Mae West and Camp

A camp diva, a queer icon, and a model of feminism—the memorable

Mae West left behind a complicated legacy, on and off the stage.

Mae West c. 1930 Getty

By: Betsy Golden Kellem (https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/betsy-golden-kellem/) |

April 26, 2023 5 minutes

You may recall that in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual
gala celebrated all things camp (https://daily.jstor.org/how-latin-camp-
rocked-the-new-york-underground/) (this was the year Jared Leto
carried his own head as an accessory and Billy Porter arrived, swathed in
gold sequins and actual wings, on a litter borne by six extremely
muscular gentlemen). The accompanying exhibit attempted, in a mint-
green text panel, to define the whole affair in the words of actress Mae
West: “Camp,” she commented in 1971, “is the kinda comedy where they
imitate me.”
West had good reason to say this. In the long arc of a career that went
from vaudeville to 1980s B-movies, West was a hardworking actress who
loved to push envelopes. From obscurity to fame, comeback to
caricature, she spent decades delighting in the stylization, excess, and
shock value of what we would come to know as camp culture.

While unwitting camp is the best kind,

West could give something just as good—a
performance that, “even when it reveals self-
parody, reeks of self-love.”

Susan Sontag is largely credited with popularizing the phrase “camp” to

describe the long-running cultural vogue for and fascination with things
that are just a tiny bit extra; her proto-listicle “Notes on Camp
(https://daily.jstor.org/unspeakable-linguistics-camp/)” is an attempt
to wrap arms around the cultural concept and its embrace of
exaggerated artifice (https://daily.jstor.org/how-queer-jews-
reclaimed-yiddish/). Sontag, too, turns to Mae West as an example of
camp well done, writing that while unwitting camp is the best kind, West
could give something just as good—a performance that, “even when it
reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.”

Born in 1893, Mae West was performing in vaudeville

(https://daily.jstor.org/vaudeville-hamilton-racial-minorities-
musicals/) by her teenage years. She debuted on Broadway as an
eighteen-year-old dancer and hustled her way through various song-and-
dance roles, becoming semi-famous for doing “the shimmy ” in the
Broadway revue Sometime. Still, by the 1920s, she was a theater veteran
with little name recognition and few prospects.
Mae West is presented on stage in a scene from the film ‘I’m No Angel’, 1933. Getty

To bring her career in line with her ambitions, West started writing plays
herself. Cobbling together financing and theater rental, she put together
a Broadway production, cast herself as the lead (a Montreal sex worker),
and debuted it in 1926 under the rabble-rousing title: SEX. As historian
Marybeth Hamilton writes ,

The play was unanimously panned by New York’s theatre

critics, all of whom predicted its immediate failure and some
of whom called for police intervention. Yet despite this
condemnation—or rather, no doubt, in part because of it—
SEX became one of the major hits of the 1926 season, playing
to mostly full houses until forced to close in March 1927.

That forced closure was the result of raid by the NYPD vice squad
(https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/the-time-mae-west-
spent-eight-days-in-jail/14642/), thanks to which West was charged
with obscenity and spent eight days in the women’s prison on Roosevelt
Island—an event that, to West’s delight, only boosted her public profile.
She continued to write boundary-pushing plays, centered on women’s
sexuality and gay life. At a time when thin flappers and demure Ziegfeld
girls were the fashion, West’s physicality and her embrace of burlesque
tropes brought low-class entertainment onto high-class Broadway.

West took advantage of her own notoriety in her 1928 play Diamond Lil
, sanding a few rough edges for the sake of public appeal. A vaudeville
drama set in the Gay Nineties, Diamond Lil at last made West a star
persona. She played a languid, singing, wise-cracking sexpot in drag
(https://daily.jstor.org/rupauls-drag-race-transgender-cultural-
studies/)—in her own words, “a little bit spicy, but not too raw.”

