulge in a camp rewriting of 1960s camp classics. Such is the case, of course, with Austin Powers, the spy who cloned and recloned himself after the arch-camp James Bond from the 1967 film version of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale—warning us all, in doing so, of the dangers of genetic engineering.
But why was spy fiction so central to postwar years? Possibly for the very same reasons that brought Jackie Holmes to life, along with legions of pulp characters and a throng of superheroes. That was the time when battles were increasingly fought not by means of troops and weapons, but by secret agencies. In the 1950s and 1960s, cultural historians tell us, there was a war indeed, with moves, tactics, strategies. It was not just the well-advertised Cold War between the free West and the Soviet bloc: it was rather some kind of civil war. (Well, it was so much of a civil war as to reach the point of being, in some cases, not just civil, but exquisite.)
Spies were on the move indeed, undermining U.S. identity and disheartening the struggle to save the free world. As early as 1948, the Kinsey Report reinforced the bluff-your-way-into-Freudian-theory view of human sexuality, placing everybody on a bisexual continuum. So, good citizens learned that there might be something queer in every- body—and everybody meant even themselves. From the 1950s on, pulp sociological studies and shocking novels—gaudy content wrapped in lurid art covers—increasingly exploited such thrill, representing a queer underworld packed with hustlers, drug dealers and addicts, “odd girls out” and sad-boys-doomed-to-tragedy, fairies and faggots, drag queens and kings, transvestites and fetish lovers. Squares learned that they lived quite close to many furtive enemies of the state, and they were both shocked and tickled into venturing on social downsides. All you needed to do was look for them in the right place—a drugstore or a newsstand might be a good starting point if you looked at the right racks, for there you could easily read about their evil deeds—and there they were, hundreds, thousands of them. Suspicion on the neighbor’s sexuality bloomed in McCarthyite culture: both spies and unorthodox sexualities lived in masquerade, acting and impersonation, after all. Editorialists from Great Britain stated it out loud and clear: homosexuals, who lived by means of cunning and deceit, made natural spies. If you joined an aesthetic disposition to such homosexual feelings, well, that made two clues leading from suspect to culprit. Common wisdom said homosexuals were doubly available to un- American activities: on the one side they were not real men and proper citizens; on the other side their vulnerability to blackmailing made them prey to communists, who might lure them into becoming spies. So, keep your eyes wide open, and watch out for them.
Courts were a crucial battleground. As film censorship had to loosen the grip it had established in prewar years—the 1930 Hays Code set the moral standards for Hollywood studio productions, banning “sex perversion” of all kinds from representation along with rape, detailed descriptions of brutal killings, and other such amenities—in the 1950s popular films increasingly gave way to homosexual stock characters, to drag (some may like it very hot and, despite what they claim, gentlemen may prefer those blonds), and to the tradition that Rebecca Bell-Metereau surveys in Hollywood Androgyny (Columbia University Press, 1985). A series of sensational trials on the rights of the press brought even more visibility to unorthodox sexualities, and their surprising verdicts entailed a change in legal standards. Echoes of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial came from Great Britain first, in 1960, along with the production of two films (Oscar Wilde and The Trials of Oscar Wilde) on the greatest “sodomite” of modern times, the subject of the most sensational trial and stigmatization of the late nineteenth century. H. Lynn Womack—the king of “physique pictorials,” i.e., male erotic photo magazines, and a champion of First Amendment rights—won a historical legal action in 1961 that acknowledged the right of his magazines to circulate in the United States, paving the road to Womack’s mail-order book service called the Guild Press, that would bring him to chair a gay porn empire. As gay pulp fiction—different from lesbian-themed pulps—had an allegedly “inherent” pornographic nature, its circulation was closely tied to the forensic battlefield. When William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch got away with it in 1966, it was pretty clear that nothing would stop the pulp revolution, bringing paper spies and their real-life counterparts on the lead. Stonewall was just around the corner.
