a.k.a. Camp as Queer Spellcraft

1. Susan Sontag Is Camp Clueless

The 2019 Met Gala’s theme was “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” Camp is hard to define. The Met Gala started, like most people, with Susan Sontag’s 1964 Notes on Camp as the definitive guide. But when it comes to Camp, Ms. Sontag doesn’t seem to know her.

Sontag mistook Camp’s costume for its content. Camp isn’t style. It’s initiation, the magick queers use to unmap and remake reality.

Sontag treats Camp as an aesthetic. Her Camp is a dramatic and artificial style that revels unnatural exaggeration. It has an ironic, playful sense of bad taste. It is detached from reality, devoid of politics or ethics. Sontag’s Camp makes no judgments. She recognizes its “homosexual” origins, but that is as political as she seems to think Camp gets.

Sontag on Camp reads like Notes on Catholicism written from the gift shop: all gold-leaf crucifixes, none of the faith behind the symbols.

2. Camp Is Queer Magick

Camp is spellcraft, not a sensibility. Camp is queer magick, a technology for queering reality. You don’t understand Camp by watching. You understand it by doing. It’s participatory. It’s initiatory. Sontag could describe Camp, but she was never initiated. You don’t experience it by looking at it from the outside; you enter it. Once you step into the circle, you are part of the magick.

Camp doesn’t describe queer life; it conjures it. It’s the ritual technology to slip past society’s firewalls and uncover forbidden knowledge. It is a counter-spell against queer erasure. It is a toolset for transformation.

This isn’t metaphor. When drag parodies gender into absurdity, when someone weaponizes glitter, when a body denied legitimacy walks the runway in defiance, that isn’t decoration. That’s creation. Camp is how queers make themselves visible when society insists they don’t exist. It’s survival, but also manifestation.

To understand Camp’s spell, you have to cast it. Magick is learned through experience. We have to enter the bodies and rituals and join in.

3. Camp in Practice: Transformations, Balls, and Icons

Camp is not detached. It is a glittery protest, a rhinestoned act of rebellion. It is the fool mocking the master. Words and ideas can be erased or censored from language, but Camp demonstrates truths where we have no words to describe it. It is an escape, not escapism.

Camp as Queer Play

As Sontag witnessed, Camp is a performance. She says camp is “being-as-playing-a-role.” She is also correct that the roles and the performances are artificial. What Sontag missed about the performances was the participation. Camp is playing. It is dress-up. Camp is a game. She forgot what it feels like when we play the game together as children.

Camp is accessing queer knowledge through play. We understand that children learn about the world and society through games. Queer people don’t see ourselves in the games and language of the de-queered world. Camp is Queer Calvin Ball, the game we invent as we go along to learn about ourselves.

Like Calvin Ball, you can recognize Camp, but you can never classify it. But also like Calvin Ball, Camp has some consistent attributes. Camp is Queer. It is subversive. It mocks “normalacy” and taboos. It attacks the epistemological and ontological boundaries of de-queered life. It is participatory. You become it by doing it. Camp transforms through subversion. It makes the unacceptable acceptable. It gives words to the inconceivable. Camp is an act of creation.

As children learn by pretending. Queers discover who we are by performing what we’ve been told is impossible. Queer people must have the audacity to unmake the rules that trap them in false lives to make space to try on identities that fit them.

Put On Your Wigs

“Black people have a hard time getting anywhere and those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive but you’re looking like an executive.”

-Dorian Corey, Paris is Burning.

Paris is Burning exposed the de-queered world, and many queer folk who were in the wrong time or place, to the 1990s Black and Latinx Drag Balls of New York City. To the objective observer, gay men of color played dress up and competed for trophies in the same way Jesus carried lumber up a hill.

In the drag balls of New York, categories like femme realness and executive realness don’t mock reality; they puncture it. “In a ballroom you can be whatever you want,” as Dorian Corey explains. The floor is a laboratory. The runway is a ritual. When Crystal LaBeija declares, “I have a right to show my color, darling — I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful,” she isn’t asking for inclusion; she’s asserting ontological fact. The Drag House is a school of magick.

Camp’s first act: create the language. They were not street kids; they were house members. They were not cross-dressers, sex workers, or deviants. They were queens and mothers! The queens of Paris is Burning were not playing dress up. They were serving realness!

The second act: create the ritual space. It wasn’t a warehouse or a community center. These were Balls! These were not streets where you would get catcalls and harassment. These were safe spaces where you could express your truths and be praised and admired for it.

