You could save yourself the colossal time and energy you would expend trying to explain the meaning of Camp to someone by just telling them to watch a James Bond film - any James Bond film. Especially one starring Sean Connery. Susan Sontag would agree with me.

“Mr. Bond, you persist in defying my efforts to provide an amusing death for you.” - Hugo Drax, Moonraker

Camp is hard to pin down. Whenever one attempts to explain it to someone one can end up feeling as frustrated as Hugo Drax near the end of Moonraker. It defies efforts to put it into a box.

The dictionary definitions of Camp are universally unsatisfying. Even the Oxford English Dictionary (THE dictionary as far as I am concerned) struggles. Back in 1909 (the first time the word was recorded with a sense not relating to tents), after much uhhming and ahhing, the dictionary-makers settled on this:

ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals

As definitions go, it’s pretty imprecise, being little more than a list of adjectives, circumlocuting the meaning like a shiver of uncharacteristically-uncertain sharks nervously circling a meal that threatens to give them indigestion. Hardly like the sharks in a Bond film, who are always certain about what they want, even if it disagrees with them later.

The hesitation is palpable - and understandable. All euphemisms (terms switched in place of less socially acceptable words) thrive on their ambiguity. By 1909, ‘camp’ had a well-established dual identity that continues to the present day. You could be having a perfectly polite conversation about soldiers or tents OR you could be nattering about homosexuals. OR all of the above. After all, soldering, spending the night outdoors under canvas and socially-unacceptable sex are hardly mutually exclusive!

For well over a century, ‘camp’ has been well-acquainted with - to use the euphemistic phrase of Oscar Wilde’s boyfriend - the love that dare not speak its name.

Despite there having been significant changes in social attitudes in many parts of the world, homosexuality is still hard to talk about. It’s no surprise then that ‘camp’ survives as a euphemism to this day. There has been something of a shift however. Nowadays, it’s used more narrowly, to describe stereotypically gay male behaviours which are considered more ‘femme’. Anything which is, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “exaggerated, affected, theatrical, effeminate”.

Wider society is now awake to the fact that not all gay men are camp. Not that there is anything wrong with being camp. I find it alarming that even gay men use ‘camp’ as an insult. There was a time, prior to coming out, when I would have taken great offence at someone calling me camp, but only because I thought they’d seen through my ‘straight acting’ cover. As an out gay man, I embrace all aspects of my personality - including the camp qualities - and would never dream of pigeonholing myself as ‘masc’ or ‘femme’. But many do. It’s a handy shortcut on dating apps (apparently), so you can find what you want more quickly. It’s also deeply depressing: love and desire reduced to the taste-determining categories of a Netflix algorithm, or a take out menu.

It boggles my mind that ‘camp-shaming’ is a thing not just done to gay people but by other gay people.

In my book, camp is far from a bad word. I would argue that ‘camp’ is one of those words, formerly used to wound us, which we should be actively reclaiming. ‘Queer’ has been largely reclaimed and even ‘faggot’ has undergone something of a renaissance in some communities. So why not ‘camp’?

Let’s take back ‘camp’! We will let the straights borrow it if they want, but it’s our word! Camp should be our word, OK?

I’m exaggerating of course (how very Camp of me!). And as we shall see, with the help of Susan Sontag, something doesn’t have to be gay to be Camp or Camp to be gay. But ‘gay’ and ‘camp’, among a large slice of the Bond fandom, are practically synonymous. And it’s disheartening when I hear anyone describe something in a Bond film as ‘campy’ with a hint of disdain, or even an outright sneer. In these moments, my heart sinks, because there’s a possibility that what they’re really saying is ‘this bit is gay’, and not in a good way. And if someone was to turn around and say “I don’t mean that, it’s just my personal taste, I don’t like campy things” then they’ve picked the wrong franchise to follow.

Many Bond fans are well aware of how Camp it is - the rest are in denial. When I posted about this recently on Twitter, my timeline was flooded with examples of Camp characters, situations, music cues and more. Several acknowledged that the whole 007 enterprise was the epitome of camp. I have tried to make reference to as many of these as possible throughout this piece.

