To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and
to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
—
Susan Sontag, in “Notes on Camp” (1964)

Just in case you were wondering what has happened to the
discussion of Camp in the age of political correctness, more than
thirty years after Susan Sontag published her famous “Notes” on the
subject, consider the following passage from K. Robert Schwarz’s
article in the April issue of Opera News, a publication of the
Metropolitan Opera Guild. Mr. Schwarz’s topic is
the critical
response to The
Ghosts of Versailles, composed by John Corigliano, with a libretto
by William M. Hoffman, which had its world première at the Met in 1991:

Those who criticized Ghosts sometimes employed a peculiar
vocabulary, one not often encountered in classical-music reviews.
Edward Rothstein wrote of the opera’s “camp” humor and “perversely
campy villain”; Bernard Holland accused the creators of “dressing the
twentieth century in Mozartian drag”; Peter G. Davis denounced the
“irritatingly camp Rossini finale.” Considering that both Corigliano
and Hoffman are openly gay, might these words amount to coded
references?

Hoffman’s reply is unequivocal: “Calling
it campy is homophobic, absolutely. When they’re saying there’s camp
in Ghosts, what they’re really saying is it’s gay. The same people
who talked about camp values in Ghosts would never use the word
when talking about Mozart or Rossini—and I can’t think of anything
campier than L’Italiana in Algeri. Why is it permissible for
Rossini and not for us? Because knowing of the sexual orientation of
the artists, they feel they can apply values to us that they don’t
dare apply to Rossini or Mozart.”

Thus in the age of political correctness it
is deemed permissible for
artists who are “openly gay” to characterize—or, indeed,
mischaracterize—Mozart and Rossini as “camp” while it is forbidden
for critics of Ghosts to describe that work in similar terms.
“Calling [Ghosts] campy is homophobic, absolutely,” says Mr.
Hoffman, putting the critics on notice that the language police now
enjoy the support of the Metropolitan Opera Guild.