The final act: make it real. The Drag Ball scene created a space for queer people to invent a new way of existing. They conjured queer houses and queer families. These made-up things provided real safety and community. It wasn’t a dress-up; it was a real transformation. In the end, aren’t all ideas made up? It is really about who in society has permission to make them.

Baby drag queens have to learn drag by doing. Through performance, they unmake and remake themselves. They claim permission to define themselves on their own terms. They touch the land beyond the restricted language of the de-queered world. Now initiated, they can serve realness. They have escaped the “other” box to transform into an individual of their own creation.

Queer Icons as Deities

Camp is critical theory that examines through performance instead of essay. Where critical theory is academic, Camp is guerrilla warfare. Critical theory critiques the power structure of society and rejects the idea that societies produce things that are free from the biases of society’s power structure and history. Where critical theory examines, Camp transforms.

Queer Icons, like queer culture, work as a code. Non-queer people overlook queerness when they see coded queer things. They see pop culture, theatricality, or pretentious art. Queer folk decode the symbols and remix them to create new meanings.

Where Sontag saw a love of theatricality and irony, there is nothing ironic about queer icons. Judy Garland’s endurance, Madonna’s ability to reinvent herself, Freddie Mercury’s flamboyant masculinity, Eartha Kitt’s unapologetic self-worth. To be queer is to be denied role models. Queer children and queer adults must create their own heroes.

Queer icons are Camp transformations. Performers are transformed into avatars of queer virtues. In a Drag Ball, the performers and the audience are a queer community that performs subversion and transformation together. Queer icons don’t have to participate in the act of Camp. They don’t even have to be queer. They are claimed by queer audiences who recode them to be the heroes, role models, and deities that we couldn’t find in a de-queered society.

In the 2001 MTV Music Awards, Britney Spears performed (of all things) “Slave 4 U.” Spears was a perfectly packaged pop princess, produced by the media powerhouses for total visual consumption. Clad in a bikini top and bedazzled booty shorts, the producers had her dance with a phallic snake. The nineteen-year-old cooed that she may be young, but she got feelings too! She was the dream girl for the male gaze. Sexy, but still innocent, she was offered up as a dancing slave girl to the audience.

Queer audiences recast Spears from dancing slave girl to goddess. She doesn’t endure the gaze; she commands it. She isn’t ashamed of her bare flesh or objectified. She enjoys her sexuality. She directs the audience with confidence and ease. The audience doesn’t consume her. They worship her. The stage is her altar. She choreographs the phallic snake, showing us exactly who’s in charge, and of what!

Camp transformed the objectification of a young singer into a miracle of liberation. Queer sexuality and queer bodies are often shamed and erased. When they are shown in a de-queered society, they are spectacles to titillate and repulse. As a queer goddess, Britney became a role model on how to reclaim your body and your pleasure. She became a symbol of flipping the script on those who would sell and consume you. Queer audiences recode icons into living archives, repositories of technique and possibility when the official record of queer lives has been erased.

What these performances reveal is not only queer resilience but queer epistemology, a different way of knowing and naming reality.

4. How Reality Gets Built (Epistemology ↔ Ontology)

Technology and Mitigated Realities

Language is a knowledge system. It functions like a map of reality, or more correctly, what we think we know about reality. Language is our first augmented reality. It edits what we can perceive. Sontag uses language to create a map of Camp; her list of aesthetic attributes are the landmarks she chooses to mark on the map.

In Jean Baudrillard’s essay, Simulacra and Simulation, he examines how comfortable people are with thinking in symbols. He explores how we have become so accustomed to symbols that we often perceive them as more real than their underlying reality. Money is a symbol; wealth is the thing. Confusing the map for the territory is how our systems get divorced from reality. We treat ledgers and formulas as real and ignore the destruction of actual wealth. Consider, for instance, our society’s inability to reconcile the destruction of money on paper with the climate crisis, the destruction of actual resources.

Sontag confused her aesthetic landmarks for the land she was mapping. She confused the performance for the purpose.

The Boundaries of Language and Reality

Wittgenstein famously said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Camp fights back by creating new language for new concepts, like drag houses. However, the constraining feedback loop between epistemology and ontology is an ominous power. Sontags confused her map of recognizable landmarks with the actual land of Camp. By de-queering Camp, it became a defanged mockery of the Met Gala.

While maps are tools that help us navigate, they also define and confine the paths presented to us. Epistemology and ontology become a trap. They are stuck in a feedback loop. What’s common becomes language. Language hardens into truth. The uncommon becomes unspeakable and thus unthinkable and untrue.

All frameworks have biases that optimize for some things at the expense of others. Every language optimizes something: business for efficiency, everyday speech for comfort. Both sacrifice the extraordinary and queer, making it the unspeakable.