The reality is, Bond has been camp since the very beginning, right back to Fleming, and especially from 1962 onwards. In fact, you could save yourself a lot of a time and energy explaining the meaning of ‘camp’ to someone by just telling them to watch a James Bond film. When we look up the definition of ‘Camp’ in a dictionary there shouldn’t be any words: just a picture of Sean Connery in a blue towelling robe standing in front of a rear-projected Miami hotel.

Goldfinger wasn’t the only seminal artwork of 1964. In the same year, the bisexual critic Susan Sontag published Notes on Camp, a paper which is considered a classic today. I revisit it often when I’m writing anything related to Bond. But this is the first time I’ve used it as the centrepiece of an article. I don’t envision it being the last.

It’s well worth reading in its entirety; not only is it insightful but it’s a lot of fun. Although Notes on Camp is widely branded an essay, Sontag went with ‘Notes’ because she saw her piece as a series of “jottings, rather than an essay… it's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp”. She also insisted on raising the stature of Camp by giving it a capital letter: it’s Camp, not camp, at least when it’s used as a noun and not as in the adjective ‘campy’. (I have used it for the noun and sometimes the adjective ‘Camp’)

I’m going to fight my natural tendency to form a “linear, consecutive argument” of the type Sontag was trying to avoid and attempt something similar, paying homage with some notes about Bond’s relationship with Camp, riffing off an observation from Sontag (which I will quote at the start). Whereas she had 58 loosely-connected notes of varying length, at least two thirds of which could be applied fruitfully to a discussion of Bond, I’m going to limit myself to 007. So systematic an approach might have appalled the late, great Sontag. If so: sorry Susan!

Sontag also peppered her Notes with quotes from Oscar Wilde, to whom she dedicated her piece. While the Bond films are replete with Wildean witticisms, direct quotes are in short supply in Bond. But in the spirit of Sontag, we’ll kick things off with another Drax-line, paraphrasing The Importance of Being Earnest: “How would have Oscar Wilde have put it? To lose one aircraft may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two, seems like carelessness.”

001 “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not.”

We may struggle to define it, but we know Camp when we see and hear it. There are those moments in every Bond film where we feel we have slipped into Camp territory. A lot of this has to do with style. As is well-established, Bond himself is something of a blank slate, an assemblage of accoutrements, pushed to - and then beyond - the limit: impeccably-tailored clothing, ludicrously overpriced cars, liver-worrying volumes of alcohol, lung-terrifying quantities of cigarettes. The character’s tabula rasa quality lets us project ourselves onto him. To an extent, we can all live the James Bond lifestyle. But while putting on a dinner jacket and ordering a Martini is quite pleasurable (and wonderfully Camp!), the feeling only lasts as long as it takes us to down that cocktail or take off that bow tie. Even when we’re living through unusual times, our world is too ‘normal’ - it is more “on” than “off”. For us, things are, reassuringly but boringly, what-they-are more often than what-they-are-not. Not for Bond. We won’t be seeing Bond taking a trip to the local supermarket any time soon. We might see Harry Palmer or Jason Bourne in the freezer aisle - but never Bond. His world is always exaggerated, always turned up to 11, and rarely what it seems.

Sontag was adamant that “the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” Although I’ve not counted the exact number of feathers in her boa, Fiona Volpe’s attire is typical of the Bond girl style. No wonder drag queens find them to be such an inspiration.

And if we’re talking of Bond’s world, we cannot neglect the setting - those expressionistic Ken Adam control rooms and hotel rooms, with their histrionic proportions and neurotic perspectives. We’ve all walked into a building and said ‘this could be the lair for a Bond villain’. We’ve trespassed into that Camp world, even if just for a few moments. And as much as we enjoy it, we’re happy to return home to something cosier, more humane.

