Camp and the Millionth Age of Gay Panic

Homer Simpson Will Always Be My Susan Sontag.

I. Sontag, Age Eight

“Homer’s Phobia” is a 1997 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer experiences a gay panic. After making a new friend named John (voiced by John Waters), Homer is shocked to learn John is gay, having misread every interaction between them. Homer anxiously and unsuccessfully spends the rest of the episode trying to stop the campy contagion from reaching Bart, who he fears will be made gay by osmosis.

Hilariously, the episode’s production apparently got caught in the same panic it leveraged for comedy. Fox’s in-house censors initially moved to stop “Homer’s Phobia” from airing because of its gay content. But the unrelated firing of the then-president of the network interceded, leading to the replacement of the censors. As The Simpsons’ first story-line devoted to gay people the episode won multiple honors, including a GLAAD Media Award for its antihomophobic message.

The gay panic episode’s real-world gay panic, not to mention the resulting awards, is funny because “Homer’s Phobia” is so timid in its satire of the fundamental homoeroticism (I wouldn’t dare write “Homer-eroticism”) of straight, white American culture. Homer first meets John at his kitschy shop Cockamamies, which is stuffed with the retro Americana that white gay men of a certain age do better than anyone at selling. Looking around at the tacky kids’ toys, Homer doesn’t get it.

“You’re a grown man,” he reminds John, who replies effortlessly: “It’s camp!”

The word elicits nothing from Homer, who stares vacantly at John until he elaborates.

“The tragically ludicrous? The ludicrously tragic?”

Finally, Homer smacks his forehead. “Oh, yeah, like when a clown dies.”

“Well, sort of,” John offers back generously. “But I mean more like inflatable furniture, or Last Supper TV trays, or even this bowling shirt,” he says, gesturing to its Pin Pals insignia (a reference to Homer’s bowling team from the previous season).

“And that kind of stuff is worth money?” Homer asks, still very much not in on the point. “Man, you should come over to our place, it’s full of valuable worthless crap.”

Sure enough, the next scene follows John as he interprets out loud every detail of their literal cartoon house, from the doorbell (“Ding dong. Classic. I mean that says it all, doesn’t it?”) to the TV room’s saturated colors. “The rabbit ears and the 2.3 children,” he waxes lyricially—“I mean, where’s the Hi-C?”

Lisa then appears from the kitchen with—you guessed it—an unironic tray of Hi-C.

It’s funny, but it’s not exactly Sontag. “Homer’s Phobia” is an entry in the culture industry’s slow and uninspired, but unmistakable capitalization on a chintzy gay sensibility as exceptionally congruent with American mass culture. Even on Fox. Homer’s gay panic is so aesthetically mediated that it avoids entertaining gay sex directly. Yet what sparkles about that choice to me, particularly today, during America’s millionth gay panic, is that desexualizing John by restricting his camp to the traffic in 1950s memorabilia doesn’t succeed in defanging the sexual from the logic of gay panic. Fox might have ran with a version of camp that embraces white gay men as part of American decor, but it hasn’t stopped an America hooked on Fox from panicking about gay people as sex deviants to be expunged from the nation by any means necessary.

I know this because I also remember the panic in 1997. I was eight when the episode aired and although the banter, not to mention the kitschy gravitas of John Waters guest starring on The Simpsons was entirely lost on me, the episode’s now-famous steel plant scene was not. In his campaign to masculinize Bart and certify his future heterosexuality, Homer takes him to Springfield’s Ajax Steel Plant. In the mustachioed hands of the foreman Roscoe, the pair are treated to what Homer anticipates will be “a firsthand look at real, all-American Joes doing what they do best.” The shot cuts to the busy mill floor, filled with muscled men’s hard bodies clustered around the forge and strolling the second-floor catwalk. When Roscoe interrupts the workers to ask them to say hi to their guests, the mincing “Hell-ooohooo!”s that reciprocate toggle Homer back to full panic. Bart asks why Homer brought him to a gay steel mill—as if such a thing existed, though that’s, uh, the joke—and Homer breaks down. “My son doesn’t stand a chance,” he complains. “The whole world has gone gay.”

It’s at this moment that the steam-whistle blows, signaling the end of the workday—and the transformation of the Ajax Steel Plant into The Anvil, a late 90s gay club. As Roscoe explains in gay deadpan that “we work hard, we play hard,” disco balls lower from the ceiling and “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C+C Music Factory signals what’s to come.