Britney becomes crazy. Drag queens become deviants. AIDS becomes just a gay disease. Camp is just a style.

Societies are built on a shared experience. Camp acts, like Drag Balls and Queer Icons, conjure new shared experiences and invoke new languages. As queer though, the language is taboo. Camp languages function as code in de-queered spaces.

Language has the power to create, constrain, and even erase. When the map replaces the territory, the gaps become part of the terrain. However, the gaps and hidden edges are where queerness is found. Queerness is never erased. It is just underground, or unmapped.

So Mayer calls these gaps “anarchives,” or literally the opposite of an archive. They are conspicuous, evidence of erasure. Were the gaps intentional? Or did the archiver not appreciate what they were missing? Would a white historian capture the lives of black slaves in the same way black slaves would have archived their own lives? What do the gaps say? What possibilities do they invite you to imagine?

Paris is Burning is such an anomaly because it exists. The Ballroom scene existed for years, but there is so little evidence in the official histories. We can find exhaustive histories of Western settlers from two hundred years prior, but the chosen names and families of so many queens live on only in the gaps.

Camp is how queer people reclaim our lost territories.

5. Queerness and The Violence of Unnaming

To be queer is literally to be strange, and also estranged from language to describe yourself. Your name, gender, family, or home might not fit into standard terms. To be queer is to constantly have to be defining yourself, or mapping yourself into de-queered terms, whether that means to be a queer person who can “pass” for being “normal,” or rejecting it entirely to create your own category of realness.

At the bottom of a questionnaire, a person can self-select into a category or check “other.” We have the “other” option for many things that don’t conform neatly to categorization, such as race, religion, political party, and gender. Beyond the questionnaire, the “other” box is very real. Society has rules and expectations for things that exist. Society doesn’t have clean roles for “stuff” in the various “other” boxes, the strange things, the undefinable things, the queer things.

Queerness is undefined, the system’s “error message,” the unanticipated special case. As per the dominant ontology, queerness doesn’t exist. But “other” doesn’t just miscategorize; it isolates — and that isolation is the doorway to violence.

Epistemological violence is violence of erasure. It is the harm done when language and systems make a life illegible, and thus untenable. It is the violence of denying a person the ability to know themself and the language to explain their experienced reality. It is the anguish one feels when they don’t fit. They are not correct. What they feel is impossible. It is the gaslighting that tells them that they are the problem. Epistemological violence erases what used to exist and what could exist. It robs people of pasts and communities. It censors reality. It forces it’s victims to be alone, each isolated in a personal shell of “otherness,” without shared language or community.

In the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, it took President Regan seven years to say the word “AIDS”. It was a queer disease and thus not one worth talking about. By 1989, more people had died of AIDS than in the Vietnam War. Tens of thousands were buried anonymously in mass graves. Queer lives were literally erased, and there were no words to talk about.

George Orwell dramatized language as enclosure with his novel, 1984, set in a dystopian future where a fascist party controls people by controlling their language. “The Party” was phasing out common English, “old speak,” with a controlled language. In the novel, the Party is on the 11th edition of their “New Speak” dictionary, with each edition smaller than the previous. The Party is removing words, thus concepts, from society’s epistemology, thereby erasing them from public reality.

The violence isn’t just the removal of words, but the twisting of concepts with Party slogans such as “Freedom is Slavery.” History is erased along with the language. In the novel, the country is at war. It has always been at war. Any history of the past, times of peace, or different ways of life have also been erased. Without knowledge of history and the concept that things change over time, people cannot imagine things ever being different from the way they “always” have been. By controlling the concepts people can have, the Party controls the realities they can live in.

Epistemological violence can be driven intentionally by those in power who seek to shape what society accepts. It can also be more mundane. The natural biases of a society form a powerful feedback loop that reinforces itself, society’s bias towards stability and clarity. Simpler models might not reflect raw reality, but “common sense” approximations are where most people spend most of their time. Few people have the capacity to manage their lives and constantly question their mode of reality. Queer people don’t have the choice.

Gender as the case study.

The dominant Western narrative asserts that there are two genders, directly tied to biology. Gender is an essential attribute in our society; it determines your partners, the rights you may have, and your behaviors. Binary gender shows up in everything from how we size clothing to what roles you are expected to play in society.

Camp rejects the other box by showing that all boxes are artificial. As RuPaul popularized, “We are all born naked, the rest is drag.” Camp makes its performance obvious, to reflect back that we are all performing. Where Sontag sees Camp as artificial, queens serve realness that transcends forced social constructs. “Realness” itself is a Camp concept that captures the complex truth of self-identity in simple, non-academic terms.

