 If people under 25 are still the gauge of the latest in fads and trends, then after spending some recent quality time with some of them I can safely announce that camp is back! The lisp, the exaggerated speech, the flailing arms, the mincing walk, are all just so hot right now. And this you will find interesting: it’s not just the boys. Baby dykes too have discovered the joy of camp. A work-related matter recently found me fraternising with a selection of Gen Y’ers, and let me tell you that Kylie need not fear rumours of her waning gay popularity. From what I witnessed last week, the Impossible Princess has a new clutch of queens to pore over her lyrics. In fact, the Gen Y Queen – I’m referring to the aforementioned baby dykes as well – is so camp that they hark back to the nellies of the 1950s. They have revamped old school camp with a vengeance. Not since the G.I. Generation have we witnessed such ‘outrageous’ behaviour. Young men screaming like girls, young women screaming like girls. And as more and more arrived at this event, it became of kind of theatrical frenzy. “Since when did lesbians lisp?” I asked a colleague, who just stood mouth agape at the heightened scene in front of us. At one point it was so fuelled that it was like a camp off, with the girls being as faabulous as the best of them. I thought, “This new breed of young dyke is seriously going to put the fag hag out of business.” Mincing, shrieking and treating gesticulation and eyeball rolling as if it were an extreme sport, I found myself camping it up just so I could get a word in. Still, for much of the evening we Gen X’ers reacted with a certain bemusement to these camp revivalists. Older, more demure gay men seemed quite uncomfortable at times, as did some of the more traditional lesbos. Others like me tried to join in with the revelry, perhaps in an attempt to prove we were just as outrageous as them. That bit was sad, or tragic, as our bon vivants surely would have put it. What has started this new camp craze? Is it a backlash to our generation’s insistence that losing the camp is the only way to gain acceptance? Or have we forged such a new world that camp is OK? Like old feminists who look at the young women of today and shake their heads over their apparent dismissal of feminism, it was obvious that several baby boomers in the room were thinking these kids are undoing 40 years of hard work. All those queens who’d butched it up for decades so that politicians would take them seriously were now witnessing the fall of Rome all over again. Or were they? The comedian Rita Rudner once posed the question, “Who invented the toilet seat cover? Did someone look at a toilet and say, ‘Now that’s nice, but it needs a hat?” Maybe it is as simple as this. Maybe the new breed are thinking, “Well, you’ve made some headway politically, but where the hell did you put the fun?” As I left the event in question, one young queen air-kissed me and I asked him what his plans were for the rest of the night. He said they were all going back to a friend’s place. I imagined them lip synching for hours on end to Kylie and then thought, “What’s so bad about that?”
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