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By Root 1247 0

can remember in vivid detail reading her essay on pornography when it first came out and agreeing and disagreeing with it in such an intense way. I read it because it addressed thoughts I’d had for years but not known how to formulate. Reading the essay on camp was the same gripping experience. To be sure, Isherwood in one of his novels, The World in the Evening, had mentioned camp (high and low), but Sontag thoroughly explored the subject and saw it as a way of rescuing failed glamour—“so bad it’s good”—and putting the world in quotation marks, of aestheticizing all experience. Everyone, even Time magazine, grabbed on to “Notes on Camp” as a kind of parlor game, the exploitation of a vogue word, the pinpointing of a new sensibility. Sontag, as I learned later, had been influenced by a friend from her Paris days, the American film expert Elliott Stein: a gay man famous for his whip collection. Stein helped her trace the contours of this unfamiliar aesthetic. I’d known about a louder, brasher street version of camp—one drag queen would shriek at another, “Stop camping, bitch!” I hadn’t really encountered this other sensibility, which was funny and seemed to have mainly to do with old movies and preposterous divas. What became clear in reading and talking to Sontag was that she wrote best about subjects she was most ambiguous about. Campiness both attracted and repelled her. Indeed her whole personality was based on this same push-pull dynamic. After we became friends I once told her I wanted to write a book about her called The Dandy and the Rabbi, since I felt that around aesthetes she became moralistic and around moralists she embraced art and frivolity. With her characteristic anti-Semitism she murmured, “It might be better to call it The Dandy and the Priest.”

No, it wasn’t that she was particularly anti-Semitic, but rather that she was opposed to anything that wasn’t “central to our culture,” as she would have put it. She was like Proust, who in his novel preferred to present himself in the form of Marcel, his narrative alter ego, as Catholic instead of Jewish. Anything offbeat—homosexuality, Judaism, being African-American—she disapproved of. She was a universalist in the true French sense, believing that Man at his best was an abstract individual in the eyes of the state, the law, humanity itself. To the degree that that abstraction was qualified (female, homosexual, black, Jewish), it was reduced. The French believed fervently in universalism, and Sontag was more passionately a Francophile than she was American.

But then again she was also just a bit anti-Semitic and homophobic. She once told the African-American novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney that he was “reducing” his stature as a writer by calling himself a black writer. She asked me how I could bear to be considered a gay writer. Her questions were meant to guide the people she cared about, Darryl and me among others, away from our own “narrowing” labels. And it’s perfectly true that she maintained world-class status partly by staying in the closet.

Toward the end of her life she told Brendan Lemon, then the editor of Out magazine:

I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the “open secret.” I’m used to that, and quite okay with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven’t spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven’t repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it’s never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody’s in drastic need. I’d rather give pleasure, or shake things up.

Soon after I met Susan I started hanging out with her. Other people have described how going out in public with her was like being seen with royalty. By and large New Yorkers were too discreet to bother her, but they did recognize her, especially at cultural events—at the ballet, at movies, at lectures. Phillip Lopate in his Notes on Sontag talks about how she’d stroll about in front of a movie audience before the lights went down, supposedly