Working Like a Homosexual

What does camp have to do with capitalism? How have queer men created a philosophy of commodity culture? Why is cinema central to camp? With chapters on the films of Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters, Working Like a Homosexual responds to these questions by arguing that post-World War II gay male subcultures have fostered their own ways not only of consuming mass culture but of producing it as well.With a special emphasis on the tensions between high and low forms of culture and between good and bad taste, Matthew Tinkcom offers a new vision of queer politics and aesthetics that is critically engaged with Marxist theories of capitalist production. He argues that camp-while embracing the cheap, the scorned, the gaudy, the tasteless, and what Warhol called "e;the leftovers"e; of artistic production-is a mode of intellectual production and a critical philosophy of modernity as much as it is an expression of a dissident sex/gender difference. From Minnelli's musicals and the "e;everyday glamour"e; of Warhol's films to Anger's experimental films and Waters's "e;trash aesthetic,"e; Tinkcom demonstrates how camp allowed these gay men to design their own relationship to labor and to history in a way that protected them from censure even as they struggled to forge a role for themselves within a system of "e;value"e; that failed to recognize them.