Lena Waithe honors black drag queens with Met Gala outfit

This year, the Met Gala-- an annual fundraising gala for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York City-- was more than "fashion's biggest night out". The gala signified the highly anticipated grand opening of the Costume Institute's annual fashion exhibition: "Camp: Notes of Fashion" that is currently set to open May 9, 2019. For what exactly "camp" is, one cultural historian made the remark, "trying to define camp is like attempting to sit in the corner of a circular room". What can be said about the theme is it has little to do with pitching tents or the outdoors and is more a play on Susan Sontag's seminal essay, "Notes on Camp". Sontag does define camp as the "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration".  With this in mind, actress and producer Lena Waithe stood out in her statement-making attire. From first glance at the front, her pin-striped pantsuit looked rather simple. However, upon a closer look the buttons on her suit were faces of black camp pioneers, and the stripes were lyrics from Diana Ross' "I'm Coming Out", Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", and other anthems from "iconic black divas". A more obvious statement, written on the back of her jacket in bold were the words, "Black Drag Queens Invented Camp". Waithe gave a statement to E! News saying she wanted to give emphasis to the black drag queens who did so much to advance the camp movement. "Pepper LaBeija, Benny Ninja, RuPaul, all these pioneers . . . I really wanted to pay tribute to them and all that they did for the culture," she explained. "They started this whole 'camp' thing by being over the top." Waithe's statement piece is extremely important because, as observed by freelance writer Evan Katz, “no black drag queens sans RuPaul appear to be invited to the camp-themed affair.” Being that the Met Gala is an invite-only event, the fact that no black queens were given the opportunity to walk the red carpet despite history showing that the theme was widely propagated and invented by them was disappointing, but not surprising. No comments about this have been made by Met Gala curators.