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 ever-fascinating tensions between high and low forms of culture and between good and bad taste, and in critical engagement with Marxist theories of capitalist production, Matthew Tinkcom offers a new vision of queer politics and aesthetics.He argues that camp-while embracing the cheap, the scorned, the gaudy, the tasteless, and what Warhol called 'the leftovers' of artistic production - is a mode of intellectual production and a philosophy of modernity, as much as it is an expression of a dissident sex/gender difference. From Minelli's musicals and the 'everyday glamour' of Warhol's films to Anger's experimental films and Waters' 'trash aesthetic,' Tinkcom demonstrates how camp allowed these gay men to design their own relationship to labour and to history in a way that protected them from censure even as they struggled to forge an identity within a system of 'value' that failed to recognise them. Students and scholars of cinema, queer studies, Marxism, modernism, popular culture, and political economy will enjoy this book.