In the 1960s, the attack on U.S. sexual citizenship found several allies in the sneaky erosion of straight gender roles and identity models. Pulp fiction’s sensationalism was in fact a stage mirroring the different challenges brought by mass culture and unorthodox sexualities to the establishment. Endless images construe a decade of antiauthoritarian rebellion, challenging social norms. Hippies and rockers, Timothy Leary and the LSD counterculture, feminist activism, poster art and flower child cult, happenings and collage, action poetry, New York intellectuals, Tom Wolfe’s radical chic and new journalism, Leslie Fieldler’s pop and freaks, reader-response criticism, the Batman series aired by ABC network, unisex fashion, optical design and outrageous architecture, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol’s queer Pop Art and icons, fifteen-minutes celebrity culture, underground films— championed by Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith—indulging in visual excess and perversions both sexual and cinematic, beat music, Jim Morrison, the Rolling Stones and their sympathy for the devil, the Kinks and their “mixed up muddled up shook up world” (a world in which “girls will be boys and boys will be girls”), leading to 1970s glam-and-glitter androgyny (Gary Glitter, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, the New York Dolls, the whole bunch of alien queens playing “rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on,” as John Lennon—not the squarest of guys himself, by the way—tagged it). It was a swinging decade that—as Patricia Juliana Smith claims in her anthology The Queer Sixties (Routledge, 1999), a must-read on the subject—has a “quasi-legendary” status, peopling our imaginations with “icons and iconoclasts,” with ghosts that keep haunting us.
All cultural areas were invested by this weird sense of liberated desire and excitement, construing a classless dream society, a wide demimonde gathering lowlife and high society, underground bars and art galleries, youngsters and intellectuals. It was New York critic Susan Sontag who, in a seminal essay published forty years ago in the Partisan Review, named this cultural scenario relishing surface and artifice, the bizarre and quaint, self-contradiction and evanescence, replicas and bad taste, irony and aristocratic detachment, “laughing with” rather than “laughing at” marginality: that scenario was camp.
As a matter of fact, she was employing an old word, emerging from the late nineteenth-century queer underworld of theatricals, tramps, and crooks, circulating in the world of high fashion and literary connoisseurs, and representing the bulk of homosexual subculture of the first half of the twentieth century. And yet, it was a word that all of a sudden might be employed to describe a whole zeitgeist. That word might be used to describe the triumph of style over content, an apology of failed seriousness, the so-bad-it’s-good identity as role-playing and the world as a stage (and as such, a most appropriate setting for pop spies). Both in the United States and in Great Britain, mass media immediately seized upon that naughty monosyllable: the New Statesman, Time, Holiday, Art News, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Herald Tribune and the New Yorker hosted pieces on the “new sensational taste.” Camp was so much a marketable idea as to gain the front cover of an Observer color supplement issue in 1966, and to be used as a catchphrase for a furniture sale advertisement in the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, Sontag immediately became a media celebrity herself, “the Camp Girl,” an icon of the cultural turmoil and excitement touching all areas of social life. She became a foremost spy figure of the anti-intellectual mid-sixties, a time when, all of a sudden, the world just looked different. It looked definitely queer, and what’s most important, it seemed a much nicer place to live in.
The establishment being under patent siege, squares had to resort to their heroes, most notably the greatest spy of all time, Sir James Bond, setting new standards of genre and gender for years to come. Mr. Double-O-Seven took up his film career in 1962 with Dr. No, opening a series of striking successes as secret agent and as cash maker. He presented a world in which boys will be boys (reaffirming male gaze and dominance) and girls will be girls (gorgeous playthings that, as much as they may nurture criminal plots, do love being mastered). He spectacularly tamed the Soviet secret service of SMERSH, the corporate crime of SPECTRE, and an amazing number of villains embodying the specters of miscegenation (in Dr. No) and lesbianism, which he managed either to arrest (that’s the fate of Rosa Klebb in From Russia, with Love) or to redeem (as with lovely superdyke Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, who ends up in Bond’s lofty and lusty heterosexual embrace). The mid-sixties were the age of pop camp as much as of James Bond, who seemed to offer a powerful affirmation of white, male, bourgeois, Euro-American values, and a role model that straights might identify with—at last!—so as to stop feeling irredeemably out- of-date.
The Bond craze produced many spin-offs, of course, including the popular television series The Avengers, Mission: Impossible, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., staging Bond’s allied agents in fighting secret evils spreading around the country. They got help from other paper superheroes, such as Captain America, Superman, and Flash Gordon. The sad truth for squares under siege is that such deployment of forces may not have been so effective, and on two grounds. On the one side, the extraordinary ability of camp to invert values and to pervert codes turned the establishment’s not-so-secret agents into double-crossers.
