Camp is an aesthetic and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ culture and especially gay men.
Camp art is distinct from but often confused with kitsch. The big difference between camp and kitsch is mainly that camp is aware of its artificiality and pretense.
The American writer Susan Sontag emphasized camp<nowiki/>'s key elements as embracing frivolity, excess and artifice.' Art historian David Carrier notes that, despite these qualities, it is also subversive and political. but subjects deemed camp may also be perceived as being dated, offensive or in bad taste. While author and academic Moe Meyer defines camp as a form of "queer parody",
Camp, as a particular style or set of mannerisms, may serve as a marker of identity, such as in camp talk, which expresses a gay male identity. and has appeared in film, cabaret, and pantomime.
Origins and development
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word camp was used as a verb since at least the 1500s. Camp may have derived from the gay slang Polari, which borrowed the term from the Italian campare, "to live, to get by", A similar sense is also found in French theatre in Molière's 1671 play Les Fourberies de Scapin. Writer Anthony Burgess theorized it may have emerged from the primary sense of the word, as in a military encampment, where gay men would subtly advertise their sexuality in all-male company through a particular style and affectation.
By 1870, British crossdresser Frederick Park referred to his "campish undertakings" in a letter produced in evidence at his examination before a magistrate at Bow Street, London, on suspicion of illegal homosexual acts; the letter does not make clear what these were.
right|thumb|Report of the ticket for a Salford drag ball in 1874
In 1874, the Manchester Courier printed the description of a ticket for a Salford drag ball, called the "Queen of Camp" ball.