Always Camp

According to the media, certain professions almost systematically attract people with Camp sensibilities and drama queens. Most typically these are "hip" professions linked to showbusiness or the arts. Although most noticeable of male characters, it still affects women quite frequently.

Bonus point if they're French or have some sort of accent, double bonus if they are Camp Gay (they tend to be at least Ambiguously Gay), and if they say "I am not an X, I am an artist", oh boy do you have a winner. Such professions include:

• Interior designers
• Fashion designers
• Hairdressers (But not barbers)
• Make up artists
• Painters of the non-brooding kind
• Actors and film directors
• Caterers (but not "chefs" or "cooks," who are either Funny Foreigners or tough guys)
• Wedding planners
• Opera artists
• Dancers: either backup or ballroom
• Anyone involved in musical theater

Common variant: a tough working-class manly-man has to act the part to get work in one of the above.

Compare Real Men Wear Pink.

Examples of Always Camp include:

Anime and Manga

• Ayame Sohma from Fruits Basket, male-romantic-fantasy-fashion designer. He's actually straight, but that's not going to hold him back from frequent Ho Yay gags with Shigure or just plain looking fabulous.
• Teenaged version: Hajime Mizuki from The Prince of Tennis.
• Fashion-design students George (who's bisexual) and Isabella (who is transgendered) in Paradise Kiss. Notably averted, though, by Arashi, who's a punk rocker - and handles the sewing.
• Pegasus from Yu-Gi-Oh! pulls this, to the point when it is often mocked in Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series. He's a painter and card game inventor who comes across as not-entirely-straight until the very end, when you realize everything he did was for his wife.
• Fai, from Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle The Abridged Series.

Sakura: Fai made this for me! He's good at sewing... and cooking... and interior decorating...

• • It's actually stated in the manga (during the Outo Arc) that he's good at cooking and drawing.
• Kenji from Kinou Nani Tabeta is gay and a hair dresser.

Comics

• Bianca Castafiore of Tintin. OK, she's rampantly heterosexual, but she's still a drama queen who looks like a man in drag.
  • One writer actually published a fictional biography of her as a castrato

Film

• This is has even transcended to other cultures. In the Bollywood flick Kal Ho Na Ho (Tomorrow may never come), the wedding planner is unmistakably campy. It leads to some humorous moments because the servant of the groom has been terrified that he is gay, and is SO happy that he is marrying a woman, that she practically beats up the wedding planner to keep him away.
• The live-action One Hundred and One Dalmatians' Cruella DeVille - the sequel has an even campier stylist played by Gerard Depardieu.
• Paulette Bonafonte from Legally Blonde (though the entire movie is arguably campy).
• Father of the Bride (the Steve Martin version) has Wedding Planner Franck Eggelhoffer, who also appears in Father of the Bride II to plan the baby shower.
• And the obvious subversion is the whole point of the Adam Sandler vehicle You Don't Mess With the Zohan, wherein the titular Zohan is the most Badass of badasses - but he doesn't want to be a super-soldier anymore; he just wants to cut hair.
  • Not just cut it, he wants to make it "silky smooth".
  • Long before that, Warren Beatty's hairdresser in Shampoo (1975) was a Casanova who used his job to find new women to seduce.
• The entire Rocky Horror Picture Show.
• Azrael from the movie Dogma

Jay: "What are you, some kind of fucking chicken?"
Azrael: "No, I was an ARTIST, STUPID!"

• The gallery owners in the Honey and Clover movie.
• The hairdresser in She's the Man was definitely camp, but they're never clear about his sexuality.
• Ken in Toy Story 3.
• Beverly Hills Cop has Serge the gallery guide. Later he reappears as a weapons dealer, but still over the top.
• Get Shorty. Actors and directors. Loan sharks, punk rockers and producers, however, are strangely down to earth.

Karen: Actors never order off the menu. They always special order something they just have to have. And they never pay for anything.

• Invoked in Billy Elliot. In the middle of the manliest of cultures, a boy wants to become a ballet dancer.

Literature

• At the end of The Dresden Files book White Night, it's revealed that Thomas, an incubus, has been feeding himself by becoming a hairdresser (he draws power from intimacy, and says that styling a woman's hair is the second most intimate thing one can do with them). In order to make them feel more comfortable and prevent them from molesting him, he plays up campyness, including a fake French accent, and implied homosexuality.
• In the Discworld novel Unseen Academicals, Pepe, a designer at a dwarf fashion house, plays up his campness when working (as well as claiming to be an Uberwaldean dwarf). When off-duty, he's a tough Morporkian lad from the streets ... but probably gay, nonetheless.

