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• 1 media/Rabbits.png 2016-04-07T11:13:36-07:00 Welcome to Bondage Camp 24 image_header 2016-05-30T18:26:32-07:00 [COULD USE BETTER INTRO] Almost all of us have heard the term “camp” or “campy” used to describe things which have nothing to do with scouting, the outdoors, or sitting by the fire toasting marshmallows. “That movie was so camp!” one might say. Camp is a “social, cultural, and aesthetic style and sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledged theatricality" (Mallan 3). In the context of queer expression, camp aesthetics disrupt many hetero patriarchal notions of what art is, and what can be classified as art at all, by “inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption" (Mallan 7). Where so-called high art incorporates beauty and value, camp necessarily needs to be lively, audacious, and dynamic [SOUNDS LIKE A CHEERLEADING SQUAD -- ISN'T IRONY ITS MAIN ELEMENT?]. "Camp aesthetics delights in impertinence" (Mallan 2). Camp opposes satisfaction and seeks to challenge. Susan Sontag's famous essay "Notes on 'Camp' " (1964) emphasizes that the key elements of camp are: “artifice, frivolity, naive middle-class pretentiousness, and 'shocking' excess (NEED SONTAG CITATION).” For Gay MCs like the Satyrs or Blue Max, camp can also be a social practice, forming part of the underlying aesthetic upon which their subcultural identity is built. [VAGUE]
  
  Not everyone is a fan of camp, however. There are some queer theorists who believe there is an important divide between camp aesthetics and truly self-shattering sexual experience including Leo Bersani [AWKWARD -- BERSANI'S CRITIQUE IS PARTICULAR AND EMBEDDED IN CONTEXT: NOT A BATTLE]. Bersani creates strict lines between camp and sex and simultaneously criticizes theorists who prioritize their theory over reality--though he is right in observing that the gay bathhouse is not a utopic vision of equality, he is incorrect in his. This is ironic because one does not remove their leathers before making a campy joke, and even if cruising, there is the ability to do more than one thing at once. Tom of Finland offers a much more positive perspective on the “dress” of S&M and leather culture, “I almost never draw a completely naked man. He has to have at least a pair of boots or something on. To me, a fully dressed man is more erotic than a naked one. A naked man is, of course beautiful, but dress him in black leather or a uniform — ah, then he is more than beautiful, then he is sexy! (Tom of Finland)” For him the experience of wearing the “costume” of the motorcycle club meant "social being"-the lived realities of his social life, especially the affective domain of sexuality; Tom of Finland is less concerned with the theoretical dimensions of camp than he is the symbolic dimension of a queer group’s aesthetic expression. Unlike Bersani, Tom of Finland’s comments on the importance of dress separates the affective and the symbolic from the economic and the rational. He separates the sex from the sexuality. But, as Foucault writes, “I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay lifestyle, not sex acts themselves... It is the prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate (Foucault).” Tom of Finland might argue, if he were here to do so, that gay subjects do not experience their own experience merely as ideas within thought but also experience their own experience as feeling, as affect.
  
  While it is easier to separate camp and sex, and easy to act as though human activity occurs in discrete categories, reality is much more muddled. When speaking of a "leather community," this is even more true--if a motorcycle ride lasts a whole weekend, it would frankly be tiring only thinking about sex the entire time--here the practicality of wearing leather while on a ride must be considered as well as the aesthetic utility of leather. Even outside of a motorcycle-riding reality, it must be allowed for the possibility that while one might put on leather in order to find someone to have sex with, the ability to do other things, including make jokes, does not come off when leather is put on. If camp is a sensibility and a sense of humor, camp in leather is a sex joke. Camp, as Susan Sontag observed, is always a way of consuming or performing culture "in quotation marks." While leather is sexy, sex is sexy, and camp is explicitly not, part of what is camp is "converting the serious into the frivolous" (Sontag), and leather becomes no less sexy when it is not taking itself seriously. What Bersani forgets, and that we offer up as a radical notion, is that a person remains a thinking being even when they are seen as sexy.
  
