Camp Counselors

"We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own," wrote Susan Sontag almost 30 years ago, in her famous notes on the parallel universe gay men lovingly, spitefully fashioned from straight culture's bargain bins. Camp, Sontag recognised, belongs to the excluded, who know that the rules of behaviour are artificial, and so can remake them in earnest and in fun. But she also knew camp's fantasy excluded her, that its obsession with the feminine as fakery made the presence of real women a problem. Note the final item on her list of canonical camp items: "stag movies seen without lust." Here, one group of men simply trades one kind of desire for another, leaving the feminine (and the female) the object of their game. Sontag's view of camp as purely aesthetic stopped her from unravelling its sexual politics any further; since she wrote, gay liberation, the plague, and queer consciousness have both clarified and complicated matters. But the mirrored chamber that separates and connects women and gay men, while shadowy, still encloses us, helping determine our relationships and our art.

The Pet Shop Boys would rather honour Dusty Springfield in sequins than play Tallulah Bankhead in chartreuse: they use camp, but also step outside to critique it, showing the artifice of the artifice. And they're as likely to camp entrenched gay customs as to stick a pin in the straight status quo. Masters of the mixed feeling, Neil Ten-nant and Chris Lowe have employed ambiguity precisely throughout their work, not really to blur their own sexual predilections, but to show how the particulars of such desire and frustration also affect others whose power is limited, particularly women, youth, and the servant class. I could have sworn their 1986 hit Rent was about a kept boy, but the Derek Jarman directed video forms a chain of dependency between an ageing doyenne, a docker, and a sulky chauffeur. For the Pets, homoeroticism flowers within the larger frame of "normal" romance - sometimes emerging as its dirty secret, often struggling against repression, but shaped as much within as against its steely-soft conventions.

Queerness has come increasing-ly closer to the fore in their work, and the new Very (EMI) works as a gay bildungsroman, from the opening track's memories of first love behind the bicycle shed to the closing Village People cover. But the Pets also examine how gay sensibilities infuse main-stream, dance-based pop and mass culture in general, and subsequently creep into everyone's dreams. Consider how the group treats that classic object of British camp humour and mainstream ad-oration, the Royal Family. In Dreaming of the Queen, Eliza-beth appears with her fallen daughter-in-law, sharing tea with Tennant and his lover, who in waking life may be dead of AIDS. Over a floating canopy of horns and strings Tennant murmurs, "The Queen said, 'I'm aghast, love never seems to last.'" Quite queeny. But then comes Diana's answer, bearing a seriousness that strips down to truth: "There are no more lovers left alive, no one has survived." Contrasting the Queen's camp with Diana's tragic voice, pointing to the real woman's AIDS activism and her own losing battle with tradition, Tennant's tale honours the way in which sorrow and compassion can cultivate unexpected sympathies.

But comfort never sits too well with the Pets; they constantly look askance at the very emotions their music evokes. They've taken broad aim at pop entrepreneurship, pretentious stars, and the opiate beat; their coolness in expressing nostalgia or sexual desire constantly makes room to expose the actual (often economic or blandly sensual) motives behind the noblest passions. Behaviour, the Pets' last album, eulogised the '80s to a glossy Eurodisco beat. Very leaps into a new era with the verve of a Broadway production number; it's out to celebrate. But the Pets couldn't serve this coming-out cake without a dollop of salt. In the past, they've shown how pleasure gets muddled by the forces of old hierarchies and new capitalist ventures; here the com-plications fall loosely down the masculine-feminine divide.

Can You Forgive Her?, Very's first single and opening cut, confronts the matter of blame, which emerges, linked with the hope for freedom, at this albums perplexing centre. The story is familiar a young man can't live up to his girlfriend's expectations; he longs for the boys who first showed him his sensual nature, but is afraid. The girlfriend's rage and scorn are more (and less) than personal; speaking for the culture of wedding bells and back-seat mashing, she "makes you a laughing stock because you dance to disco and you don't like rock." The girl can't win, but this is not her story.

The worrisome female otherwise stays out of Very's narrative, except in the Queen's guise, and more subtly, as the anima within the non-gender-specific charac-ters Tennant portrays: their flirty ways, their hesitancy and fear of offending, but also their tenderness and urge toward romance. Presenting himself as the understanding, often-jilted mate of a conflicted, perhaps closeted roue, Tennant aligns himself with Can You Forgive Her?'s needy antiheroine, suggesting that the gap between womanhood and femininity sometimes can be only a matter of biological circumstance.

