Susan Sontag’s “Notes on (Summer) Camp”

What is camp? Well, it’s a vision. It’s unmistakable. It’s sharing a bunk with seven other girls and having a rotating schedule of who the entire bunk has decided to hate this week. Camp is big. It’s brash. It’s more often than not “Hate Katie” week.

Camp is a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. Camp is artifice. It is style. And by style, I mean cutting the sleeves off your T-shirts so they look like they got halfway caught in a shredder. Camp is those little boob cardigans that only cover one-eighth of your body. Camp is ironically wearing Crocs until one day you are unironically wearing Crocs.

Camp is a way of looking at things, a perspective. Like dropping your glasses in the lake and using a backup pair with an old prescription. It is seeing the world in bright, bold colors and vague, fuzzy shapes that give you a headache to look at.

Here are some things that are part of the canon of camp:

• Tiffany lamps
• Swan Lake
• Cabin bathrooms where the floors are always just a little wet
• Feather boas
• A teenage boy wearing basketball shorts that show off his very smooth calves
• Oscar Wilde
• Not washing your sheets for six straight weeks
• Way too much perfume

Things that are camp are often decorative, emphasizing things like texture and sensuous surfaces. Like the hard, smooth plastic of intricate lanyard bracelets made by a girl named Becca, or the soft, sticky mud that Derek accidentally sat in, and now people won’t stop joking that he pooped himself.

Camp is the love of exaggeration. It is things being what they are not. It is a girl who has never in her life given a blowjob explaining that guys like it when you use teeth. It is thinking your nineteen-year-old counselor is no younger than thirty. It is a chorus of young women standing outside a bathroom stall, shouting conflicting advice about the best way to put in a tampon.

Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It is not a lamp but a “lamp,” it is not a woman but a “woman,” it is not normal chili but “don’t worry about what’s in this chili, it is definitely safe to eat.”

The most pure form of camp is something that does not know it’s camp. It must move through the world unaware of its own campiness, like Becca attempting to flirt with a counselor who is definitely gay and dating another counselor, or the idea that the ice cream machine will ever work in the future or, frankly, has ever worked at any point in time.

Camp is the spirit of extravagance. A woman walking around with a giant feather boa. A man wearing a three-piece suit to the drugstore. A thirteen-year-old girl attempting a smokey eye with three different shades of CVS-brand purple eyeshadow.

Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. Whether that’s Gaudi’s architectural masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, or a boy named Josh trying to stuff eight warheads into his mouth, camp is about working toward something bigger than yourself. Yes, Josh! You are camp!

Camp is the extra. The over-the-top. The aforementioned girl crying in the shared bathroom because her ex-best friend said she looked like a slutty raccoon who shops at Aeropostale. Camp the decadence of it all. It is getting hit in the face with a water balloon. It is being the loudest, most off-key person at the singalong.

The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. To mock authority. To look at Bob, the sixty-year-old owner of the facility, clad in an Eddie Bauer polo and cargo shorts, and say, “We want to use the kayaks to sail to Portugal.” “That’s impossible,” he will say, “No,” you must reply, “it’s camp.”