Drag and gender play are taboo because gender is directly related to social power structures. Those in power have a vested interest in preserving their privilege, and expansions to that binary are tightly gate-kept. If gender carried no social power, society would treat it like people’s hobbies; fluid, evolving, unserious, but it doesn’t. We acknowledge that people are not born knitters, and their interests may evolve. We also allow for extreme cases where people turn hobbies into professions, or even invent whole new hobbies. (Hobby-fluid?)

Gender matters to people, specifically maintaining a binary model of immutable gender. The language we use reflects this. Society uses the fact that we have the language of “man and woman” to prove the reality. They use the reality of gendered structures like sports, bathrooms, and government IDs to prove their language. We have two genders, so IDs have two options. You can only choose one of two options on the form, so there are only two genders in reality. It is a closed loop, and the trap is sprung.

Genderqueer people are denied their reality and the language to describe it. They are forced to use awkward technical language which explains their experience academically, but “gender is a social construct” doesn’t capture the simple essence the same way someone can say “I like to knit” and most people readily understand.

Genderqueer is the other box. A genderqueer person doesn’t experience gender the way the binary demands. To try and make their experience legible, they’re forced into clumsy translations: “gender is a performance,” “intersex exists,” “biology is a spectrum,” “look at species with multiple sexes.” These are survival strategies, but they don’t capture the human truth of a life. So we end up with the weary answer: It’s complicated.

Queer people are forced to translate queer lives and queer selves into de-queered models. We are taught to censor ourselves before we even know ourselves.

This is where the violence starts: when the world doesn’t have words for you, the world pushes you to change. Being othered is erasure, an act of epistemological violence.

The Hardening of Violence

Social biases harden into overt oppression. So Mayer explores this in A Nazie Word for A Nazi Thing. The Nazis wanted to replace an existing worldview with their own. It wasn’t enough to put their concept out there; they had to remove anything that contradicted it.

Joseph Goebbels, who drove the Nazi culture and propaganda efforts, created the sensationalist art “Entartete Kunst” exhibit to highlight the otherness that was to be shunned in the new order. “Entartete (often translated ‘degenerate’) was what the regime deemed unfit to exist, art and people cast as “outside classification.” The Nazi regime led with a worldview that what should be is what will be. Nazi’s sought to bring reality neatly in line with their pseudo-scientific epistemologies of eugenics, racial superiority, and their inevitable future as a thousand-year empire. Anything that was outside that classification was to be made “not to be.”

The pattern isn’t new. The Nazis declared dissident art and identities entartete, degenerate, and burned the archive. The point wasn’t moral panic; it was epistemic control. If reality is a shared language, then silence is a weapon.

In this way, the Nazi’s transformed people into people who are not people. Jews, queer people, Roma, and myriad other people simply became “entartete.” The Nazi’s next step was to make the reality fit their language. Overt epistemological violence became real-world violence as the Nazi’s tried to fit the world into their worldview by force. Like so many other waves of epistemological violence turned into physical violence, histories have been erased with their people. Books, movies, art, love letters, and stories have all been swept into ashbins and buried.

The pattern continues. Queer books vanish. Teachers are gagged. Drag is criminalized. Healthcare is withdrawn. Conversion therapy, aka the torture of queer people, is promoted. This isn’t squeamishness; it’s strategy. Erasure is not absence. It is force: a tactic to protect existing structures by striking people and ideas from the record as “Entartete,” unfit to be seen, said, or saved. Mayer insists that queer knowledge must be sought not only in clues and archives, but in conspicuous gaps, what Mayer calls “anarchives,” where a record should be and isn’t. Those blanks are evidence. They point to what was removed, by whom, and why. To render a life unseeable is to render it unlivable. The silence is engineered; the gap is a weapon.

As queer activists declared in 1985: “Silence = Death.”

6. Camp as Spellwork (Queer ↔ Occult)

Magick speaks occult truths that language has forgotten. Magick is the practice of altering how the magician perceives and thus relates to the objective, external universe. The magician doesn’t change the universe, they change themself.

Queer Chaos Magician Phil Hine explains in his book Chaos Condensed, “We live in a world subject to extensive and seemingly all-embracing systems of social & personal control that continually feed us the lie that we are each alone, helpless, and powerless to effect change. Magick is about change.”

Phil Hine describes magick as a way to step into the world fully, not an escape to other inner planes or spiritual hierarchies. Magick is a technology to “disentangle yourself from the attitude and restrictions we were brought up with and which define the limits of what you may become.” It is a way of broadening your perspective with the intention of bringing about change.