But even this is too concrete. Camp is not just an elaborate set, a big frock or a way of smoking a cigarette. Sontag called Camp a sensibility, lacking the solidity to even be considered an ‘idea’. For something to be Camp it must be consistently achieving “victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.”” This consistency doesn’t come easily: all aspects must work together. The quips that follow henchmen’s deaths don’t work if the sets fall flat. The sleazy sax on the soundtrack must be the aural equivalent of Stacey Sutton’s white trouser-suit, immaculate and uncreased as she steps from the helicopter, so perfectly formed it cannot be taken seriously. It’s just too perfectly designed. Inside, some part of us screams: this is not the real world!

Perhaps the most stylised and stylish Camp affectation is the one that appears at the beginning of (nearly) every Bond film: the gunbarrel. It’s so serious, so posed… how could it be anything other than pure Camp?

002 “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much."”

The harder they come, the harder they fall. It sounds like the sort of proverbial phrase Ian Fleming might have tried to work into one of his titles. As far as Bond is concerned, it’s a truism that the ‘harder’ the film, the more Camp things become.

Lots of fans apply the descriptor ‘Fleming-like’ to the so-called ‘harder’ films. Several Bond actors, most notably Timothy Dalton, have expressed their intention to go ‘back’ to Fleming in their portrayals, as if Fleming is the bastion of seriousness.

As much as I love the Fleming books, I would never saddle them with the accusation that they are serious. But lots of fans insist that we should, including other writers.

In his introducing to his own Bond continuation novel Colonel Sun, Kingsley Amis decried the filmmakers’ departure from Fleming, using the example of The Spy Who Loved Me to illustrate where they were going wrong: the film concerns stolen nuclear submarines being used to trigger Armageddon whereas the novel is one of Fleming’s most Camp creations, a gloriously lurid first-person tale of a young American woman’s sexual history and rescue from mobsters by handsome stranger from across the pond, James Bond. While the latter may present itself as serious fiction, both cannot be taken altogether seriously, not matter how much they are proposed as such. They are “too much” in their own way. Somewhat ironically, Amis’ own novel is one of the weirdest, outre Bond continuation novels - a Camp delight in other words.

The trick, of course, is not minding that it’s “too much”. The films and books go to extreme lengths to ground the outlandish elements in some kind of internal reality. Bond’s famous expostulation that Q must be joking about an ejector seat installed in his new DB5 is there as a pressure release valve - just as things are about to stretch credulity to breaking point we have the lead character express what we’re all thinking.

Fleming was quick to observe that his own books weren’t funny, whereas comedy has been a hallmark of the film series since the start. But if the Fleming books had been translated onto the screen without such witticisms, they would have been impossible to take seriously. They would have simply been “too much”. Sontag states: “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.” If anything, the books are a far purer incarnation of camp than the films.

And while films like Licence To Kill and Casino Royale are widely considered to be on the ‘harder’ end of the spectrum, that scarcely makes them less Camp. In fact, their po-faced seriousness, punctuated with the same release-valve wit of the other films, makes them masterclasses in Camp. Films generally thought of as Camp just don’t bother to hide the clashing tones. In Diamonds Are Forever, Moonraker and Die Another Day, for instance, the seams are especially visible, pushing them to the edges of Camp and almost teetering into self-parody. But they’re still essentially the same. When we put Diamonds alongside Licence, we’re not comparing an apple with an orange - we’re comparing a Pink Lady with a Golden Delicious.

Seriousness is an “essential element” of Camp. Specifically, a seriousness that fails. This failure is baked into Bond’s DNA. Fleming created James Bond as a way of propping up a nation’s waning self-belief, helping Britain with its identity crisis in the decades following the Second World War and the loss of Empire. It was an impossible task - a darkly funny proposition.

And now? What is the failure at the centre of this million dollar international franchise? The Camp delusion we still fall for in 2021 - willingly! Time and time again! - is that one person can save the world. We know, deep down, that it’s a lie. But we take it seriously for two hours at a time. In the words of the illustrious Dr Goodhead, high in orbit and the delusion we all share: “James, take me around the world one more time.”

003. “What Camp taste responds to is "instant character"... what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character.”

Bond never changes - not really.

