America Is Doomed / Camp

Will Conservative Camp Ever Be the Same Without Lindsey Graham?

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Why is there not an avalanche of AI slop tributes to Lady G like there was for Charlie Kirk? Fine, I’ll do it.

Last Sunday morning, as usual, I blinked open my sleep-worn eyes, rolled over, grabbed my phone, and to my unending shame, opened X and scrolled. Yes, I look at X first thing, like a chainsmoker reaching for that first stick. I wish I didn’t, but here we are. At the top of my feed sat a post from grey-faced genocidal maniac Benjamin Netanyahu. Ugh. Not exactly what I was hoping for. Yet, this time, Bibi wasn’t bizarrely denying a role in an assassination or re-X-ing an interview with Greta Van Susteren where he not only floats a new war with Turkey but laughably rehashes old Iraq War talking points about chemical weapons. (Aside: one of the worst parts of living in a neocon eternal return is that the same stunts intended to lead the country into unnecessary forever wars are being pulled by the exact same people! Get a new act!) Instead, Bibi was in mourning, posting a tribute to “the loss of our dear friend, Senator Lindsey Graham.”

Wait….what the fuck happened to our Lady G?!!!

Of course, learning of Lady G’s untimely demise from Netanyahu is only appropriate, given Graham spent the last months of his life hollering “God bless Israel!” in a gin-soaked haze on Fox News and encouraging nuclear war on Meet the Press. A nuclear holocaust is a tad intense for relaxing Sunday morning viewing, but breathless, slurring warmongering intensity seemed to be Graham’s final act before the curtain call. “I will be with Israel to our dying day,” he spat. And well, he surely made good on that promise!

But, considering any of this came later after the initial shock. The queen of conservative camp is dead?! I put on our 13-plus hour Lady G Pride Playlist in tribute, which remains our greatest playlist accomplishment on this website. Queen for a day! I fantasized about being at Madonna’s Club Confessions at Knockdown Center in the wee morning hours—my spin to “One Step Away” in the pink fog machine haze interrupted by news of Graham’s death. Did Madonna announce it mid-set?! Deeper and deeper and deeper! I laughed at tweets suggesting Lady G and Charlie K were battling in hell over the pleasure of being Ronald Reagan’s power bottom. Oh, Mother, look what they’ve done to me! I cackled at the growing conspiracy theories that Graham didn’t die of a sudden heart attack but instead was blown to smithereens by the Russians at a Ukrainian drone factory. You can win! You can win!

Then, I got sad. It was one clip that did it: visionary Cole Escola doing the best impression of Lady G I’ve ever seen on Amy Poehler’s podcast. Reflecting on Graham starring as Mary Todd Lincoln in their Broadway hit Oh, Mary!, Escola imagines Lady G might learn a thing or two about herself in the process. “I’ve been so BAD!” they exaggeratedly exclaim, a spot-on interpretation of Graham’s breezy Southern drawl, more often harnessed for promoting bloodshed than remorse. “I learned not to JUDGE lest ye be JUDGED!”

My heart sank. I got a little misty-eyed. What will conservative camp DO without Lindsey Graham? Will it ever be the same?!

I don’t think so. Though I stopped writing about the aesthetic with the same frequency as during the first Trump administration because conservative camp has become so ubiquitous it’s almost not worth commenting on, faithful Filthy Dreams readers will know I’m particularly obsessed with the specific noxious strain of camp that runs through the conservative set. Of course, Trump and his Trumpettes made conservative camp more visible through Village People and Laura Branigan-filled playlists; frozen Mar-A-Lago face shock tactics; WWE-style kayfabe; and a dash of Twinks for Trump. But they weren’t the pioneers. Bruce LaBruce, in his pre-Donnie 2012 lecture “Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp,” names rootin’ tootin’ Sarah Palin, the original conservative mean girl Ann Coulter, and helmet-haired Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher as conservative camp icons in his extended camp taxonomy. But, there is a glaring absence in his list: Lady G! Graham is a key figure in conservative camp: a bloodthirsty neoconservative, homophobic, glaringly obvious closet case with a dramatic flair straight out of a regional Tennessee Williams production and a fetish for globbing onto perceived “strong men” like a golfing, brown-nosing lamprey. Just to be clear, celebrating Graham as the queen of conservative camp doesn’t mean he wasn’t a passively homicidal monster sporting a Make Iran Great Again hat while the American AI bots bomb little Iranian school girls. In fact, it’s exactly what conservative camp does! Shield atrocities under a layer of alluring theatricality! And boy, Lindsey was a star. In fact, I can’t understand why Lady G is not getting as much AI slop tribute attention as Charlie Kirk. Don’t people appreciate conservative camp anymore?! Where are the videos of Graham partying with long-dead political figures? So, I had to make my own:

