What’s more camp than dodging the Vietnam draft?
1969’s The Gay Deceivers dares to ask this very question, and its answer leaves little room for argument. Danny and Elliott decide to evade the Vietnam War draft by pretending to be gay for the draft board, but when an Army doctor suspects them, they have no choice but to buckle down on their lie, moving into a house with a rococo sensibility decorated by their next-door neighbor, Malcolm, who lives with his husband, Craig. Malcolm’s most prized possession is his plot of peonies, which Elliott’s girlfriend accidentally steps in while leaving in a huff after being shoved out the door to protect Elliott’s cover.
The Gay Deceivers falls heavily to one side of Susan Sontag’s dichotomy that camp is “either completely naïve or wholly conscious” (283), gleefully playing into gay stereotypes and delighting in its protagonists’ discomfort. Malcolm is the embodiment of camp throughout the film, dancing a tango as he cooks an omelet, coaxing Danny into dressing in drag as Judy Garland, and, as we see here, not playing whatsoever about his beloved peonies/marigolds. He is the human version of “art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’” (284). Malcolm is funny precisely because he is ‘too much’ and makes Danny and Elliott uncomfortable, forcing them to play parts which their solidly heterosexual sensibilities do not agree with. He plays the gay-passing-as-straight in-joke with Danny and Elliott (at his sister’s wedding “the best man gave the groom away, my father gave my sister away, and the fact that I wanted to be flower girl gave me away!”) and is unabashedly camp for the audience, whose knowledge of the deceivers’ predicament creates a meta-filmic in-joke. The audience’s knowledge that in this clip Malcolm is having a cat fight with none other than Elliott’s heterosexual girlfriend is its own in-joke, and one which Malcolm’s camp sensibility only highlights.
There is something to be said for the theatricality of The Gay Deceivers with reference to Jack Barbuscio’s four tenets of camp. This film is at its heart theatrical—characters play roles with the abundance and confusion of a Shakespearean comedy, and all of these roles are defined by the dichotomy between straight and gay. The comedy in this clip comes from Malcolm’s refusal to play a role and his unerring sense of self, regardless of the homophobic society he finds himself in. His camp sensibility exists in stark contrast to the deceivers’ sneering sense of superiority and asks them to put their money where their mouths are, affirming that at its heart, camp is “a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgement” (Sontag 291).