There’s a certain kind of person who, upon being shown a six-foot drag queen in a gown made entirely of working disco balls, will frown and ask, “But what does it mean?” The correct answer is that it means a great deal, and also that asking is slightly missing the point. The camp aesthetic has spent the better part of a century being misunderstood by exactly this person — the one who needs art to file a flight plan before it’s allowed to take off.
Camp is the sensibility that says you can be dead serious about being unserious. It loves the failed grand gesture, the chandelier in the studio apartment, the torch song delivered with one too many key changes. It is theatrical, knowing, a little too much on purpose — and it has been queer people’s native tongue for a very long time, which is precisely why it keeps getting flattened into “ironic bad taste” by everyone who didn’t grow up speaking it.
So let’s do the thing camp itself would never do and get rigorous about it. What is camp, where did it come from, why is drag its loudest dialect, and why does any of this matter in a year when the whole conversation has gotten so tense? Pour something pink. We’re going in.
Here’s the problem with defining camp: the moment you pin it to the wall like a butterfly, it dies a little. It’s a sensibility, not a checklist — a way of seeing that prizes artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and a kind of loving extravagance. Camp doesn’t roll its eyes at the over-the-top. It pulls up a velvet chair and applauds.
The clearest way in is to separate camp from its cousins. Kitsch is something tacky made without irony — a porcelain figurine that genuinely believes in itself. Camp is what happens when a sophisticated eye adores that figurine precisely because it tries so hard and overshoots. Camp is not “this is bad.” Camp is “this is so committed to being fabulous that it loops back around to glorious.” The failed seriousness is the whole charm.
A few load-bearing traits, since camp loves a list almost as much as it loves a feather boa:
If you’ve ever wept at a soap opera while fully aware it was ridiculous, you have felt the camp aesthetic from the inside. The trick is holding two things at once: this is absurd, and I would die for it.
The word itself has a backstory more dramatic than most of the things it describes. Etymologists generally trace “camp” to the French se camper — roughly, to strike an exaggerated, provocative pose — a phrase that turns up in Molière in the 1600s. From a strutting theatrical posture to a whole queer sensibility is, frankly, a very camp journey for a word to take.
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the earliest printed use of “camp” as an adjective to 1909, in J.R. Ware’s slang dictionary Passing English of the Victorian Era, where it’s glossed as ostentatious, affected, and exaggerated — and already flagged as the lingo of a particular underground. Long before anyone wrote it down, “camp” lived in coded speech, in theater dressing rooms, and in the corners of cities where being too much was both a danger and a defiant joy.
That coding is not incidental. For generations when queerness was illegal or unspeakable, camp functioned as a private frequency — a way to signal, flirt, mock the powerful, and survive the closet with your wit intact. The arched eyebrow could say what the mouth couldn’t. Camp was armor that happened to be sequined.
You cannot discuss this subject for ninety seconds before someone invokes Susan Sontag, and for once the name-drop is earned. In 1964, Sontag published “Notes on ‘Camp'” in the Partisan Review, later collecting it in her 1966 book Against Interpretation. It was the moment the sensibility got escorted out of the underground and onto the syllabus.
Sontag wrote the essay as a numbered list of observations — itself a faintly camp gesture, refusing the tidy thesis — and gave the wider world a vocabulary for something queer communities had been fluent in forever. She located camp in artifice, in extravagance, in “the love of the unnatural,” and in the strange seriousness of the unserious. The essay is dazzling, much-cited, and also exactly the kind of document that lets a sensibility get domesticated.
Because here’s the friendly quarrel queer writers have had with Sontag ever since: in making camp legible to the mainstream, the essay arguably loosened its grip on its queer roots, treating it as a free-floating “taste” anyone could pick up like a scarf. Sontag herself acknowledged camp’s deep ties to gay culture. But once a secret language gets a famous translator, the secret part tends to evaporate. That tension — between camp as universal style and camp as specifically queer survival — is still the most interesting fight in the room.
If camp is a sensibility, drag culture is its most spectacular stage production. Drag takes every camp instinct — artifice, exaggeration, glorious excess, the wink that’s also a knife — and gives it a body, a name, and a spotlight. It is camp that talks back.
And drag has never been just about looking pretty in heels. The best drag is argument disguised as entertainment: it exaggerates the performance of gender precisely to reveal that gender was always a bit of a performance. That’s why it can be so funny and so quietly radical at the same time. Queer humor has always understood that the surest way to defang a rigid system is to put it in a wig and make it lip-sync.
The lineage runs deep. Long before any reality show, there were the ball cultures of Harlem, the midnight stages, and figures like Divine — the muse of filmmaker John Waters, whose 1972 cult film Pink Flamingos turned trash, shock, and pastel excess into a camp landmark whose fingerprints are all over queer cinema and, eventually, every glittering thing that came after.
