WHOSE CAMP IS IT ANYWAY?
Camp is mainstream now - so what happens next?
Thursday 4 November 2021
08:30 pm - 09:30 pm
This panel will try to dig a little deeper in understanding the aesthetics, writing and humour of camp. Especially now with the mainstreaming of camp, has true camp been lost, and if so, can it be reclaimed? Even worse, is queer camp being censored as more vanilla variants become prominent?
Moderator - Tim Spencer is a writer/actor/producer for film, television and theatre. His verbatim script, Show Me Yours, I’ll Show You Mine, won the 2012 Green Room Award for Best Independent Writing. In 2017 Tim formed Wintergarden Pictures with Joshua Longhurst and Rosie Braye. Tim wrote the company’s first short film Cherry Season which received the Generator: Emerging Filmmaker’s Fund and was broadcast on SBS Viceland and won the Best Screenplay award at the 2019 Melbourne Queer Film Festival. In 2018 he was a writer for the Australian Equity Foundation’s inaugural Diversity Showcase and is a participant in the Australian Writer’s Guild Pathways program. In 2019 he developed and co-wrote the digital comedy series Ding Dong I’m Gay which was supported by Screen Australia and Screen NSW. The series has over 15 million views on YouTube and was nominated for Best Online Comedy in the 2020 AACTA awards. Tim won Best Performance in a Digital Series in the 2021 Queerty awards. His half-hour adult animation Friend Mode is supported by ScriptedInk and has been optioned by an Australian production company
Jes Layton invented writing, the airplane, and the internet. He is a writer, streamer, cosplayer and artist having presented at a number of national writers festivals. His work can be found in Junkee, Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings, Archer, The AZE Journal, Concrete Queers, the Victorian Writer, Enby Life and scattered elsewhere. Her short story ‘Chemical Expression’ was published in Underdog: #LoveOzYA Short stories (Nero Books) 2019. Her piece ‘Looking Back, Looking Up’ is featured in Growing Up in Country Australia, (Black Inc) 2022.
Lewis Treston is an award-winning playwright and researcher from Queensland. Plays include: IRL, Hubris & Humiliation (Winner Australian Theatre Festival New Play Award), Meat Eaters, Hot Tub (Winner Patrick White Playwright’s Award), Follow Me Home, and Reagan Kelly (nominated for the Matilda Award for Lord Mayor’s Best New Australia Work). He is a graduate from QUT, NIDA and UQ and recently completed an MPhil thesis concerning camp humour in Australian theatre.
Michael Sun is a writer, designer, and broadcaster based on Gadigal land/Sydney who loves beautiful dogs and ugly fonts. His work — which revolves around the intersections between queer and pop culture, memory, and technology — has been published in Guardian Australia, The Monthly, ABC Arts, VICE, the Age/SMH, Overland, Hello Mr. (RIP), and many more. Currently, he’s the Editorial Assistant at Guardian Australia in features, culture, and lifestyle, and he was the former Culture Editor of Netflix Australia. In his spare time, he embodies the queer art of mediocrity and gasbags on FBi Radio (these things are unrelated).
Patrick Lenton is an author and journalist currently living in Melbourne. He is the author of three books, the essay collection Uncle Hercules and Other Lies, and the short story collections A Man Made Entirely Out Of Bats, and the recent Sexy Tales of Paleontology. He is also a freelance journalist, and a deputy arts + culture editor for The Conversation.