Very slyly builds its portrait of not-so-liberated gay life from details pulled from the closet, the fem bar, the cruising strip. In this seemingly all-male world, Tennant's voice, wavering between coyness and buoyant showboating, refutes masculinity's dominance. Songs that directly address the pop life also honour mass culture's feminine aspects. Tennant humours a cynical schmoozer in Yesterday, When I Was Mad, despising himself for embracing the cad's callous dismissal of his work. "But then, when I was lonely, I looked again and changed my mind," he croons in a perfect show-tune coda, confirming the value of pops community-created charm. In The Theatre. Amidst a flourish of Les Miz fanfare, he celebrates the word of illusion that artists build to comfort the unthinking masses. "It's another world here, somebody's singing," he intones, and, far in the background, Sylvia Mason-James lets forth a diva wail.

Throughout Very, the Pets continue to prove their genius at rescuing the "disposable" pop sound-bytes treasured by audiences in bedrooms and on dance floors throughout the modern world. Very engraves even more than usual on the band's musical Magic Slate - with the surface wiped clean of all but the most insidious rhythms and melodies, traces of earlier designs appear in the corners or beneath the dominant picture, lines of inheritance that won't be wiped away. A Barry White theme wafts through Liberation; Charles Aznavour's memory sparks Yesterday, When I Was Mad; piano-bar chords chase a Key West beat in To Speak Is a Sin; a Hi-NRG swirl sets up One in a Million's ultimate cry of love.

For the Pets, music moves at a level of fantasy-building that's deeper than words, and although it's not directly addressed, a musical threat may be the one that drew the pair toward Very's more obviously queer turf. With its toxic-waste orange industrial packaging, and the astro gear Tennant and Lowe wear in the pictures within, it camps techno's cyborgasmic revolution. Techno boys are space invaders in the dance world, bringing a straight, masculine ethic into the clubs. Young Offender could simply be a bitter ode to a videogame-obsessed trick, but the art this kid works could as easily be on CD-ROM. "Is that fire in your eyes, or the glow of machines?" Tennant sings, as Lowe blends sonic zooms with more familiar clavier and string sounds. Tennant muses on his own potential involvement in this life, in this scene: "Will I get in your way, or open your eyes? Who will give who the bigger surprise?" Very contains only a few techno blips and bleeps; instead, it raids the legendary dance floors of the past, reasserting the primacy of the disco beats that ruled dancers' hearts before techno tickled their brains. The Pets reconstruct the pop milieu in which many young men first came out (at least to themselves), especially now that the duo itself has been around long enough for a generation to grow up to its soundtrack. This album is, to a great extent, a love letter to those fans.

The Pets realise that they can only offer sweets and sympathy, that pop's political effect, while sometimes experienced as real, ultimately stays within the realm of imagination. There, a man can sing from a woman's point of view, or eradicate the boundaries between genders. That's what happens in Go West, Very's final production number, a Village People chestnut resurrected as the AIDS era's impossible dream. As the Pets play it, Go West is a fantasy in the midst of collapse. The fanfare that begins it signals its unreality: the curtain is raised. A manly chorus lifts Tennant's delicate vocal higher as the rhythm soars. The video unleashes beefcake hordes in red-and-white military garb, parading past Socialist Realist murals and up a magnificent staircase, past the Statue of Liberty (a black woman, for the second time in a video - the first was Ministry's "N.W.O."), toward an even more elevated male statue. The fall of one empire parallels the slow decay of another, but in this vision both survive strong and full of love for their shared illusions. Tennant and Lowe know better; they step off the staircase, through a hidden door ands into the final frontier (On the album, too, there's a cloaked admission that paradise remains lost. Eight minuses after Go West, the chorus, now hushed, sings a ballad-in-miniature about times past, but not forgotten.) After Tennant finishes his twinkly ode, the mix takes over, and beyond the manly crescendo two sounds flash and reappear, like distant lighthouses: a techno tweak, and the phantom call of a house diva. Even in this valley of dreams, life never loses the encumbrance of its ghosts.

This article was written by Ann Powers and appeared in the 2nd November 1993 issue of Voice magazine.

Special thanks to Mary (Domino99) for sending me a copy.
There is a link to her Funnily Enough web site from the And Finally page.