James: When he talks about the past, he looks at me.

Charles: I’m just so relieved. I thought that I was the oldest one here, but then I saw you and, thought, “Oh, thank God.”

Jack: I was rereading the Sontag essay in preparation for this, and I do think that camp is a sensibility, an aesthetic sensibility. I would imagine it really derived from gay culture, gay male culture initially, and then has widened through every different group. Sontag starts with Oscar Wilde, which is a reasonable place to start because he was such a funny commentator on the unnatural.

At the time, people wouldn’t have necessarily expressed their antipathy to same-sex sexuality through what we call homophobia, but they would have said, “This is unnatural.” And so, you could say that one of the foundational gestures of camp is to say, “It’s unnatural? Absolutely.”

Zaldy: The term was in black and white in the dictionary in the last century, but camp and its queer roots have been there as far back as it goes. It’s just … camp. I mean, imagine Roman orgies — that’s camp! That is full-on camp.

Charles: If we were back at the Roman orgy, it’d be our perception of it as opposed to somebody else’s. Maybe a heterosexual person at the Roman orgy might just be going at it from purely the sex angle, but if we were there, we’d be amused at the look of it, or the person who’s posing and looks foolish because they want to be something that they actually are not. I think an element of camp is what the truth is and what the perception is, when they’re two different things. That’s where often the humor comes in.

Carmelita: I also think that it’s really important to put women in. I came from the ’80s, but women were also dressing up and were also acting out in cabaret around that time. Maybe they were not as visible.