Ahead of her exciting new show, Temi Wilkey talks about the power of camp
BY TEMI WILKEY, IMAGE BY JADE ANG JACKMAN
I always thought there was something incredibly camp about the very fact of Susan Sontag’s Notes On Camp. To write an academic essay about the phenomenon of camp had all the ingredients of Campness itself. The self-indulgence to write, very seriously, about something seemingly frivolous. But before I’d even read Sontag’s Notes On Camp I came across Mikaella Clement’s incredible essay for The Outline called Notes On Dyke Camp. It explores the aesthetic expression of the Campness of queer women. I remember reading it for the first time six years ago when I was performing with Pecs, The Drag King company I co-founded, co-directed and used to perform in. It felt like a revelation. A dazzling description of the “prowling, smirking, swaggering” Lesbian Campness that our shows, back then, were revelling in.
Years later I would cast off my drag king crown, hang up my binding tape and exchange my life in cabaret for writing plays. This was primarily because, as much as I loved performing as a drag king, I am fundamentally… a femme. Let’s face it, whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional, we make art to attract potential lovers. But when I would step offstage and into bed with one of the many people I pulled, I couldn’t help but feel like they didn’t want to be sleeping with me but with my hyper-masculine alter ego, Drag King Cole. This year I’m bringing my debut one-woman solo show Main Character Energy to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s a homecoming of sorts. The show marries the theatrical style we found in the Pecs shows I used to co-direct with my true femme sensibilities.
The Oxford Dictionary defines a “femme” as “a lesbian whose appearance and behaviour are seen as traditionally feminine.” I discovered so much about the relationship between gender and performance while I was performing as a Drag King. The ways in which, in & out of drag, we are all always performing our gender, whether it’s the gender you were rigidly assigned at birth or a magical & unique gender presentation of your own making.
Mainstream (read: Straight) society doesn’t recognise the liberating nuances of this and femininity is more widely perceived as a performance than masculinity is. Masculinity is “the norm”. It’s seen as a lack of performance. Whilst femininity is something you “put on”. I think this is one of the many reasons that Drag Queens are so much more popular than Drag Kings. When we first formed Pecs we were met with a lot of questions: “What do you even do? How could you perform masculinity? Do you just…wear clothes?” You have to work extra hard as a King to first prove that you are performing something, let alone that there is merit to that performance. But, I digress…
Clements distils Sontag’s description of Camp as “a sensibility marked by artifice, stylization, exaggeration, theatricality, playfulness and irony”. This sensibility then has a deep relationship to femininity because femininity is so widely perceived as performative. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks… not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’.”
The Camp Sontag described is now usually ascribed to queer men because men displaying feminine gender expressions subvert society’s expectations of the behaviour of a real man. Clements makes a point of saying that dyke camp is not inherently masculine “in the same way it has been a mistake to think of camp as inherently feminine.” But it’s worth considering the fact that most of the examples she uses to illustrate dyke camp lean towards a more masculine gender presentation. I’d say that being femme is a queer reclamation of hyper femininity which is often (but not always) expressed through being camp.
So often gay men tell me that they feel incredibly attracted to me. Sexually. It confuses them. They have often only ever dated or desired men. I am almost constantly being told that ‘if I were attracted to women…” And they can never quite finish that sentence.
But they are attracted to me. Because the Campness in me speaks to the Campness in them. Camp is an expression of my queerness just as much as it is theirs. The Campness of femme women is an often missed and highly valuable expression of camp. Femmes are often disinherited of our campness because people can’t see it. Hyper-femininity on a woman, like florals for spring, is hardly ever seen as ground-breaking. But it is…
It’s a many-egged pudding. It’s a hat on a hat. Or, to bastardise Sontag, a “lamp” on a lamp. It is pure and unadulterated excess. In order to even be recognised as camp as a woman, or as an AFAB person, your flamboyance has to be so bold, so undeniable. It’s Janelle Monae in a floral cape, floral headdress & floral boots. It’s Chappell Roan in a towering wig & glamorous, purposefully messy make-up. It’s a delicious moan when you take a bite, it’s asking someone to carry you up the stairs because you’re far too tired to scale them, it’s wearing sunglasses indoors & at night, it’s fur, it’s fluff, it’s tulle, it’s feathers, it’s organza, it’s Carrie Bradshaw. It’s Main Character Energy. But choosing to be joyously self-indulgent & feminine when you’re queer is even more exciting than when Carrie, a straight woman, does it. Because our femininity, when we express it, is owned. It’s knowing. It is self-aware. A lot like my show.
How is the spirit of femme camp informing my creative practice? It’s in its self-indulgence – it’s a one-woman show about a beautiful woman (based on myself) (played by myself) who has created a one-woman show to show off her emotional range so that she can finally get the kind of parts she deserves. It’s incredibly meta-theatrical, which holds all the stylisation, exaggeration & playful irony of camp. It’s not really a play. It’s a “play”. Its queerness lies within its form. It has influences from cabaret, from my years of drag. But this time it’s high femme. Femme Camp.
My director and I have known each other for over ten years. That’s over a decade of being very camp on many dance floors. Campness looks very different on him than it does on me. But we were able to recognise it in each other, long before we even knew the other was queer. Camp is our secret language. A gift from the gay gods sent to help us find one another. A sign across a room, the slightest, smallest twinkle in someone’s eye, the flick of a wrist that lets you know you’re both gay & you’re home. Seeing camp in others, those who have that magical human expression reminds us that there are other people as weird & as powerful & as wickedly playful as you are.
As self-aware as it is self-indulgent, Main Character Energy is a high-energy cocktail of comedy, audience interaction and cabaret. An excuse to show Edinburgh how radiant Temi is.
At the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry from the 18-20 of July & the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the Roundabout at Summerhall from the 1-26 of August.
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