They may have been the bizarre, yellow bodies of The Simpsons, but watching the throng of dancing clones was terrifying at age eight. I felt, in that signature homophobic way, implicated by something I had no reference for, and whose explosive significance I could not contain. It was much gentler than the kids who had called me gay, or faggot at school, but it was just as terrifying. If The Simpsons was pointing out that gays could hide in plain sight in the most conventional scenes of everyday life, then it might as well have outed me as some kind of gay hiding inside my family. It’s a bit absurd for an eight-year-old to feel that way, but that’s homophobia for you. It’s the sheer power of a panic sublimated into mass culture. As would happen many more times during my childhood, the flash of heat in my cheeks told me all I needed to know, even if I didn’t understand the context: don’t watch episodes like this around your family.

The most effective Fox censor was the one inside me, it turned out.

---

II. A Brief History of Panic

Although I’d like to imagine John Waters knew, The Simpsons likely didn’t realize it was citing a distinctively Anglophone logic of gay panic described in high literary terms by Eve Sedgwick in her first book, Between Men (1985). It’s one of the less palatable take-aways from the recent regression to gay panic style homophobia in the US (and the UK) that neither same-sex marriage, nor a representational tidal shift towards respectable gay, lesbian, and trans images has defused the raw political power of being anti-gay and anti-trans. We aren’t in the second great gay panic since Anita Bryant sang of Florida oranges and got a pie in the face for it (which I think is funny—more on that later); the logic of social panic around gender and sexuality was already having its centennial—at least—when “Homer’s Phobia” first aired.

I’ve been researching the history of gay and trans panic for a book I’m writing, A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Although The Simpsons doesn’t figure into the manuscript, it’s helpful in explaining what gay and trans panics are about—and why they are immune to the smug and immensely popular charges of hypocrisy from the left (you know the form well: “they are the ones really obsessed with gay sex, or children’s genitals, or erasing women!”).

I treat gay and trans panics together because they have almost always worked by bleeding their edges into one another, remixing classic tropes of woman-hating. The gay and trans panics we know today were invented in the nineteenth century as two sides of one coin, and The Simpsons concurs. Bart’s masculinity is the stand-in for his future heterosexuality, making the gay panic a gender panic in form. Likewise, the first specifically trans feminine panics in the nineteenth century Anglophone world, whether the British colonial administration’s existential anxiety about hijras in India, or the United States’ colonial efforts to eradicate two-spirit people, sexualized the trans femininity it marked these populations with by accusing them of being sex workers and sodomites. Their transgression of an Anglophone gender system was coded as per se a form of sexual aggression. None were trans feminine by identity, which makes their examples especially instructive; they were rather indiscriminately trans feminized by the state to make them into legitimate targets. Towards the end of the century, a similar sexualization and harassment of effeminate gay men and trans women who did sex work, or performed in the burgeoning gay nightlife scene in cities like London, New York, Paris and Berlin, is unmistakable in police records. Over the following century, this logic resulted in the literal gay and trans panic defenses, which still allow people to kill gay men and trans women and justify it after the fact as a logical response to the self-evident threat of sexualized femininity.

In other words, homophobia and transphobia emerged together in the case of panic, in that they did not distinguish, but rather took advantage of, conflating gendered appearance with sexual impropriety. In the nineteenth century there simply was no sense in the minds of British or American statesmen that “gender” and “sexuality” were separable, let alone facets of individual identity. They were convenient anchors for consolidating power. And individuals, such as men who date or patronize trans feminine people, have since followed that endorsement to its violent conclusion.

Panic is fundamentally social, meaning it also adores conflation. The pan in the word refers to a Greek god with geographic dominion over the hills, looking after crops and animals. Pan’s power to make animals stampede, one he could visit upon humans at his whim, was called a panic, with all the irrational connotations we might imagine. By the eighteenth century, its arbitrary divine logic had been recoded as the fear of uncertainty itself. “The Uncertainty of what they fear’d made their Fear yet greater,” explained Lord Shaftesbury. “And this is what in after-times Men call’d a Pannick.”

By sexualizing trans femininity, and feminizing homosexuality, gay and trans panics apply this fear of uncertainty to the social interdependence of sexuality and gender in their hegemonic Western system.

