Tuesday 28 August 2007

Camp is a four letter word!



Chat online or do it the old fashioned face-to-face way these days and you’ll hear the term straight acting bandied around all over the place. It seems that with homosexuality being more visible in society, those of us in the community would prefer that it was invisible again.

Anyone seen as being the slightest bit effeminate is to be looked down upon from a very well manicured but butch looking high ground. The guys coming out at a very young age in cities like Sydney seem to be more comfortable exploring their camp side, but the rest of us seem hell bent on making sure we don’t look like we actually sleep with other men.

I have to admit, I personally don’t understand the compulsion to wear eyeliner and have hair straightening parties with my friends, but I don’t understand the compulsion to play rugby league and paw over busty blonde girls either, but I’m not going to condemn the straight boys for doing it.

Just as the baby-gays might be hiding their insecurities behind eyeliner and foundation and a fierce pastel studded belt, are those determined to be “straight acting” hiding their insecurities of being seen as weak behind their macho front? Isn’t it about time that we all just were who we genuinely are instead of pretending to be something we aren’t? From what I can see, that was the whole point of coming out in the first place wasn’t it? So that we didn’t have to live in the closet wearing our polyester-blend self-loathing?

Thanks to DNA for the images.

4 comments:

Superchilled said...

It is quite clear that there is a wide range of looks and preferences within our own gay communities. Underneath it though, we're all essentially the same, and I think we need to appreciate this more than we sometimes do. It's easy to make fun of someone who's not quite what you think is normal - but equally you're not normal to loads of other people.

If we accept all the permutations and combinations and look for the similarities rather than the differences, we'll be able to embrace and maybe learn from all the fantastic quirky, odd, and sometimes scary people around us. At the very least, they'll make life more interesting.

Anonymous said...

I always consider my campy moments to be a product of my love of creativity, and my desire to stand out from the people around me. I've never had a desire to repress that part of myself. On the flip side, I also enjoy watching sports and can be decidedly low key.

Eyeliner I love, but it's the overdone, really dark black eyeliner because I like how it makes a person's eyes look. I think it can be very beautiful. I'm not sure where I got that from, but I've always loved eyes, so it probably comes from that.

Angus said...

I like this post.

I get this feeling that camp-ness is put on - it's not an ingrained part of most people; fair enough some people are effeminate from, well, birth... but the other people... what's the motivation? Is it just insecurity? Is it the attention?

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