By this description, Camp isn’t just practice. It’s ritual. It’s spellwork.

Queer and occult share a root condition: both are hidden. Both are quests for knowledge that let you understand and manipulate reality. And both are treated as taboo, not because they’re frivolous, but because they threaten the monopoly on what counts as real.

In Alix E Harrow’s novel Once and Future Witches, she imagines a world where women once widely knew magic, but the patriarchy had suppressed it. Magickal knowledge was passed secretly between women and archived in domestic handicrafts. A woman could safely hide a spell in the threads of a cross stitch, or the ingredients of a potion in a cookery book, because these were women’s work and women’s things. They had little value and thus attracted little attention. Similar to how African American slaves could hide clues to escaping to freedom in plain sight, because white slave owners didn’t bother with negro songs or hair braiding. Camp passes below the noses of de-queered audiences, specifically because they are dismissive of the queerness underneath. The real archives are found by spotting the gaps in the official archives.

Magick is a tool for seeing beyond the map to the territory, or more accurately, to remind us that we are looking at maps to begin with. The map only shows us what the creators of the map prioritized, as well as the blank spots that they either intentionally left out or never explored. Magick helps you separate the map from the underlying land, enabling you to transcend the priorities and gaps we inherited from our map’s creators — including the maps we made ourselves.

Phil Hine defined this as chaos magick: belief is a tool, not a prison; paradigms are things you can pick up, test, and put down; results tell you whether a practice works. In Prime Chaos and Condensed Chaos, Hine frames magick as experimental, participatory, and explicitly paradigm‑shifting. That shift is the point here: Camp trains you to consciously step into a new paradigm, a new hermeneutic circle in magickal terms, so different phenomena become legible, actionable, real.

Hine also writes about queering occulture(s): loosening the de-queered, gatekept defaults of occult scenes by foregrounding bodies, desires, and practices excluded as “improper.” Camp does the same kind of work: it bends the circle until there’s room to breathe. It treats symbols as instruments, not sacred idols; performance as an epistemic lab; style as a method for re‑patterning the sensible.

Magicians enter the occult via initiation; they obtain knowledge by participating in the act. Queers discover their truth by doing. Witches join covens. Drag queens join houses. Taboo knowledge and hidden truths are passed on by participation. Initiates learn to strip social symbols of their power. They learn the untold stories of a wider queerdom. They subvert them to break out of patterns that don’t work for them. They enter the undefined, “other” space and experiment with framings that fits them.

Camp breaks the epistemic loop by initiating us into the unmapped, where performance becomes the hero’s journey of revelation and self-discovery. The remapping starts from queer life rather than measuring everything against its distance from “normal.” You must perform the truth that seems artificial to a de-queered society until you discover the reality in it for yourself. You are a queen. You are the gender you perform. You are a sexual being with a physical body. You deserve love and joy. You are not fixed. You were never broken, only bound. Camp teaches how to break out.

Camp is a counter-spell against the social norms that bind queers. It is the magick we use to learn about ourselves and our unbound possibilities. Camp is the spellcraft we use to transform how we perceive ourselves and our reality, and step into that previously unreachable space.

Sontag missed this because she stood outside the circle. She observed but did not enter. Camp withholds its knowledge from spectators. It is occult in the literal sense: hidden except to those who participate. Camp is queer gnosis. Camp is the secret language hidden in plain sight.

7. Camp Reclaimed

Sontag never entered the magick circle. Her map picked the landmarks she could describe from a distance. She wasn’t initiated into the craft. She mistook Camp’s style for its substance, draining it of its queer power and liberation. Camp doesn’t describe queer life. It conjures it. It’s not a pose or playlist. It is an exploration of the land beyond the map. It is the un-erasure of the unnamed. Camp summons what society would leave missing or silenced.

Camp is not decoration, it’s creation. Camp is magick. Irony, invocation. Artifice, alchemy. All things are lies; everything is permissible. Camp is the spell by which we unmake and remake the world.

Works Cited / Bibliography

• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981.
• Harrow, Alix E. The Once and Future Witches. Redhook, 2020.
• Hine, Phil. Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. 1995.
• Hine, Phil. Essays on Queering Occulture(s) at Enfolding.org (assorted).
• Hine, Phil. Prime Chaos: Adventures in Chaos Magic. 1993/2009.
• Livingston, Jennie (dir.). Paris Is Burning. 1990.
• Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty‑Four. 1949.
• So Mayer. A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing. Peninsula Press, 2020.
• Sontag, Susan. Notes on Camp. 1964.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922, proposition 5.6.