Notes on Hotel Camp: Sontag Meets Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room

Abstract

This essay presents ten notes, historical and speculative, sparked by the fact that two of the classics of American queer writing, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), were partly inspired by the same tiny Paris hotel room. In place of a case for buried collaboration, I take inspiration from the coincidence of Baldwin and Sontag’s shared space to think their differences together—a conjunction which reveals larger things about the Baldwin we have revived, the Sontag we are reviving, and our residual habit of picturing queer modernism as a star map of individual, trademarked celebrity-functions. Fresh concentration on Sontag and Baldwin’s neglected interactions might help to save both from the distortions of the revivalist spotlight.