Queer as Camp Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason Editors fordham university press New York 2019 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 3 1/30/19 3:50 PM Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 4 1/30/19 3:50 PM contents Preface charlie hailey vii Camping Out: An Introduction kenneth b. kidd and derritt mason 1 Notes Home from Camp, by Susan Sontag daniel mallory ortberg 000 Part I camp sites “The most curious” of all “queer societies”? Sexuality and Gender in British Woodcraft Camps, 1916–2016 annebella pollen 000 Queer Pedagogy at Indian Brook Camp flavia musinsky 000 “No Trespassing”: Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere kathryn r. kent 000 Nation-Bonding: Sexuality and the State in the Jewish Summer Camp alexis mitchell 000 Notes on Church Camp d. gilson 000 Queer at Camp: A Selected Assemblage of Resistance and Hope mark lipton 000 v 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 5 1/30/19 3:50 PM vi Contents The Camping Ground “Down Under”: Queer Interpretations of the Australian Summer Holiday paul venzo 000 Part II camp stories Camping with Walt Disney’s Paul Bunyan: An Essay Short tammy l. mielke and andrew trevarrow 000 Illegal Citizen: The Japanese-American Internment Camp in Soon-Teck Oh’s Tondemonai—Never Happen! ana m. jimenez-moreno 000 Why Angela Won’t Go Swimming: Sleepaway Camp, Slasher Films, and Summer Camp Horrors chris mcgee 000 Striking Camp: Empowerment and Re-Presentation in Lumberjanes kyle eveleth 000 Escape to Moonrise Kingdom: Let’s Go Camping! kerry mallan and roderick mcgillis 000 “Finding We’Wha”: Indigenous Idylls in Queer Young Adult Literature joshua whitehead 000 Acknowledgments 000 Works Cited 000 List of Contributors 000 Index 000 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 6 1/30/19 3:50 PM “The most curious” of all “queer societies”? Sexuality and Gender in British Woodcraft Camps, 1916–2016 Annebella Pollen In the years during and after the Great War, disaffected with the apparent militarism and imperialism of Boy Scouts, British pacifists established rival outdoor youth organizations. These new organizations returned to some of the founding ideas of Scouting in the form of the “woodcraft” system of outdoor education pioneered at the turn of the twentieth century by Ernest Thompson Seton and latterly absorbed into Baden- Powell’s organization. To these ideas each of the new organizations—the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, and Woodcraft Folk—added their own distinctive philosophies, drawing on psychology, spirituality, art and politics, to provide idiosyncratic camping experiences across genders and ages. Camp in this context was more than leisure, and more than an escape from encroaching industrialization—it was a personally and socially trans- formative space, rich with utopian possibility. The British woodcraft movement’s subversions represent a distinctive and elaborate queering of the Boy Scout ideal. Through their futurist visions and revivalist performances, members acted out their radical ideals for a hybrid new/old world. Alongside these activities, each group devel- oped detailed and sometimes unorthodox ideas about “sex instruction” and 31 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 31 1/30/19 3:50 PM 32 Annebella Pollen “sex equality” interlinked with complex theories of camping. As such, new ideas about social relationships ran through woodcraft organizations’ vision and were played out under canvas. In the temporary worlds of primi- tivist camps in the heady period of change after the Great War, alternatives to so- called civilized life could be tried on for size. Gender and sexuality became prime sites where the limits of experimental practices were tested and contested, and aspects of these challenges continue in the organiza- tions’ twenty- first century manifestations. Through an investigation of woodcraft theories and practices, this essay examines the movement as a case study of oppositional ideals in the inter- war period, when camping and experiments in living intertwined. While woodcraft organizations in Britain have always been much smaller in scale than numbers of Scouts and Guides, and their founding ideas were far from mainstream, their position as aspiring cultural revolutionaries meant that they inhabited a space—literally and figuratively—as outsiders. This essay presents views from the three most prominent woodcraft organiza- tions, each founded during or shortly after the Great War. The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry was the first pacifist coeducational breakaway from Scouts. Founded in 1916, it was at its most productive in the 1920s and 1930s with public projects including the progressive Forest School for children and Grith Fyrd craft training camp for unemployed men. The organization recently celebrated its centenary; it is now a very small cluster of descendants of early members. The flamboyant, artistic Kindred of the Kibbo Kift was established as an all- ages, mixed- gender alternative to Scouts in 1920 but only lasted just over a decade as a woodcraft organiza- tion before being radically remodeled into an economic campaign group (The Green Shirts) and latterly a short- lived political party (The Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Ireland). Finally, Woodcraft Folk was founded in 1925 following a schism in Kibbo Kift over political direction; it continues to thrive as an outdoor- focused and democratic organization with around 15,000 adult and child members in groups spread across the United Kingdom. Camping as an Oppositional Practice Camping may seem to be an innocuous leisure activity, merely providing a low- budget holiday; as such, it could be of little social or political con- sequence. Yet camping has also been described as essentially socialist in character. In G. A. Cohen’s analysis, as a system based on collective property and mutual giving, camping demonstrates in miniature “that 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 32 1/30/19 3:50 PM British Woodcraft Camps, 1916–2016 33 society- wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable” (11). Camps are clearly diverse in their organization and ideologies, but they have nev- ertheless been characterized as extraordinary and exceptional places; as philosopher Giorgio Agamben has put it, the camp is “a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order” (1). For their capacity to stand outside conventional social structures, camps have become utilized for protest and as sites where the building blocks of society can be symbolically decon- structed and remade. Angela Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy, for example, have argued that the collective nature of camps has been particularly effective in forging “communities of understanding.” In their conception, camp is a “unique structural, spatial and temporal form that shapes those who live, work, play and create within it” (8). A further essential aspect of camp—its transitory nature—necessarily results in a shift in everyday practices. To use the anarchist Hakim Bey’s terminology, camps encapsulate a “temporary autonomous zone” where intentional com- munities can form “pirate utopias.” The temporary nature of camping allows for the suspension of norms and the trying on of new worlds for size. As camping historian Matthew de Abaitua writes, “Camping promises nothing permanent. It is a way of trafficking between what was and what could yet be” (60). The romantic promise of camping has long held an allure for reform- ers at odds with the modern world. Since the writings of Henry David Thoreau in the mid- nineteenth century, a substantial body of literature has been produced in Britain and America espousing the ostensibly moral value of withdrawing from urban life with only the most basic means of survival on hand. Full of motifs of savages, Indians, gypsies and the like, such discourse contains much that can be critiqued as privileged colonial fantasy, but the experience of going back to the land clearly had (and has) anti- establishment potential. The “pastoral impulse,” as Jan Marsh has described it, was particularly prevalent from the 1880s in Britain among socialist campaigners, who saw the countryside disappearing from view and reconfigured it as an idea. “Country” became an oppositional and idealized space in positive relationship to the rapidly expanding, polluted, and industrialized city (Williams). For those late- Victorian reformers who campaigned for all- round social improvement, new enthusiasms for cycling, hiking, and camping were part of a broader urge for the simplification of life. Campaigns for fresh air and radiant health were a core part of these left- wing desires, which aimed to reform all aspects of life, from new ways of eating and dressing to new forms of social relationships. 19202-Kidd_QueerAsCamp.indd 33 1/30/19 3:50 PM 34 Annebella Pollen Key proponents of these lifestyles, which espoused anti- industrial and alternative causes from vegetarianism and self- sufficiency in food produc- tion to the revival of handicrafts, included John Ruskin, William Morris, and Edward Carpenter. Carpenter, in particular, offers a bridge between the late nineteenth- century practices and their manifestation among alter- native youth organizations in the 1920s.