The following is an excerpt from "The Dark Side of Camp" by Gareth Cook, published in the September 1995 Washington Monthly.

"Mommy, show them what they might win!" screams Babette from the front of the bar. Babette is the young game-show hostess, dressed in a frilly maroon dress and long silver gloves. A recent track from Pizzicato Five (a Japanese mambo band) thumps loudly and out dances Bianca, a red head in a black evening gown. Bianca shimmies to the front with the next prize, a small (scented) gold crown. Bianca is a man.

Welcome to the grand prize round of "Drag Freak Bingo" at the Andalusian Dog, a Salvador Dali-inspired bar on Washington D.C.'s U Street. The rules tonight are simple: A set of bingo cards will cost you seven dollars. The broken crayons to mark your card are free. Bianca and his partner-in-drag, Biatta—he's the one with the pearls and the trumpet—call the numbers from a table draped with gold lame. And crowd participation is a must: If they ask a question, you will scream.

It can be difficult to get a handle on camp. "It's terribly hard to define," says a character in Christopher Isherwood's 1956 novel The World in Evening, probably the first explicit discussion of camp. "You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao Tse's Tao."

Funny as camp can be, its dark side is hard to deny. When Dave Letterman shines the kleig lights on seemingly clueless working class foils, teasing them for the benefit of an uber-hip New York audience, he shows that mass camp can be smug, snobbish, and even mean.

Thirty years ago, when Susan Sontag described the then-obscure phenomenon in her brilliant essay, "Notes on Camp," she praised it. "Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgement," she argued. "Camp is generous." At that time, of course, the nation's economy was on a seemingly endless upward trajectory, and the middle classes were the prime beneficiaries. The spread of the old status markers—home ownership, steady, well-paying jobs, and access to universities, expanded through the GI Bill--seemed to point to a new social equality. There was hope that social class was receding as a dividing wall, that inheritance and the family name were being eclipsed in importance by achievement. ("I'm an American," says Pulp Fiction's Butch, "our names don't mean shit.")

Taste was replacing the older, more permanent signs of social status. People are not "upper-class," the new thinking went, they just have great taste. And, unlike class, taste was something you didn't have to be born with—conceivably, everybody could have it. Just know the right wines, learn the right artists, and make a trip to (or at least read about) Europe. The foreign travel poster was a dorm room staple of the time.

Finally, in the sixties, as the counterculture mushroomed, many hailed the end of cultural elitism. As pop-nihilist Andy Warhol quirkily put it in his 1970 book, Popism, "It was fun to see the Museum of Modem Art people next to the teenyboppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors." It might seem that the camp which now surrounds us is evidence that class did indeed disappear.

In fact, the proliferation of camp shows that Americans are still obsessed by class. With college diplomas and Florida vacations more widely available, the upper-crust needs a new way of distinguishing itself. Look closely at camp and you'll see that, for the young and the hip, "anything goes" is clearly not the rule. The idea is to show that you have enough taste to choose the right bad taste.

But another kind of snobbery is less conscious—and more corrosive. Consider a recent snippet from the WXYC radio station at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With an audible snicker, the DJ introduced samples from "Six Days on the Road," a compilation of songs from real-live truck drivers. The snickering—Can you believe those truckers?—is all the evidence you need that this sort of imitation is not exactly flattery. Integral to the camp sensibility is a mocking and superior attitude toward the lower classes, especially poor whites.

Poor whites are the one group that even the most touchy-feely liberals seem to feel fully licensed to mock without remorse. The stereotyped images—a dirt front yard—with rusted out car carcasses, dogs, pink flamingoes, and plenty of inbred kids running about—are camp standard bearers, and acceptable parts of the public dialogue. The New York Times, in stories about Tonya Harding, glibly referred to "trailer trash."

Although the viciousness is all too clear, this assault on poor whites actually springs from America's romance with the idea of egalitarianism—the myth that social class is entirely fluid. Everyone concedes the presence of a substantial black underclass, but that can at least be rationalized as a legacy of slavery and segregation. The presence of large blocks of poor whites, on the other hand, seems to contradict explicitly the idea of upward mobility. Unless, of course, the poor whites in question are lazy or stupid or both. "White trash" is a convenient notion that allows us to maintain the idea that social advancement is based on talent: Their plight, we reason, is entirely their fault.

Camp acts as a balm to the conscience. It allows us to feel the rush of superiority to those we see as our social lessers, but without the guilt. It is a kind of faux compassion. We pretend we care... Meanwhile, in very concrete ways, our worst prejudices prevail. People who can't dress or talk just right are cast aside. The "hillbilly" is turned away from a school for which he is qualified; he just didn't seem very bright. The "trashy-looking" woman with heavy make-up and sprayed hair is passed over for a job; she just didn't seem trustworthy. These class barriers aren't just a cultural flaw—they are a deep social pathology, keeping down people who could do great things.

The most disturbing example of this at work, Jonathan Alter recently argued in Newsweek, is what's happening to our public schools. Once the best way of bringing the next generation together—and of assuring that its best and brightest, regardless of background, would be given a chance to achieve--the schools are now being abandoned. Parents who can afford it flee to the suburbs or send their kids away to private schools. The country is separating, and the next generation will be even more divided. But we're numbing up, and feeling good about it.

Cool.