  Criticizing BDSM practitioners for their “complicity” in projects of death, Bersani writes, “S/M lifts a social repression in laying bare the reality behind subterfuges, but in its open embrace of the structures themselves and its undisguised appetite for the ecstasy they promise, it is fully complicit with a culture of death (Bersani 97).” Let’s investigate (and critique) this point more deeply; why might the aesthetic practices of gay MCs carry the stench of death as strongly as the scents of leather and sweat? We argue that death has always been an integral part of the sexualities practices by S&M and leather communities, due to the associations of Gay MCs with their straight, criminal counterparts and due to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
  
  There are few groups as widely known for their criminal activities as so-called “1%er” MCs. As was discussed briefly in The Passive Partner, leather and motorcycles have cultural significance beyond the queer world. Both aesthetics have been associated frequently with crime and criminality, especially as it exists in a state of “opposition-to” the police. In many ways, the police are the ultimate example of a repressive state apparatus; they are both the enforcement and the enforcers of mechanisms of power in society which create homophobic hegemony. As police crackdowns on criminal biker gangs increased, so did crackdowns and raids on gay gatherings (CITATION NEEDED, from history of motorcycles source). Making matters worse, straight MCs would occasionally come into contact with supremacist or simply homophobic Motorcycle clubs leading to physical confrontations or police intervention (raids on clubs, shutting down campsites, ordinances against riding noise etc I can find citations another time). Gay motorcyclists, already reeling from AIDS, were under fire, quite literally, from all sides. Instead of casting aside the aesthetic of those who used violence against queer bodies to gain their power, the queer MCs absorbed it, modified it, and made it their own. “In our audacious explicating of society’s roles and violent tensions, leatherfolk mirror the deadly game that a culture (dishonest with itself) plays (Bersani 84).” Leather became more about sex, more about gay-ness, than it ever had been before the efforts to suppress it and keep it separate from straight motorcycle culture. “The very aping in S/M of the dominant culture’s reduction of power to polarized relations of dominance and submission can have the unexpected- and politically salutary- consequence of enacting the appeal of renunciation (Bersani 95).”
  
  [MAYBE TRANSITION] When speaking about the lives and deaths of queer people, it is impossible not to mention the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980’s and the far-reaching consequences of those events. In the 1980s, AIDS had been historically understood as a problem of the “other”-- President Reagan did not consider drug users or queer people to be a part of his vision of the “American Family,” and cut off access to health and wellness support over the course of his two terms in office. Criticizing the blatantly homophobic reactions of the federal government and American citizens for failing to respond with compassion at the time of most urgent need Bersani writes, “homophobia may be the vicious expression of a more or less hidden fantasy of males participating, principally through anal sex, in what is presumed to be the terrifying phenomenon of female sexuality;” Here we can contextualize homophobia as a reaction to the subversion of the taboo inherent to homosexuality in a heteronormative society. Where heteropatriarchy demanded silence, the suffering queer population demanded recognition, compassion, help. The requests fell on deaf ears, and the Reagan administration maintained its silence; without access to proper care and pharmaceuticals, hundreds of queer people were dying each week. Nearly everyone had lost a lover, friend, or family member to the disease. It’s somewhat unsurprising, then, that gay people who have lived through that time period desired a way to speak out, to remember the horrors of AIDS and to commemorate those who had died. Their solution was to alter their aesthetic, to swap out chinos and slacks for denim and leather. And although “[during] the 70's, leather took on a more defined hypermasculine sexual look and became less about form and function in motorcycle riding (satyrs archive)” the 80’s brought about the most radical aesthetic changes to the gay MC [BEFORE AND AFTER PICS]. “S/M both exposes the mechanisms of power in society and provides a cathartic release from the tensions inherent in social distributions of power (Bersani 83).”
  
  Mallan, Kerry, McGills, Roderick (2005) "Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children's Culture", Canadian Review of American Studies Vol.35 №1 pp. 1–19
   

  Off the Beaten Path: Media In Tension