Even the recent films, featuring a loose, retrospectively-applied continuity, show Bond ending up basically the same as he started.

The one opportunity the filmmakers had to mess with this previously was in Diamonds Are Forever. Many fans have expressed a desire to see how the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service might have continued the story, with a plot focused around Bond’s revenge on Blofeld for killing his wife. And while it’s certainly intriguing, the filmmakers chose to avoid the issue almost entirely, heightening the Camp qualities of Diamonds Are Forever in the process.

Camp thrives on continuity, but not if it means having the character develop. Sontag again: “Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence - a person being one, very intense thing. Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced.”

We don’t want Bond to develop - that’s a huge part of his appeal. It’s also what makes him sublimely Camp.

004 “Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: The most refined form of sexual attractiveness consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Connery got the part because Cubby’s wife said he moved like a panther. By comparing Connery to one of the least ‘masc’ of the big cats, Dana Broccoli nailed the appeal of the actor in the role. There’s something attractively feminine about the first big screen Bond, who lifted weights as “Big Tam” before being fitted for the tuxedo.

Subsequent Bond actors have also stereotypically feminine qualities, reflective of their time periods. Counterintuitively, the actor most associated with Camp in Bond, Roger Moore, was presented as the most hypermasculine, bedding multitudes of women in a bid to convince us that he was the most manly of the lot. All it did (brilliantly!) was highlight how traditional notions of masculinity are just gossamer-thin Camp affectations.

Male characters behaving in a manner we would consider to be ‘femme’ are a rare breed in Bond films. The two most notable examples are Fordyce in Casino Royale (1967) and the Rio hotel manager in Moonraker, both played by straight men. Neither of these are what I (or Susan Sontag) would consider to be Camp in the true sense - they’re just outdated gay stereotypes, what Vito Russo identified as the ‘sissy’ character-type from early Hollywood cinema.

Sontag’s comments on what makes a feminine women most beautiful seem tailor-made with Bond girls in mind. While it may at first appear that a Bond film is merely reinforcing traditional gender norms, the ladies who routinely top the polls of Sexiest Bond Girls are mostly those who find themselves fighting tooth and nail to take their share of a man’s world.

005 “While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard -- and the most articulate audience -- of Camp.”

Camp does not discriminate, being freely open to people of all persuasions. And while it’s completely the case that seeing Camp as merely a synonym for ‘gay’ is far too reductive, it’s also the case that homosexuals possess VIP access. We ‘get’ that something is Camp before others do. Here at the “vanguard”, we’re attuned to every ping on our Camp radar. Camp-dar, if you will.

Nowhere is the more true than in our appreciation - on a Camp level - of heterosexual sex.

Just blink and you could easily imagine some of the Bond films’ ‘sexy’ scenes in Carry Ons. Sometimes, it’s only a music cue and a Sid James laugh away.

But it’s when heterosexual sex is treated seriously, sexily even, in a Bond film, it’s at its most Camp. Bond’s and Elektra’s coupling in The World Is Not Enough always springs to mind; a celebration of pure Camp, shot - completely unironically - like an advert for luxury chocolate.

Sontag notes that Camp is “not a natural model of sensibility, if there be any such”. Sex is one of the most natural acts depictable, but it’s rarely presented naturalistically. There are boring, conventionally moral reasons for this. But in terms of Bond, not only would natural, real, explicit sex severely restrict the audience, it would completely ruin the series.

Sex is part of the films’ Camp style and texture. Sex must be formulaic, rarely progressing beyond heavy-petting. Bond film sex rarely gets beyond - to use an Americanism - second base. The films move so fast - perhaps to avoid us lingering on what probably happens next, if we’re honest: the missionary position providing a brief distraction, for an hour or two; an awkward silence as the bedside lamp is extinguished; nothing stirring in the darkness except for the remainder of the Bollinger in its ice bucket, quietly acclimatising to room temperature.

Or maybe things get positively Bacchanalian and no one sleeps a wink. Who knows?

Well, we do.

