“Just when it was thought humanly impossible for anything truly new or revealing to be said of camp, [Tinkcom’s] book Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema appears and not only challenges received critical wisdom on the topic but into the bargain advances a powerful new model for thinking about camp and its place in contemporary culture.” — Brett Farmer , Genders
“Neither light nor always easy reading, Working Like a Homosexual is still a pleasure, not the least for the well-researched subject matter and the well-structured arguments. Tinkcom presents a subtle yet powerful view of the economic power not just of camp but its queer practitioners, which will make this an important contribution to understanding the inescapable capital value of the queer esthetic in mainstream culture.” — Christopher Byrne , Lesbian and Gay New York
"[An] elegantly-written book. . . ."
— Steven Maynard, Labour/Le Travail
"[Tinkcom’s] research is impeccable and his style is very readable. All in all, this is an important addition in the field of cinematic queer studies."
— W. A. Vincent , Choice
"Matthew Tinkcom's Working Like a Homosexual is a welcome, deliciously quirky, and much-needed addition to queer film studies, labor studies, and the interrogation of the uses of sexuality and its discontents within the system-in this case, the Hollywood machine and its marginalized orbits." — Erika Suderburg, Journal of the History of Sexuality
"Tinkcom deserves praise for daring, as he remarks at the outset, to '[take] camp seriously.' His deft reading of some 17 films offers insightful deconstruction of texts too often dismissed as fluff or trash." — Michael R. Schiavi , Quarterly Review of Film and Video
"Tinkcom deserves praise for daring, as he remarks at the outset, to '[take] camp seriously.' His deft reading of some 17 films offers insightful deconstruction of texts too often dismissed as fluff or trash." — Michael R. Schiavi Quarterly Review of Film and Video
“A brilliant, innovative study of camp that exceeds the terms in which this topic traditionally has been conceived. The result is a reformulation of camp as queer industrial labor, from the perspective of the production as well as the reception of that work. Anyone working on camp will hereafter have to reckon with this book.” — Steven Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties