Set in a summer camp, this sweet and sharp screwball comedy set in a summer camp for queer teens examines the nature of toxic masculinity and self-acceptance. Sixteen-year-old Randy Kapplehoff loves spending the summer at Camp Outland, a camp for queer teens. It's where he met his best friends. It's where he takes to the stage in the big musical. And it's where he fell for Hudson Aaronson-Lim—who's only into straight-acting guys and barely knows not-at-all-straight-acting Randy even exists. This year, however, it's going to be different. Randy has reinvented himself as 'Del'—buff, masculine, and on the market. Even if it means giving up show tunes, nail polish, and his unicorn bedsheets, he's determined to get Hudson to fall for him. But as he and Hudson grow closer, Randy has to ask himself: How much is he willing to change for love? And is it really love anyway, if Hudson doesn't know who he truly is?
Named the #1 Bestselling Non-Fiction Title by the Calgary Herald To camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to queer. And for many children and young adults, summer camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, editors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections of “queer” and “camp,” focusing especially on camp as an alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time. Exploring questions of identity, desire, and social formation, Queer as Camp delves into the diverse and queer-enabling dimensions of particular camp/sites, from traditional iterations of camp to camp-like ventures, literary and filmic texts about camp across a range of genres (fantasy, horror, realistic fiction, graphic novels), as well as the notorious appropriation of Indigenous life and the consequences of “playing Indian.” These accessible, engaging essays examine, variously, camp as a queer place and/or the experiences of queers at camp, including Vermont’s Indian Brook, a single-sex girls’ camp that has struggled with the inclusion of nonbinary and transgender campers and staff; the role of Jewish summer camp as a complicated site of sexuality, social bonding, and citizen-making as well as a potentially if not routinely queer-affirming place. They also attend to cinematic and literary representations of camp, such as the Eisner award-winning comic series Lumberjanes, which revitalizes and revises the century-old Girl Scout story; Disney’s Paul Bunyan, a short film that plays up male homosociality and cross-species bonding while inviting queer identification in the process; Sleepaway Camp, a horror film that exposes and deconstructs anxieties about the gendered body; and Wes Anderson’s critically acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom, which evokes dreams of escape, transformation, and other ways of being in the world. Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor. Contributors: Kyle Eveleth, D. Gilson, Charlie Hailey, Ana M. Jimenez-Moreno, Kathryn R. Kent, Mark Lipton, Kerry Mallan, Chris McGee, Roderick McGillis, Tammy Mielke, Alexis Mitchell, Flavia Musinsky, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Annebella Pollen, Andrew J. Trevarrow, Paul Venzo, Joshua Whitehead
"Camp" is often associated with glamour, surfaces and an ostentatious display of chic, but as these authors argue, there is an underside to it that has often gone unnoticed: camp’s simultaneous investment in dirt, vulgarity, the discarded and rejected, the abject. This book explores how camp challenges and at the same time celebrates what is arguably the single most important and foundational cultural division, that between the dirty and the clean. In refocusing camp as a phenomenon of the dark underside as much as of the glamorous surface, the collection hopes to offer an important contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics and aesthetics of camp.
Couldn't get enough of Love, Simon or Red, White and Royal Blue? This is the (slightly NSFW) book for you! 'Jack of Hearts might be the most important queer novel of the decade' Gay Times 'Jack of Hearts won my heart' Courtney Act 'This book is filth' Julian Clary --------------- 'My first time getting it in the butt was kind of weird. I think it's going to be weird for everyone's first time, though.' Meet Jack Rothman. He's seventeen and loves partying, makeup and boys - sometimes all at the same time. His sex life makes him the hot topic for the high school gossip machine. But who cares? Like Jack always says, 'it could be worse'. He doesn't actually expect that to come true. But after Jack starts writing an online sex advice column, the mysterious love letters he's been getting take a turn for the creepy. Jack's secret admirer knows everything: where he's hanging out, who he's sleeping with, who his mum is dating. They claim they love Jack, but not his unashamedly queer lifestyle. They want him to curb his sexuality, or they'll force him. As the pressure mounts, Jack must unmask his stalker before their obsession becomes genuinely dangerous... Praise for Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) 'The affirming, sex-positive, brilliant new book that puts the "adult" into young adult literature' Attitude 'Humane, sex-positive writing of the funniest, filthiest and most heartening kind' The Guardian
**Named One of Book Riot’s BEST QUEER BOOKS OF 2017** “Packed with story and drama … If Tennessee Williams’s ‘Suddenly Last Summer’ could be transposed to the 21st-century South, where queer liberation co-exists alongside the stubborn remains of fire and brimstone, it might read something like this juicy, moving hot mess of a novel.” –Tim Murphy, The Washington Post A searing debut novel centering around a gay-to-straight conversion camp in Mississippi and a man's reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen. Camp Levi, nestled in the Mississippi countryside, is designed to “cure” young teenage boys of their budding homosexuality. Will Dillard, a midwestern graduate student, spent a summer at the camp as a teenager, and has since tried to erase the experience from his mind. But when a fellow student alerts him that a slasher movie based on the camp is being released, he is forced to confront his troubled history and possible culpability in the death of a fellow camper. As past and present are woven together, Will recounts his “rehabilitation,” eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer, and to reclaim his story from those who have stolen it. With a masterful confluence of sensibility and place, How to Survive a Summer is a searing, unforgettable novel that introduces an exciting new literary voice. “Clear and moving, revealing White’s talent in evoking the complexities of the rural South.” —Publishers Weekly
Sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s are widely considered conformist in their depictions of gender roles and sexual attitudes. In Camp TV Quinlan Miller offers a new account of the history of American television that explains what campy meant in practical sitcom terms in shows as iconic as The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as in more obscure fare, such as The Ugliest Girl in Town. Situating his analysis within the era's shifts in the television industry and the coalescence of straightness and whiteness that came with the decline of vaudevillian camp, Miller shows how the sitcoms of this era overflowed with important queer representation and gender nonconformity. Whether through regular supporting performances (Ann B. Davis's Schultzy in The Bob Cummings Show), guest appearances by Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, or scripted dialogue and situations, industry processes of casting and production routinely esteemed a camp aesthetic that renders all gender expression queer. By charting this unexpected history, Miller offers new ways of exploring how supposedly repressive popular media incubated queer, genderqueer, and transgender representations.
Connor Major's summer break is turning into a nightmare. When he comes out to his religious zealot mother, she has him kidnapped and shipped off to a conversion therapy camp that will be his new home until he “changes.” Connor plans to escape, but first, he’s exposing the camp’s horrible truths for what they are—and taking the place down.
Hailed as "the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties," American artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin has received numerous accolades for his kaleidoscopic, multilayered movies and multimedia installations. However, there exists to date no comprehensive study of this prolific artist's work. Queer Art Camp Superstar compensates for this absence of sustained critical analysis of Trecartin's work by looking closely at a selection of his most significant movies in order to discern the artist's artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media. Examining Trecartin's substantial body of work, spanning from his early, pre-YouTube era series Early Baggage (2001-2003) to Temple Time (2016), Ricardo E. Zulueta adheres to a faithful chronological order, thus inviting readers to witness the ways thematic and formal concerns have evolved from Trecartin's earliest movies to his more recent multimedia cinematic installations. Through precisely chosen screen captures extracted directly from the movies, Zulueta demonstrates the serious attention paid to camera angles, mise-en-sc ne, and shot transitions, thus revealing and reflecting on the concepts that underwrite and are underwritten in these narratives. Giving careful attention to Trecartin's network of layered references to the grotesque and abject, carnivalesque and ludic, and camp imagery, Zulueta illustrates and explains how the artist takes on reality television, technology, fashion, consumption, and cyberspace.
For two years Ester Newton did field research in the world of drag queens—homosexual men who make a living impersonating women. Newton spent time in the noisy bars, the chaotic dressing rooms, and the cheap apartments and hotels that make up the lives of drag queens, interviewing informants whose trust she had earned and compiling a lively, first-hand ethnographic account of the culture of female impersonators. Mother Camp explores the distinctions that drag queens make among themselves as performers, the various kinds of night clubs and acts they depend on for a living, and the social organization of their work. A major part of the book deals with the symbolic geography of male and female styles, as enacted in the homosexual concept of "drag" (sex role transformation) and "camp," an important humor system cultivated by the drag queens themselves. "Newton's fascinating book shows how study of the extraordinary can brilliantly illuminate the ordinary—that social-sexual division of personality, appearance, and activity we usually take for granted."—Jonathan Katz, author of Gay American History "A trenchant statement of the social force and arbitrary nature of gender roles."—Martin S. Weinberg, Contemporary Sociology