Live Action Television

• Fez from That '70s Show.
• Kazama Daisuke in Kamen Rider Kabuto.
• Played with a lot in Ugly Betty.
• Michel from Gilmore Girls.
• The Life Science teacher in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. Bonus points since the show airs on Nickelodeon.
• Elim Garak, the Cardassian former Obsidian Order spy tailor on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although the suits (heh) gave him a girlfriend (Ziyal, the half-Bajoran daughter of Gul Dukat) to quell the gay rumors.
  • The Expanded Universe novel A Stitch In Time, written by the actor Andrew Robinson, may or may not have said he was bisexual, but if it didn't it tried its hardest to imply it.
  • Both Andrew Robinson and Alexander Siddig (formerly known as Siddig El Fadil, the actor playing Dr. Bashir) have stated in interviews that they were well aware of the gay/bisexual subtext between their characters, and that they and the scriptwriters deliberately played with that subtext. Robinson stated in an interview (and in the author's note of his novel) that he always found the idea intriguing that Garak might be bisexual because Cardassians, being aliens, shouldn't have the same sexual taboos as people today (meaning the Western World). So yes, fans of that pairing are not just imagining things.
  • The title of the Andrew Robinson interview about Garak was "Cardassian - Writer - Tailor - Spy. Actor-Director Takes a Stitch In Time", by Michelle Erica Green (webdate: 3/18/2000). The interview can be found via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine here.
  • See also this essay: The Queer Cardassian: The Case for a Gay Garak by The Plaid Adder.
  • And on Scifi.about.com, Julia Houston mourned the sudden end of the relationship between Garak and Bashir in her essay "The Loss of Garak and Bashir" (Dateline:10/24/98)
  • And finally, one of the writers for the show, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, has stated that he wrote Garak to have an attraction to Bashir, but unrequited and unnoticed.
• Mr. Bob, from an episode of Get Smart. He was hired to redecorate Max's place. In a subversion, he's really a tough guy with a Brooklyn accent, who can handily whip Max in a fight, but he needs to sound and act camp to be taken seriously as an interior designer.
• In an episode of Cheers, Norm turns out to have a talent for interior design—previously undisclosed as he has spent his entire life trying to hide it. Frasier and Lilith persuade him to try it professionally, but to get work he has to put on a (rather subdued) camp persona. Come to think of it, since Norm has long been married to the always-off-camera Vera, with whom he never sleeps, to whom he pays as little attention as possible, but on whom he will never cheat even when tempted, one is tempted to wonder...
  • Norm's referrals to his wife are camp in & of themselves; he is hiding his deep affection for her because he "knows" that the denizens of the bar would rib him for being openly loving about her.
• Parodied in one sketch on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, with the "Heterosexual Interior Designers" (or some other similar name). Their client refuses to admit them in, since they simply aren't gay enough.
• Absolutely Fabulous: Patsy Stone.
• Averted by Ice, the Bounty Hunter/Caterer on Arrested Development, who is neither campy while catering nor obnoxiously macho while bounty hunting.
• Mr. G in Summer Heights High.
• In The A-Team episode "Pros and Cons", Hannibal gets his camp on when he poses as a hairdresser.
• The titular Wig Master from the Seinfeld episode "The Wig Master".

Video Games

• Sander Cohen is a creepy version of this trope, combined with the Mad Artist. To a lesser extent, this also applies to Dr. Steinmann, "Surgery's Picasso".
• Zhang He of Dynasty Warriors. "We move! Our path through to the battlefield shall be paved with the petals of roses!"
• Hairdresser Octopus in Parappa the Rapper 2.
• Star the Opera Singer in Silent Scope 2.

Web Comics

• Wanda Rocket of the webcomic Girly. Her first appearance.
• Felix the hairdresser from Supernormal Step. He's even a Third Person Person.

Western Animation

• Fairly Oddparents' Mr. Bickles. And Cupid, though he falls for Momma Cosma under the spell of his own arrow.
• The first-chair hairdresser at the new shop in Arlen on King of the Hill. The rest are catty women. Doughy army sergeant-barber Bill has to act the part (poorly) to get a job there and express his stifled creativity.
• The indomitable Edna Mode from The Incredibles. She plays this one for all it's worth.
• Dion, the fashion designing college student in Braceface.
• Bobbi Fabulous, rocker-turned-beautician from the Phineas and Ferb episode "Dude We're Getting The Band Back Together", fits this to a T.
• Ze French-accented Painter Smurf in Ze Smurfs. He's always temperamental when it comes to his masteurpiesas.

Real Life

• Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, ancient Egyptian servants who are speculated to be the first same-sex couple in recorded history, shared the title Overseer of the Manicurists in Palace of King Niuserre. Always Camp indeed.
  • They were also brothers and probably twins. Values Dissonance, anyone?
    • It was routine for pharaohs to marry their sisters, so incest is not out of the question at all.
      • However, incest was only allowed within the royal family in order to keep the bloodline pure. Outside of that, it was frowned upon. But, a common way to refer to a loved woman was "sister of my heart", so it might stem from there.