Styled

Camp Sites advances the beautifully counterintuitive argument that the midcentury US university’s transition between the consensus liberalism of the 1950s and the New Left radicalism of the 1960s was characterized less by rupture than by continuity. Chief among these continuities was an interest in style—the political gesture conceived as a stance, the idea that “attitudes are politics” (13). A major foil, the book further argues, for the postwar period’s evolving interest in style was the figure of the closeted homosexual. Camp Sites accordingly lays out “the shift from a representation of queer sexuality as the abject other of mainstream liberal culture to an image of queer sexuality as the statist enemy of the counterculture and the New Left” (1). Traversing a large number of academic disciplines and intellectual movements—including the campus novel, the rise of qualitative sociology, the teaching of writing, the development of method acting—the book persuasively demonstrates that “midcentury academic disciplines placed the theatrical, the synthetic, the artificial, and the constructed at the heart of their research programs” (2), making these into objects for scrutiny.

Camp Sites shows the more familiar narrative of the rejection of 1950s liberalism by 1960s radicalism to be a story that is largely enabled by scholarly and historical inattention to the consistent ways that these two broad movements scrutinized the figure of the homosexual. In the 1950s, belief emerged as an intellectual and political summum bonum. Belief, however, also took on a particular valence: “beliefs are what you publically pretend to have while privately admitting their emptiness. Belief is a formal structure purified of content” (7). The closeted homosexual—whose commitments were privately held rather than publicly expressed—gave the lie to this structure of belief, and thus became a figure of dissembling and threat. But for much the same reason, as the New Left began to reject formalist beliefs in favor of a notion of authenticity (or what the book calls “the gesture of conferring political meaning on acts by highlighting their obviousness” [105]), the homosexual again became a problematic figure, because his private convictions figured only his inauthenticity.

As the admirably wide research of Camp Sites demonstrates, considerable ink was spilled in those pre-Stonewall days discussing the status of homosexuals. However, the book does not only track the manifest discourses surrounding homosexuality in the period; it also tracks the (consistently negative) evaluations of camp style and camp aesthetics—the surfeit of non-ironic aesthetic excess that failed to reflect either the style of detached belief in the 1950s or the style of authentic self-expression in the 1960s. If homosexuals were aligned with a camp style that kept them out of touch with the intellectual and political mainstreams of the postwar period, however, the book goes to lengths to show that those mainstreams nevertheless relied on the figure of the homosexual and on camp style as a lurking form of inauthenticity against which to define themselves. Camp Sites draws attention to the historical fact that the radicalism of the New Left failed to embrace nascent gay liberation movements, observing that “The equation radicals forged between authenticity and a meaningful life rendered gay culture’s uncommitted and artificial persons beyond redemption, even if such figures would serve a role in defining countercultural commitment by their negative example” (1).

Camp Sites is written with splendid erudition and is carefully measured in its assessments of the historical terrain on which it stands—also the same terrain on which academics working at US universities in 2014 all stand. Indeed, a book that tries to expose the ways that a logic of disavowal structured academic knowledge sets for itself a complicated task. To commit itself to a hermeneutics of suspicion would involve complicity with the postwar academic mandate to expose rather than believe. By contrast, to believe rather than expose might leave the study complicit with something that it also seeks to critique. What we get in the end is a work that imagines that the past is irreversible, that the terrain on which we walk...