Then drag got a primetime slot. RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered in 2009 on the cable channel Logo, migrated to VH1 in 2017, and grew into a multi-Emmy-winning franchise that exported the art form to living rooms worldwide. Suddenly “tuck,” “read,” and “the library is open” were turning up in group chats run by people who had never set foot in a gay bar. Drag had gone, against very long odds, fully mainstream.
The high-water mark of camp’s mainstream moment came draped in feathers on a flight of stairs. The 2019 Met Gala took as its theme “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” a Costume Institute exhibition built explicitly on the framework of Sontag’s essay. The accompanying gala was co-chaired by a murderers’ row of icons including Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Serena Williams.
It was, predictably, a riot — Lady Gaga performed a striptease of four nested outfits on the carpet, which is possibly the single most camp sentence ever to appear in a fashion recap. And yet the evening doubled as a teaching moment in what happens when a queer underground sensibility gets the red-carpet treatment.
Because a fair number of guests showed up in tasteful, expensive, perfectly nice gowns that were not camp in the slightest. They’d heard the theme as “fancy” or “weird.” That gap — between people who understood camp as a queer language and people who treated it as a costume prompt — was the most instructive thing about the whole night. Camp can be borrowed. It cannot quite be faked.
It would be easy to treat all this as settled history — camp won, drag’s on TV, we can stop now. That reading would be a mistake. Drag and queer humor have moved back into the center of a cultural fight, and the camp instinct to laugh at power has rarely been more useful.
When something gets legislated against, protested, and turned into a punchline by people who’d clearly never seen a show, that’s usually a sign it carries real cultural weight. Drag is loud, joyful, gender-bending, and unembarrassed — which makes it a convenient target for anyone invested in everyone staying quietly in their assigned box. Organizations like GLAAD have spent years documenting how drag performers and queer expression keep ending up in the crosshairs of these culture wars.
And this is exactly where camp reveals it was never frivolous. A sensibility built by people who had to find joy under pressure, who turned exclusion into a private language and survival into a spectacle, is not a luxury good. It’s a tool. Queer humor doesn’t deny that things are hard; it insists on dancing anyway, which is a far more defiant act than despair. The boa is the resistance.
It’s worth naming, too, that camp and drag aren’t a monolith. They look different across cultures, races, generations, and identities — drag is performed and reinvented by trans women and men, cis women, nonbinary artists, and people who’d reject every one of those labels. The sensibility has never belonged to one kind of queer person, and pretending otherwise would be the least camp thing imaginable.
The deepest joke camp ever told is the one in its own structure: that being unserious is itself a serious commitment. It takes discipline to be this extravagant, craft to land the perfect “too much,” intelligence to mock the right things with affection rather than cruelty. Camp is not laziness in a feather headdress. It’s precision pretending to be a party.
So the next time someone demands to know what the disco-ball gown means, you can tell them the truth. It means a century of coded survival and stubborn joy. It means a language queer people built when no other language was safe. It means that the people most determined to laugh are often the ones who’ve had the least reason to — and the most courage to do it anyway. The camp aesthetic was never about not caring. It was about caring so much you put it in sequins and let it shine.
Camp is a sensibility that finds delight in artifice, exaggeration, and theatrical excess — loving things precisely because they’re “too much” or gloriously over-the-top. It’s not the same as bad taste; it’s a knowing, affectionate appreciation of style, drama, and the failed-but-fabulous grand gesture. Think extravagance with a wink.
In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,'” later collected in Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag described camp as a sensibility rooted in artifice, exaggeration, and “the love of the unnatural.” Written as a list of numbered observations, the essay introduced camp to a wide mainstream audience and remains its most-cited definition — though many writers argue it loosened camp’s specifically queer roots in the process.
Camp developed as a coded language among queer communities at a time when being openly LGBTQ+ was dangerous or illegal. Its wit, exaggeration, and theatricality let people signal to one another, mock the powerful, and find joy under pressure. Drag is camp’s most visible art form, exaggerating the performance of gender to entertain and quietly challenge rigid norms.
The 2019 Met Gala theme was “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” tied to a Costume Institute exhibition that drew its framework from Sontag’s essay. Co-chaired by figures including Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Serena Williams, the night became a high-profile, sometimes uneven, public crash course in what camp actually is — and what it isn’t.
Not quite. Kitsch is typically something tacky or sentimental made earnestly, without irony. Camp is the appreciating eye — the sophisticated delight in something precisely because it overshoots and tries so hard. You can have a kitsch object; camp is the loving, knowing way of seeing it.
Keep reading: the queer history hidden in pop songs.
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