Camping the Gothic

Abstract

Since its release in the late 1940s, Other Voices, Other Rooms has remained an arguably unpopular novella in the works of Truman Capote; its criticism is thus far from recent. Most critiques explore the work in its historical milieu of Southern-gothic fiction, either intentionally or unintentionally avoiding the very prominent queer themes. This article acknowledges Capote's use of gothic paradigms and the text's process of undermining gothic motifs to highlight its two adolescent queer characters. Moreover, the text's own Camp discourse is the liberating force that extinguishes the looming Southern-gothic background to expose the sexual possibilities for its young characters. Amidst the sea of late forties and fifties fiction that frequently ensconced the death of the homosexual character, this novella serves as an exception: through a humorous Camp aesthetic, the text gives birth to its inherent queer desires.