These agents were very much camp themselves, being sooo heterosexual, sooo too-much, as to enact themselves their own parody. They were all spies or masked agents, in fact, and you know, one should never trust a spy.
On the other side, such normalizing agents immediately gave way to sheer parodies, and to countercultural icons, which of course turned the rules of the Bond game against themselves. Sir James Bond was the protagonist himself of some queer adventures in Casino Royale, the only unofficial film production of the very first Fleming novel, in which the proliferation of Bond look-alikes is staged literally (all secret agents being renamed after the original superspy, who unwillingly gives up his retirement in order to save the honor of Her Majesty’s Secret Service by guiding his own replicas to a feast of parody). He got into double gaming and cross-dressing in Cyril Connolly’s lovely 1963 short story, “Bond Strikes Camp,” which brings 007 to a mission in drag in a gay bar (he’s to act as “Gerda Blond”) only to find out that Miss Moneypenny is a dyke into leather and that “M” has devised the whole plot in order to seduce him (“I am sorry, James. It was the only way I could get you”). Parodies of the straight spy (whatever that may mean) or superhero narratives abound, from mainstream classics—Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966), based upon Peter O’Donnell’s comic strip and books, Roger Vadim’s sexy fantasy Barbarella (1968), the Batman television series and the movie released in 1966, starring Adam West and bringing the caped crusader and his oh-my-goodness young companion to mass double-entendre consumption—to underground pieces such as Andy Warhol’s 1964 Batman Dracula, the “Harry Chess” (i.e., “the Man from A.U.N.T.I.E.”) comic strip published in Drum magazine in 1965, and Spy on the Fly (one of the counter-Hollywood amateur productions of the Gay Girls Riding Club), bringing secret agent 0069 to a beauty salon where, after reading a Payboy magazine, he fights a criminal plot (don’t ask how he does that, please).
And there was C.A.M.P.’s top agent, leading such bouquet of exquisite, dancing queens. In his own very name he hyped and conflated gender attributes, powerfully mixing feminine (“Jackie”) and masculine (“Holmes”) stereotypes into the explosive cocktail of a John-Holmes-with-a-twist. A flamboyant blond bombshell armed with a cache of skillfully concealed weapons (besides some obvious technology, there are his white poodle Sophie who’s in fact trained to kill, and his own amazing body, an irresistible sexpot fit for world records— and I’m not just talking about sports records), he is a first-class expert in gemology, skilled marksman and Bugatti mechanic, a relentless se- ducer, and a most effective resource when Interpol fails in fighting evil schemes and brutal villains. In the three novelettes you’ll find in this volume, for instance, Jackie wins against a gay diamond counterfeit- ing ring, a band of midget outlaws who dress up as Santa Claus in order to purloin diamonds from stores, and an international kidnapping ring that brings him from Los Angeles to Tijuana on to Lisbon.
If compared to mainstream parodic heroes, he was possibly less universally known, true, but certainly of equal—if not superior—momentum. Not only because he was gay and proud of it before it was plausible, or because he was advocating what in academic jargon might be called “second-wave feminist theory” at a time when first-wave feminism was getting on the move. His adventures, as a matter of fact, were read by an impressive number of people, and what’s most, they are still read in outworn copies, remnant to the mass production of the years 1966-1968, and most valuable collector’s copies. So, he was—and still is—quite active as a spy figure. His lower visibility may be taken as part of his being a superspy, as obviously, a good spy is one whose deeds take place behind the scenes. (Need an example?)
In case you don’t know it yet, you may understand the 1960s pop scene much better by learning that the Beatles’ manager, the one who crafted their image, was in fact a closeted queen.) Well, there are rumors that when the Stonewall riots took place in New York, in June 1969, boosting the gay struggle for civil rights, Jackie Holmes and his secret agency were also there to mourn Judy Garland, and did not miss the chance to hit and fight for a world of justice and freedom. As such, the Man from C.A.M.P. books are certainly period pieces, but not just like many other things—greeting cards, magnets, Bakelite goods, etc.—that may be recovered from our mythological past to add the glamour and emotional gratification of campy “moral twilight” to our furniture and bookshelves. Victor Banis’ serial spy hero is in fact a most powerful sign of the times (he is, in other words, a spy as “clue,” “trace,” or “peephole”), a ghost constantly materializing in pulp postcards and in essays on the U.S. 1960s, and now, nearly forty years after his debut, back to a new edition that will introduce him to a whole new generation of readers.
