When it Comes to Summer Camp, There’s No Need to Fight It

By Mark Sawchuk

I let out an involuntary, gleeful chortle in the middle of the archives reading room, causing the volunteer on duty to raise her eyebrows. I had just come across this delightful flyer from the early to mid-1980s advertising a rental property in the small town of Guerneville, north of San Francisco. “Girls—Why Fight It?!?” crows the text, accompanied by a pasted-on graphic of two elegant Victorian ladies who are in the process of tearing each other’s throats out.

Before joining the GLBT Historical Society as a staff member, I was a volunteer and also worked as a researcher-for-hire. One assignment was to identify materials pertaining to LGBTQ life in Sonoma County, two counties north of San Francisco past Marin County. Sonoma is certainly within the Bay Area, but it’s a good drive away from the city. It’s anchored by the medium-sized city of Santa Rosa and dotted with increasingly chic wine towns.

Analog Advertising

My research led me to the folder in one of the society’s four Ephemera Collections dealing with the Russian River Valley, the area of Sonoma that’s home to Guerneville. For LGBTQ people, this small, former logging town situated along the Russian River among groves of redwoods is the main draw in the county. Guerneville since the late 1970s has been the Bay Area’s local gay summer getaway, the equivalent of Boston’s Provincetown, New York’s Fire Island, and Washington D.C.’s Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. With San Francisco’s notoriously damp, cold summers (we have a nickname for all the summer months: “May Gray,” “June Gloom,” “No-Sky July,” “Fogust”), we need it. Guerneville is often sunny and warm when San Francisco is cloaked in a thick blanket of mysterious, purplish fog.

Which leads to “Ed,” the creator of the ”Why Fight It?” flyer (which I privately call the “Fancy Ladies” flyer). In an era before Craigslist, AirBNB or indeed the internet, those wishing to rent a summer property resorted to analog means, such as friend networks, telephone calls and homemade flyers. These would be lovingly stapled to telephone poles and coffee-shop bulletin boards, complete with fringed, tear-off phone numbers along the bottom. Knowing his audience, Ed has cleverly aimed for maximum visual impact at a distance by including these two luscious ladies. I imagine him cutting and pasting the graphic onto the flyer at his kitchen table using Elmer’s glue, chuckling to himself before running off to the library to make photocopies.

What self-respecting queen could resist? The image compels us to learn more, desperate to discover why the pair is quarreling. Were they forced to share a room during their gay holiday weekend? Did they get stuck in a dumpy motel? Did one of them steal the other’s boyfriend after too much beer (perhaps I should say absinthe) on the Fourth of July? Whatever the reason, drama had clearly ensued. Ed seemingly reassures us: there might be some drama if you rent my place, but it won’t be the fault of the accommodations…

A Distinct Queer Register

Here at the GLBT Historical Society, our collections contain materials of heroes, pioneers, community groups and activists. Many are deeply moving, but document serious, sometimes dire moments in history. Given the devastation wrought by the HIV/AIDS crisis, it is sobering to learn that between 20 to 25 percent of our archival collections are related in some way to AIDS. But the society contains a lot of hilarious materials, too. I’d wager that there’s no other archive anywhere in the world that houses as many feather boas as ours.

Humorous materials such as the Fancy Ladies flyer exist in another register: that of camp. Camp is a distinctly queer register, or style of expression, that binds LGBTQ people together. It deploys a wink, a nod, a gleam in the eye, or just a simple phrase. “Girls—Why fight it?!?’ is pure, performative-pearl-clutching camp.

And this summer, that’s one camp I’m signing up for.

Mark Sawchuk is the communications manager at the GLBT Historical Society. He received his Ph.D. in European history at the University of California at Berkeley in 2011 and has worked with nonprofits in various capacities for much of his career.