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3 8 8 Genet does not want to change anything at all. Do not count on him to criticize institutions. He needs them, as Prometheus needs his vulture. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet O ne. It almost seems at times to have become a matter of common acceptance that camp is radical, and the play Men by Noel Greig and Don Milligan provides a convenient example of the process by which I imagine that to have come about. Men offers itself as a polemic against“the straight left”—an abstraction which it embodies in one of its two central gay characters, a shop steward in a Midlands factory and, in secret, the lover of Gene, a camp gay male for whom the play attempts to solicit a besotted and uncritical reverence. Their relationship is seen to be continuous with the dominant patterns of heterosexual relationships, and it is presented as a synonym for them, though there is no attempt to consider, or even to acknowledge, the social pressures which have gone into producing the similarity. The play concludes that the political struggle in which Richard, the shop steward, is engaged at work can be assimilated to “phallic” power drives (we are not allowed to forget that he is known to his fellow workers as Dick), and offers, in Gene’s plangent cry of “Socialism is about me,” what it takes to be the corrective emphasis. How “socialism” is to be defined or in what way, exactly, it can be said to be about Gene are not matters which the play finds it proper to discuss , although it becomes clear enough that Richard’s activities (from which women workers are pointedly excluded except, in one instance, as the “victims” of a strike action) lie beyond the pale. Indeed, Gene’s intimate relation to socialism is very much taken as a given. His ignorance of, and indifference to, politics is repeatedly stressed, yet he is somehow instinctively in line with the proper ends of political action; in the final scene, Gene becomes the medium not only for a series of vague and tendentious aphorisms about patriarchy (“Men, like Nature, abhor a vacuum”), portentously delivered in a spotlight, but also for the savage, cruel, and self-righteous scapegoating of Richard, who is endowed with the moral responsibility for his oppression. Men concludes that Richard should allow himself to become “nervous, sensual, and effeminate”—as dubious a set of Moral Positives as anyone could reasonably demand— and indulges itself in A Doll’s House ending which we are asked to take as a triumph of radical intelligence. Richard’s confusion, desperation, and self-oppression are neither here nor there. It is all “his fault,” and we can take due satisfaction in his comeuppance: his guilty secret has been discovered by his workmates, and his just desserts are at hand. For Interpretation: Notes Against Camp (1979) 25 Chapter 25.indd 388 1/17/12 10:57 AM 3 8 9 f o r i n t e r p r e tat i o n The point I wish to make is that Gene’s camp is taken as an automatic validation of the character. He has nothing to recommend him beyond a certain facile charisma and a few slick epigrams, yet his five-minute tour de force telephone monologue at the end of the first act is considered sufficiently impressive to “place” the portrayal, in the preceding thirty minutes, of Richard’s political involvement. Men arrives at its assessment of camp by a simple process of elision. The Richard/Gene relationship is “like” a man/woman relationship. Therefore, Gene’s camp is continuous with woman-identification: that is, it is “like” a feminist discourse against patriarchy. Therefore, camp is the means by which gay men may become woman-identified = radical = socialist, and we can carry on camping and “being ourselves” with perfect equanimity (camp, of course, is always “being oneself”) in the serene assurance that we are in the vanguard of the march toward the socialist future. The play does not seek at any point to demonstrate the validity of this spurious set of propositions.They are simply data,and as such, they relate significantly to certain characteristic assumptions of bourgeois feminism. Juliet Mitchell has argued, for example, that the “political” and “ideological” struggles are conceptually and practically distinct, the one to be fought by the working class and the other by the women’s movement. She even goes so far as to suggest...

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