Summer Camp

Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls (1967)

There I was, performing my morning rituals, getting ready for the day ahead, when the ‘60s playlist I had on unexpectedly emitted the theme song from Valley of the Dolls. The sweet melody immediately signified the intrusion of camp into my normal routine. The music had me right there in that scene, the indelible one in which Patty Duke and Susan Hayward try to kill each other, and Hayward’s wig ends up swirling in the toilet bowl.

It is now the season when young people escape their parents and go off to day or overnight camp. It is also Pride Month, and I wondered if there was something in the air that brought on this onslaught of the kind of camp that sends many gay men like me into paroxysms of delight.

Whereas my nieces are veteran campers who cherish dubious experiences like doing water sports in a dirty New Hampshire lake and sharing bunks with other unhygienic adolescents, I was a mama’s boy who preferred a heated swimming pool and my own air-conditioned bedroom. The summer camp scene was decidedly not for me -- but put on a camp classic like Valley of the Dolls, and I’m there.

What is it about the art of camp and gay men? Why do many of us flock to so-bad-they’re-good movies like Mommie Dearest and Showgirls, able, like my husband, to recount them scene by scene and line by line? On the surface, these films have nothing in common. Yet their exaggerated sensibility combined with their utter lack of self-awareness keeps me coming back for more.

Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls

Speaking of Showgirls (1995), the first time I made my husband watch it, he was livid. He went to bed complaining of my inferior taste and that I had wasted two hours of his life. But somewhere between bedtime and the following morning, while processing the film in his sleep, he got it. “Camp” clicked in his cerebral cortex, and he awakened wanting to rewatch it.

Showgirls’ dramatic tension derives from a power struggle between an aging Las Vegas ecdysiast and a fledgling challenger played by then-newcomer Elizabeth Berkeley, whose career the film summarily ruined. Her dedication to her craft is nowhere in evidence more than in a sex scene at a swimming pool that belongs in the overacting Hall of Fame.

If a film is so bad it ruined a performer’s career, it becomes a candidate for camp canonization.

This year, I am celebrating Pride Month and camp season by immersing myself in (my kind of) camp once again. Summer camp was never this much fun.