Not everyone was a fan of West’s excess, a version of femininity turned

up to eleven and reliant on gay male culture (https://daily.jstor.org/in-
the-gay-cookbook-domestic-bliss-was-queer/). American cinema
scholar Pamela Robinson recounts 1930s reviews that dismissed West as
“the world’s best bad actress ” and “the greatest female
impersonator of all time.” But her hustle was undeniable. In 1928, the
New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1928/11/10/mae-
west-profile-diamond-lil) claimed that West,

who writes her own plays and then stars in them, is one
hundred per cent good showman. Her showmanship is
apparent always, natural, inborn. She may have added to it,
learned a trick here and there, but her ability to put herself
over and her delight in doing it is a trait that could not have
been acquired.
In the 1930s, West got her big break in film. She was nearly forty years
old, at an age when most actresses were considered past their prime.
She went on to star opposite Cary Grant and W. C. Fields, and while at
one time she was among the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, she
ultimately left the movie business due to clashes with censors , who
didn’t feel her burlesque persona fit with the reality of Hays Code
Hollywood (https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/).

West maintained a career through mid-century on stage, in clubs, and in

radio, television, and music. She returned to films in 1970 as a libidinous
casting agent in Myra Breckenridge, based on Gore Vidal’s 1968
transgender revenge novel. The movie was ultimately released with a
rare X rating (https://daily.jstor.org/film-and-tv-ratings-in-the-
streaming-age/) and was universally panned (Film scholar Christie
Milliken notes that critic Stanley Kauffman concluded that “The film
looks like an abandoned battlefield after a lot of studio forces tussled
and nobody won .”).

But West was used to bad reviews and suggestions of censorship, and
Myra, along with the likes of late-night television and a 1971 Playboy
interview in which she defined herself as camp incarnate, set her up as a
resurgent celebrity. New generations with different attitudes toward sex
and entertainment—and an appreciation for looking back on campy
content—joyfully ate up her double entendres and husky swagger.

This was the Mae West of archetype, the woman about whom James
McCourt rhapsodized that
 the buzz derived from watching her lope into an empty set-up
frame, survey the invisible audience like an ocelot raised on
ortolan fricase, utter “Goodness had nothin’ to do with it,
dearie,” and swerve off camera, was the ultimate fulfillment of
audiences’ collective expectations.

West died in 1980 at age eighty-seven. Since her passing, audiences and
scholars have explored her legacy as a camp diva, a queer icon
(https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-fag-hag-went-from-hated-to-
celebrated/), and a model of feminism. The same words that were used
to criticize her in her early career—she was “a grotesque, a man in drag,
a joke on women, and not a woman”—have come up against a fuller,
modern understanding of gender as performance
(https://daily.jstor.org/judith-butler-the-early-years/). Whether she (or
camp, for that matter) belongs to any one audience has been debated,
but scholar Michael Schuyler argues that Mae West is for everyone: “The
best self-consciously produced camp doesn’t take sides but desires,
instead, to be embraced by all sides. West, it seems, knew this .”

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Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/1350139?mag=mae-west-and-camp)
By: Rebecca A. Bryant
American Music, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 168–187
University of Illinois Press

Mae West Live: “SEX, The Drag, and 1920s Broadway”

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/1146217?mag=mae-west-and-camp)
By: Marybeth Hamilton
TDR (1988-), Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter 1992), pp. 82–100

[Mae West in “Diamond Lil”.]

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.16083432?mag=mae-west-
and-camp)
By: Part of: Museum of the City of New York
Diamond Lil

“The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me”: Mae West’s Identification

with the Feminist Camp (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225605?
mag=mae-west-and-camp)
By: Pamela Robertson
Cinema Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 1993), pp. 57–72
University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies

Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the

Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814976?mag=mae-west-and-camp)
By: Gregory D. Black
Film History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1989), pp. 167–189
Indiana University Press
Rate It X?: (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv125jj09.5?mag=mae-
west-and-camp)
By: Christie Milliken
Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, Eric Shaefer, Ed., (2014), pp.
25–52
Duke University Press

Mae West (1890s–1980) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43455634?

mag=mae-west-and-camp)
By: James McCourt
Film Comment, Vol. 17, No. 1 (January-February 1981), pp. 16–17
Film Society of Lincoln Center

Camp for Camp’s Sake: Absolutely Fabulous, Self-Consciousness, and

the Mae West Debate (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20688470?
mag=mae-west-and-camp)
By: Michael T. Schuyler
Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter 2004), pp. 3–20
University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association

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