According to Susan Sontag:
“In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve” (283).
Further, she claims that something can only be pure Camp when the creator of it has attempted to do something “really outlandish” (283) but is unable to succeed. In the HBO Max show The Righteous Gemstones, the character Baby Billy Freeman embodies camp because of his obsession with stylization, dead-seriousness in what he is doing, and his inability to be taken seriously (due to being ‘too much’ (Sontag 284)).
In the clip I have chosen, Baby Billy starts his own TV game show called Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers. He is, rather innocently, completely convinced that his show is excellent television, and takes it seriously. He is committed to the stylization, texture/color/sound/costuming and their over-the-top ostentatiousness and flamboyant quality. As Sontag notes in regards to camp: “style is everything” (285).
While Baby Billy is not gay (as far as we know) fans of the show on social media refer to him as bisexual and have ‘claimed’ him into the gay community. According to Jack Babuscio, the creator of camp content (in this case, BBBB), need not be gay themselves: “[Camp’s] link with gayness is established when the camp aspect of an individual or thing is identified as such by a gay sensibility” (122). His behavior has attracted the attention of said gay sensibility. According to Babuscio:
“…[camp] signifies performance rather than existence. Clothes and decor, for example, can be a means of asserting one’s identity, as well as a form of justification in a society which denies one’s essential validity” (124).
Baby Billy, having been claimed by the gay community online, asserts his identity as an incongruous figure that – as shown in the show – is usually not accepted by society and lives on the fringes of it.
Babuscio lists four features basic to camp: irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor. Irony in this case refers to “…any highly incongruous contrast between an individual or thing and its context or association” (122). He lists several such examples, including youth/old age and sacred/profane. Baby Billy’s campy show has several of these incongruities — he is old, acting young, he is professing to be of high religious importance, while performing a number for a ridiculous game show.
Overall, in the Righteous Gemstones, Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers set out to be an important endeavor that would be entertaining as well as educational for Christians worldwide, but ended up giving Baby Billy status as a gay icon (in real life, sadly not within the canon of the show).