The panic, in other words, channels the fundamental sociability of sexuality and gender to torture out of it a justification for present-day hierarchies. You can never really tell who is “normal” and who is gay, or who is really trans and who is a “normal” man or woman. You might think you can most of the time, or promise the perfect criterion or test is just around the corner, but it is always a failing ploy. You might think, likewise, that you are entirely unrelated to gayness and transness, but that isn’t quite true either. Rather than an easily segregated, visible minority, connection to the gay and trans world blurs in and out of everywhere. Only the political domination of gay and trans people maintains the charade that they are naturally separate. And that has made fear a potent alibi for preemptively attacking gay and trans people for a long time. It’s why there remains such intense, nakedly hateful focus on children today: if gay and trans people can arise anywhere and everywhere, then their social reproduction is an uncontrollable feature of human life, utterly benign—and fundamentally unkillable. All that is left is the bludgeon of a fantasy of hetero-reproduction to beat children into submission.

The best way I know to sumarrize the bizarrities of panic’s logic is the story of two undercover police officers named Chopping and Labbatt who were tasked in 1932 with infiltrating a drag ball in London’s West End. Incredibly, the police decided to get up in drag to pull off the operation. While having a drink at a bar across the street from their target, wondering whether their female impersonation was convincing, the officers were approached by a man who asked if they were going “to the drag tonight,” answering the question for them. This man chaperoned them to the ball, introducing them as “two camp boys, friends of mine.” And the cops went on to spend the night drinking, dancing with men, and having sex with several of them. They were adept at passing in the gay word not just because of their drag, or familiarity with gay sex, but because they were up to date on gay argot. When someone at the ball asked them “Have you traded tonight?” Labbatt didn’t miss a beat. “Twice with my boyfriend” he said, pointing to Chopping.¹

The cracking success of these officers, and others like them, engendered a gay panic in the Metropolitan Police. It wasn’t just that they were engaging in entrapment, not to mention law breaking, by going in drag, getting properly drunk, and having gay sex. The panic stemmed from the fact that if normal men could so easily go gay as part of their jobs, then the line between criminal queers and normal society wasn’t as robust as the policing of gay life implied.

The Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedures saved face by pretending the problem could be reversed. It recommended that officers who did this kind of undercover gay work should be rewarded with promotion and transfer away from such duties, lest they…be transformed by all the gaiety. “There is a risk,” the Commission explained, “that habitual employment in visiting clubs…is likely to have a demoralising effect in the police concerned…chosen for their youth…dressed in clothes to which they are unaccustomed and given money to spend freely…[officers] are brought into contact with a mode of life very different than their own.”² That awful way of life might stick to these young, pretty cops if they did such work too long. Except, those cops seemed pretty damn accustomed to it from the get-go.

Social contagion, in other words, is a defensive prop invented by those who will hurt the vulnerable instead of admitting that what they fear is already part of the world they live in. Its pretension is dead on arrival.

If this sounds like hypocrisy on the part of the police and the state, which defeats the entire purpose of its repression of gay people, well yes, logically it is. But as we know, the policing of gay people in London or elsewhere didn’t stop in the 1930s because it was self-contradictory in practice. This brand of sexual and gender hypocrisy is very old indeed—and quite persistent. Gay panic, especially when it involves gender or trans feminine appearances, has remained remarkably resilient.

The conclusion is not that everyone is secretly gay, or a little trans. Or that pointing out the hypocrisy of the panic-traffickers will cause them to stand down. It’s that gender and sexuality are too sociable to ontologically divide the world up along such lines in the first place, no matter who draws the lines. To punish gay and trans people for our ways of life is a pretense to be rejected without having to justify our worthiness in return.

---

III. Lessons in Pie-Throwing

Famously, Anita Bryant was hit in the face with a pie during a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa in 1977. Tom Higgins, the pie-thrower, was part of a much larger activist response to her national campaign against gay rights that had begun in Florida. A boycott of Florida orange juice—Bryant was its spokesperson—had even led to gay bars refusing to serve it. Screwdrivers, a shockingly popular gay drink in the 1970s, were replaced in many establishments by “Anita Bryants,” which apparently were made with vodka and apple juice. A truly horrifying development from the point of view of good taste, but that’s politics for you.

Bryant must have picked up a thing or two about camp from her gay enemies because she managed to get in a halfway decent retort after absorbing the pastry’s impact.

“Well,” she quipped, “at least it’s a fruit pie,” before letting out a higher pitched “huh,” or maybe “hah.”

The ultra-serious man flanking Bryant at the press conference had to ask her no less than three times to get her to pray for Higgins in a display of Christian piety. Bryant, who audibly sighed before relenting, was evidently not feeling very sincere about her politics in the moment.