Grok told me the man on the left was Ronald Reagan. Glad we’re sucking up natural resources for all those data centers for that kind of accuracy

In fact, I had to hesitatingly use Elon’s creepy, pervy Grok for many of these because Gemini lectured me when I asked to surround Graham with shirtless men. What’s wrong with that?! Though, to give Gemini credit, I do enjoy this Thomas Kinkade-like tribute:

Queen for a day!

Conservative camp icons are sometimes born, not made, and Graham was predestined for aesthetic greatness. His lurid, or as he describes it, “rascally” origin story feels straight out of a Truman Capote short story with Graham as the thinly veiled Capote-esque little blond child mincing around his parents’ dumpy pool hall, the Sanitary Café, in Central, South Carolina. In his memoir, Graham acknowledges the Sanitary Cafe was segregated all the way to the early 1970s, but still calls it “a great way to grow up.” Ok. Graham overlooked all that bigoted unpleasantness because he was the wee belle of the Sanitary Café’s ball, sneaking sips of beer and puffs of cigs from unsuspecting white patrons when they hit the head. These irritating, sneaky habits earned him the hilarious nickname “Stinkball,” which really should have been used more widely during Graham’s lifetime. Even though he grew up in what sounds like a racist dive bar, Graham still apparently did not learn how to pour a pint if this photo with fellow genocidal loon Dana Bash is any indication:

How pissed would you be?

From the pool hall to the halls of Congress, Stinkball rose through the ranks, first in the military, then as a congressman, and then as a longtime senator from South Carolina. Could I tell you anything he did in this time for South Carolina? Not really. The only time I recall him recently mentioning his own constituents was in a reverie about using them as grist for the U.S. war machine, gushing enthusiastically, “I’m going back to South Carolina and ask them to send their sons and daughters over to the Middle East!” What even were Lindsey’s domestic politics other than surveillance and voting against same sex marriage? Beats me. Mostly, when I reflect on Lindsey’s career, I think of him attaching himself to other men to fuel the flames of war. First, with the nauseating “Three Amigos,” alongside his Big Daddy John McCain and Joe Lieberman, a horror show of Iraq War surge bipartisanism that we should remember when people start waxing poetic about the days the Republicans and Democrats used to work together. How come the only bipartisan consensus seems to be bombing brown countries and enriching Raytheon?

After McCain, Lindsey found another Big Daddy in Donnie T., even though he previously melodramatically slammed Trump as “a kook” and “a race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot.” Until, of course, he realized he needed the guy. Then, it was swinging down the lane in a golf cart at Trump Doral while listening to “It’s a Man’s World” and getting cozy on Air Force One while spewing fevered Cold War-era Cuba scare tactics four mini-bottles deep. In a bit of a surprise, given his general sociopathic lack of empathy, Trump has seemed in the past week or so to be a smidge impacted by Graham’s death. Sure, first he had to claim that Lindsey’s dying wish was to pass the SAVE Act. And yes, he also rambled about Graham’s poor health, lack of self-care, and bad back that led to his death, which he sensitively described as “a certain part of his body literally blew up.” This transformation into Dr. Don was clearly an attempt to distance his own observable decline from Lindsey’s explosive finale. Still, in one of the many meandering calls made to news organizations in the wake of Graham’s passing, I could detect a slight tremor in Trump’s voice, that lump in his throat, knowing he lost yet another of his monstrous closet queen friends. Do you think his heart tugged knowing Roy Cohn and Lindsey are having a cocktail in hell’s version of Le Club without him?

It’s always summer in hell!