Camp and its dotted, capitalized version we are introduced to behind the debris of the Round Up bar when we first meet Jackie Holmes, share the very same kismet, and telltale sign value. When Jackie’s books disappeared from the market, camp also languished, banned by 1970s gay activists as belonging to the self-stigmatization of pre-Stonewall queer culture. The mid-sixties camp craze was dismissed as a vulgar cooptation enacted by the dominant culture’s “tasting it”: by making it into a style, straights turned it into some- thing fashionable and inoffensive (“it’s so cute!”), as they effaced its homosexual raison d’être. Just like C.A.M.P. was a secret organization that helped homosexuals survive until the world would become a more just and fair place, historical camp might be seen as a survival strategy, a twin of what soul represented for African Americans, a pe- culiarly homosexual vernacular and way of coping with a bitter reality of hatred and scorn: as such, at best it doomed those who indulged in its lavishness to self-ghettoing.
More recent years, however, have seen a revival of camp, in both queer activist practices and critical thinking. At stake right now are its history, definition, and politics. Camp has variously been framed as “style,” “taste,” “sensibility,” “aesthetic,” or “cultural economy,” as self-derogatory or subversive strategy for the gay community. As such, camp is a quite problematic (and nevertheless central) element of our cultural history, a slippery, enigmatic, contradictory issue that may only be defined by adopting a metaphor, such as the diamond metaphor I deployed in my book, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Edinburgh University Press/University of Michigan Press, 1999). The diamond image, in fact, brings forth the quintessence of camp, its preciousness and instability, the value of diamonds being in the beams and figments produced in reflection and refraction on their multifaceted surface. It’s worth noting that in her superb graphic guide, Queer Pulp (Chronicle Books, 2001), Susan Stryker writes that the jewel-encrusted statuette everybody runs after in Dashiell Ham- mer’s The Maltese Falcon is “pulp literature’s most potent symbol of the process through which projected fantasies become concrete and circulate endlessly through the pathways of deferred desire.” If such is the value of the pulp diamond, and if the diamond image best describes the multilayered complexity of camp, it is quite significant that Jackie’s exploits began by crushing a criminal ring of fake diamonds.
In Jackie’s stories, in fact, we can trace the whole complexity of camp, of pulp’s whirling fantasy world, and the whole ambiguity of the Sixties revolution itself. These are all stories in which Interpol relies upon C.A.M.P. to fight enemies it fails to understand. Stories in which heterosexuality relies upon camp to police its alterity. So, albeit unwillingly, Jackie Holmes may have been working for heterosexual institutions, after all; just like camp, according to some critics, helped integrate homosexual subculture into straight society, by selling gay identity on the cooptation market. And yet, Jackie’s stories are also stories of relentless seduction, for he inexorably manages to penetrate all straight agents that Interpol couples him with. In a way, Jackie is just like Lola, the queen of the Kinks’ “mixed up muddled up shook up world,” appearing just a few years before the Kinks sang her epics of seduction (“Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man, but I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola”). Was he building a bridge between heterosexuality and homosexuality? Was he promoting pan- or bisexuality? Was he—as David Bergman states in his excellent contribution to Patricia Juliana Smith’s The Queer Sixties—really building a sense of gay community? Was he infiltrating and destabilizing straight culture, or was he really acting as a plaything, policing boundaries, for dominant culture? Just like all of the 1960s spies, was he possibly double-crossing, triple-crossing, or what?
Oh well. The politics of C.A.M.P. and of its top agent may not be clear, just like the schemes of camp will remain irreducibly duplicitous. All said and done, what can you expect from a secret agent, if not ambiguity? Certainly, you shouldn’t look for clear and straight politics, when spies are at stake. But there’s one thing that is quite clear. C.A.M.P., Jackie Holmes, and the whole horde of characters we meet in these novelettes, are outrageously funny, even today. It may well be that we deserve such class of excitement—in academia as well as in the real world—now even more than when they were brought to life. Yes, it is high time we take leave of campy academic jabber, and just indulge ourselves in his gaudy, exhilarating, priceless adventures.
Fabio Cleto
February 2004