Now, it’s arguably funny to throw a pie in an anti-gay crusader’s face for many reasons, one of them being that the whole thing was rather camp. But the incident illustrates an important distinction within camp, one I borrow from my friend Ari Brostoff’s whip-smart essay on Caitlin Jenner that was published a few years ago—one worth studying in this arch-serious moment of a million panics.

Brostoff explains how camp, once the centerpiece of the gay world in the mid-twentieth century, has been discarded by the ultra serious queer and trans politics of sincerity that define our era (the same historical transformations that led to “Homer’s Phobia” going to air in 1997). Though camp performance is quite rare these days, so too is camp as an interpretive mode—camp as reading, which has its roots in drag shows and, especially, Black and brown ballroom. The sparkling insight of Brostoff’s essay is to read Caitlin Jenner’s failure to emobody proper transgender politics through the interpretive mode of camp, one that lights up her stubborn dedication to spectacular failure as really fucking funny, rather than anxiously trying to sweep it under the carpet because of its implication for the rest of us transsexuals. It’s hilarious, but there’s a lesson in the humor itself: failure is something we are all going to encounter in our attempts to do politics. Inconsistency, hypocrisy, and their shame are not only qualities of our oppressors because only they are wrong, or hypocritical. Caitlin’s politics are manifestly horrible on their own terms, not because they are contradicted by her being a trans woman. The contradiction is not the point from which proper trans politics springs, either, for there is no such thing to be crafted but for becoming failures like her. But it is the point from which we can laugh.

Likewise, a camp interpretation of Bryant being pied in the face reminds us that her presumed distance from the gay people she hated was close to none. Again, it’s not because she was secretly a little gay, nor does the insight neutralize the harm she inflicted on gay people. It’s to observe, first, that being an aging woman celebrity desperately clinging to relevance through Christian purity could be both deeply anti-gay in its politics and, for the same reason, very gay in its aesthetics. Throwing a pie in her face not only humiliated her, for a brief moment, in the way gay people were routinely humiliated by a homophobic American public. More importantly, it reminded everyone that her attempt to sever any relationship to gayness and thereby secure the moral purity of her Christian politics would always flop. Camp’s message was about the ubiquity of failure. The pie said to Bryant: you are formed as much by the gay culture that supplied at least it’s a fruit pie as any of the “homosexuals” you want barred from working as school teachers. If we gays are failures, then you are a failure too.

Higgins, in other words, didn’t try to usurp Anita Bryant’s purity by demonstrating the moral superiority, or sincerity, of gay politics; he brought her down to his level in a hilariously literal way by using the channel of panic to spread that failure around—the medium being pastry, whipped cream, and fruit filling.

If you’ve seen Framing Agnes, you’ll know there’s a moment in the film where I narrate the story of Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen was not playing for camp in her white American high femininity. But the absurdity of the situation she was put in as a 1950s trans celebrity, especially looking back on its newsreel footage, is why I play it for camp in my retelling—famously, I give my best Christine for the camera.

Audiences shall judge how successful I was in the performance. But I made the decision to go camp in my interpretation of those events to signal that we are hopelesly, hilariously entangled with what embarasses, shames, and harms us. And so our job is not to belatedly purify the world, which is precisely what our oppressors always claim to do when they single us out to eliminate us. We don’t owe the world respectability and sincerity in exchange for a life unharmed. We command respect because we are already here. And no amount of pie-in-the-face, proverbial or otherwise, can take that away, unless we give it away ourselves in advance, out of insecurity.

Camp as an interpretive method, I humbly submit, serves us better than sincerity in understanding the stakes of today’s gay and trans panic. Camp does not endorse the wildly embarrassing politics of civility that have shrunk the acceptable field of political action so intensely since the era when Bryant was pied that it’s still standard practice to try to publicly correct right wing media darlings (and their New York Times columnist allies) who have made bank off their obviously disingenuous promotion of grievance politics and authoritarian revenge narratives. I’m on Twitter, so I get it: the appeal runs deep; it’s emotional, not rational. But why play a losing game when we have manifestly better arts of interpretation through which to declare our unkillable existence is fundamentally good, not because it is pure, but because it is benignly imperfect?

Camp does not pretend it has the solutions to ending gay and trans panic. Throwing pies is certainly not a prescription. It merely allows for the reprieve of a little laughter along the way—a shared condition if there ever was one. And if you’re not going to laugh these days, I’m afraid all you’ll be left with is to cry. Or worse, to plot a politics based in resentment, just like the powers that be.

1. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2006), pp 26-27.

2. Queer London, pp 29-30.