In the beginning, it was the ‘thing’, rather than the ‘word’. So when, how, why, did this near-indefinable phenomenon become more than a concept and get given a handle? How strongly was anyone aware of its presence? Had it existed for centuries? Susan Sontag suggested in her seminal essay of 1961 – when camp, as we think of it, was a mere debutante in its flamboyant life cycle – that Louis XIV’s Versailles, by dint of its elaborate taming of nature, was camp. If so, it opens up the possibility that agriculture itself is camp; and that maybe for first turning the wilderness and forests into Campo di Fiori or Champs Elysee, the Romans or Goths should be handed the palm for camp’s nomenclature.

It would follow therefore, that buildings are camp, as are clothes, religion, science – in fact, all human life, all art, all thought, all intellect, is camp. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised; except for the fact that the Complete Oxford English Dictionary gives, baldly, and long before any reference to rows of tents, the word’s first meaning as ‘All-masculine’. Do admit, as Nancy would say.

William Gaunt, writing The Aesthetic Adventure in 1945, never uses the word camp, even though reminding us that Oscar Wilde’s lectures in America were entitled The Value and Character of Handicrafts, and House Decoration. Janet Flanner, Paris living-and-loving columnist for The New Yorker in the flamboyant inter-war years doesn’t hint at camp’s self-evident prevalence, even when sublimely portraying such icons of the genre as Elsie Mendl, Josephine Baker, and Mlle Schiaparelli.

As late as 1954, Cecil Beaton, in The Glass of Fashion, a kind of catalogue raisonne with knobs on by and about the epitomes of campness, seems utterly unaware of the existence of the word, the ‘thing’, the attitude, though Antonia Fraser, who ghosted the book for Beaton, tells me that the first time she came across the word was in Angus Wilson’s novel, Hemlock & After written a couple of years earlier.

This jibes with my earliest memory of campness, the waiters at the Bicyclette in Lower Belgravia and La Popote d’Argent in Marylebone whom, being moonlighting chorus boys to a man, behaved as much as possible like the two Hermiones, Gingold and Baddeley in their echt camp revues. These revered ladies’ barbed brilliance was soon to be manfully mirrored by the two most magical drag artistes ever, Rogers and Starr, whose new shows, staged in a tiny theatre in Notting Hill, were as eagerly awaited as the openings of My Fair Lady or West Side Story.