On Cinema

There are critical moans that John Waters' Serial Mom is not camp enough. This is both true and untrue. Waters' work is as camp as ever (where else could you witness Kathleen Turner, right, beating someone to death with a leg of lamb to the tune of 'Tomorrow' - and in perfect rhythm?) but the environment around it has also changed. Camp no longer belongs exclusively to gay men, just as the who's-a-pretty-boy-then look - masculinity with moisturiser - no longer belongs to gay men. Camp has been renamed post-modernism, and the pretty boy is now called the New Man.

This can be terribly confusing for old-fashioned screamers. Example: one of the campest flicks of recent times was Hudson Hawk but it didn't star Divine. It starred Bruce Willis, not exactly the friend of the out, despite that first name (I mean, Bruce - phhhuullease) and his homosexual tendency to namecheck favourite movies and performers, using both to establish a fun persona. Indeed, the only real difference between Willis and a gay man is that a gay man would have donned a hairweave by now or trained his poodle to play dead on his head when company was present; Bruce thinks it's big and clever (ie butch) to flaunt his baldness. And there are acres more of that than there are of wife Demi Moore's naked tummy. . .

So, where does this leave us? In the same old place. Gay men not getting credit for their cultural contributions, or worse: straights bitching that queens aren't even good at camp anymore - as if they had nothing to do with it.

(Photograph omitted)