All of the fades to black, cut aways and elisions allow us to fill in the blanks. But the other bits we never get to see - Bond going food shopping, clearing his in-tray, using the toilet* - are universally mundane. Hitchcock said that drama was life with the dull bits cut out. There are no boring bits in a Bond film - and no real life either. What’s left is pure excitement; pure fantasy; pure Camp. And that includes the sex scenes.

*actually, it’s well established that Bond spends a long time with other men in toilets (especially GoldenEye and Casino Royale), but we never see Bond using them for the reasons they were designed (fortunately).

006 “Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive.”

Connery is the Campest Bond, hands down (or up, depending on if Blofeld has just been caught you making mud pies). It helps that he got there first: there’s a freshness, and a lack of self-awareness - almost a naivete. For Sontag, “Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying”. And the less it winks at the audience, breaking the illusion of seriousness, the better.

The cruel irony is that if you set out to make Camp, you’re usually setting yourself up to fail.

Many of the more recent films, especially those made for anniversary milestones (Die Another Day, Skyfall) have featured numerous fourth wall-shattering callbacks. Here is where we stray from Camp into kitsch territory.

The earliest Bond films feel the most Camp to me. Like the dodgy back projection, it’s easier to spot.

It’s impossible to predict what will be Camp about Bond in several decades’ time. If the series goes in a more serious direction we will probably be in for a treat thirty years down the line.

007 “Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp…”

One of Sontag’s Notes was list of things she considered to be unequivocally Camp, ranging from “Tiffany lamps” and “Swan Lake” (both of which feature in Bond films incidentally) to “old Flash Gordon comics” and “women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)”. Every Bond film is inherently Camp so it’s probably easier to list what ISN’T Camp about Bond. However, here is a list of especially Camp things, featuring some of those suggested by Licence To Queer readers. I’ve weeded out any that seemed to be just ‘things that are a bit stereotypically gay’. I think by now we know things can be Camp AND gay, but some things are just Camp and some things are just gay. I’m especially partial to that cosy space in the middle of that Venn diagram.

As for whether they deserve to be in this list, they’re all Camp more or less. Some more, some less. I’ll let you decide:

The train scene in Casino Royale

Miss Moneypenny inviting Bond to listen to her Barry Manilow records in The Living Daylights

Honor Blackman

Jaws and Dolly (the sincere ending more than the meet cute)

Shirley Bassey

The title cards in Quantum of Solace

Charles Gray’s Blofeld (from waspish start to bathosub finish)

Most of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

The indentigraph machine in For Your Eyes Only

Madonna's 80s throwback cameo in Die Another Day.

The fight with dragged-up Colonel Jacques Bouvar in the pre-credits sequence of Thunderball (more for its violence than the fact that it’s stunt ace Bob Simmons in drag)

Tanya Roberts: "That's incredibly dangerous"

All of the villains and girls in Tomorrow Never Dies

Roger’s safari suits. The lot.

M’s death scene in Skyfall

Professor Joe “Bless Your Heart” Butcher in Licence To Kill

All of You Only Live Twice

This exchange from Diamonds Are Forever:

Tiffany: “You’ve just killed James Bond!”

Bond: “Is that who it was? Well it just goes to show no one is indestructible”

Thank you to all of the Tweeters who contributed to this piece:

@jonnylarkin @ThomWolf @somrharris @leosoesanto @backlotte @alibondgirl @KevBot_87 @ArlosDad @mark0connell @FoulFangedFiend @mattdegroot @TheWizardOfIce @MarcusPetaja @BenjaminDWaters @MattRf20

If I have missed you off it was purely accidentally; please get in touch and I will add you!

Also recommended: Lennart Guldbrandsson has written an interesting essay on Camp in Bond. Although his whole point is that the success of the series is rooted in its unique mixture of “serious” and “silly”, he bravely proposes a taxonomy of Bond films, with just under half of the films in the ‘serious’ category, and the rest on the ‘silly’ side of the line. It is sure to stir some lively debate among Bond fans who might be affronted or delighted, depending on where their favourite films appear and if they consider ‘silly’ or ‘serious’ to be good/bad things.

007 Notes On Camp