Understandably so, because, as a titan of conservative camp, Trump would comprehend that conservative camp needs a Lindsey. Sure, there has been some progress with a few more out gay villains like Be Gay, Do Crime, soon-to-be reality TV star Georgie Santos, whose pre- and post-prison appearances on Tucker should be required viewing for any student of conservative camp, especially with his yarn about soaking in the bathtub with a nice glass of Chardonnay when Mike Johnson rang him up to demand his resignation. Yet, these steps forward in camp equality are also paired with a few steps back, like Milo Yiannopoulos’s turn to ex-gay conversion camp camp. Even so, closet queens, particularly ones who vote or, like Cohn, rail about gay rights, are the airport bathroom stall-stomping hypocrite lynchpins of conservative camp. And Graham, no matter how much he sashayed his way through media appearances, was never out. In fact, minus some of the Motherboy hang-ups, Lindsey’s closet was kept much like Cohn’s, like a glass box, obvious, see-through, but still locked tight. The phenomenal forthcoming new biography of Cohn, American Scoundrel, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark, quotes Sidney Zion, “Roy lived in a closet that was the oddest in history—a closet with neon lights—but he maintained it fiercely.” Linds too. When asked about his lifelong bachelorhood, he responded that he “never found the time to meet the right girl, or the right girl was smart enough not to have the time for me,” which…fair.

But, in the boredom of the pandemic, a few rent boys gabbed, alongside a notably memorable Medium post that may either be truth or a masterpiece of body horror fan fiction, which included an especially revolting scene about Graham’s “ladybugs.” I’ll leave you to discover what those are. After Graham’s death, I voyeuristically wanted more Lady G dirt just for the gossip, and actress and author Jesse James Rose delivered with an Instagram post recalling Graham being “the man who paid a twinky pre-transition college student a fat stack of cash to do unspeakable things to him in a hotel room while he wore red lingerie.” Hey, at least Lindsey put twinks through college! Somehow, Rose’s divulgence of Graham’s panty party is less of an outing to me than the berserk X-ed anecdote from journalist Ashley Parker. Warning: it requires getting past her wacko assertion that covering Congress was the “Best! Beat! Ever!” as a lead-in to her following around Graham in the wake of the devastating mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church. No wonder people hate journalists. Beyond that head-spinner, though, Parker recalls how she showed up sweat-soaked to humid South Carolina straight from the drafty Capitol. Lindsey’s response? “You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some new clothes—maybe a dress—and take a shower, and then we’ll talk.” Sticky! Icky! Jeez, so judgy!

Sex worker and catty fashion critic tales aside, Lady G seemed to get most of her pent-up kicks—her psychosexual release—from drones, bombs, aircraft carriers, troops on the ground, and the potential for nuclear war. And it’s his pursuit of this fantasy, alongside a few others with similar fetishes, that helped push Donnie T to go to war with Iran. Lindsey, much like many of our aging warmongers, will not have to endure the fallout from this unmitigated disaster. In fact, Graham, the day before his death, stated, “I can’t die now. I still need to do Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.” And then he died. Which you have to admit may be the pinnacle of neoconservative camp. Not that Graham wasn’t trying for camp glory in his last few months with copious maniacal public appearances, morbidly celebrating any and all killing done by our dying empire. Blue Georgia on X has a psychotic wrap-up:

Though “We’re going to blow the HELL out of these people!” is up there in the top Lady G conservative camp moments, along with his gimlet-breathed “SanctUUURARY cities” appearance on Hannity, his pièce de résistance must be his over-the-top show-stopping vigorous defense of “I like beer” Brett Kavanaugh against sex pest allegations during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Graham certainly knew how to hold an audience as he began with a strongly asserted slow burn, insisting, “I cannot imagine what you and your family are going through.” Quickly, though, Graham reaches a fevered pitch, hollering, “This is not a job, this is HELL!” At some points, it appears like Kavanaugh is barely holding in laughter, and who could blame him? Graham puts on such a barnstorming performance that it should be taught in high school theater classes! I want to recite it as a monologue!

Yet, it’s a later, quieter event that I would place as my number 1 in Lindsey Graham’s conservative camp canon: this fuzzy photo of Graham wandering around Disney World holding a pink light-up bubble wand, as caught by TMZ. She’s a princess!! And because I’m nothing if not a completist, I spent some time trying to figure out exactly what princess scepter this was! An Ariel and Flounder Light and Sound Bubble Wand, in which Ariel brushes her hair with her fishy friend while sitting in a seashell. Of course, forever in denial, Graham claimed the wand wasn’t his. Sure, hun. I guess he’ll never get to come out of The Little Mermaid fanatic closet either. Even though I don’t recall Sebastian encouraging forever wars, The Little Mermaid somehow seems appropriate. Did Lady G just want to be part of our world?! Well, we don’t want her! Still, like the water-logged ocean depths without newly leggy Ariel, the world of conservative camp will never be the same without her.

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