Logo EVP Lisa Sherman (left) and RuPaul (Getty Images)

On the night of the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Logo network’s most popular program ever, Logo celebrated with a party at the Out Hotel’s XL club. The drag-queen competitors posed for photos with guests—and sat for interviews with the national media; the clientele was almost entirely gay men. (As one friend emailed me: “EVERYONE IS THERE. EVERYONE. EVERYONE BUT ME.”) Even the contestant-villain of the season was inundated with admirers.

While Logo was once a gay enclave—the Out Hotel of the airwaves—the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race has been a breakthrough for the network among straight and gay audiences alike. It’s the kind of hit that defines a network. Or, in Logo’s case, helps to redefine it.

In April, the channel’s general manager, Lisa Sherman, wrote an op-ed on the Huffington Post wherein she indicated that the network’s programming was to follow gay interests, but that “quite often those interests are now the same as those of their friends and family, whether they’re gay or straight. It’s not just programming about gays, it’s programming that gays will enjoy.” The channel’s new branding hinges on the slogan “Beyond Labels.” In other words, Logo is going gay-ish.

This means less reality programming like The A-List—a real-life soap opera starring gay socialites—and more like like Eden’s World, a currently-airing series about a seven-year-old beauty queen, or The Baby Wait, an upcoming series about couples (both straight and gay) trying to adopt. “It seemed almost too on-the-nose for Logo,” said Baby Wait executive producer Tony DiSanto, of The Hills fame, who said the show was initially pitched out as a gay-centric series influenced by the portrayal of gay adoptive parents on ABC’s hit Modern Family.

A conversation with Logo’s recently installed senior vice-president of original programming, Brent Zacky, changed the angle slightly. “Brent called us and said, ‘This is great. Let’s take it a step further and feature all different sorts of couples.’ It’s such an obvious way to make this a more broadly appealing show. We hadn’t even thought of it.”

The success of cable networks with a gay sensibility but whose programming grid is not an all-gay agenda—think of Bravo or E!—is indicative of what Logo, a division of Viacom, stands to gain with its shift in sensibility.

As the gay movement has seen substantial gains in political and cultural capital, and as gay political groups (like the Empire State Pride Agenda, which recently fired its executive director) and gay media (like Out, which recently laid off its entire editorial staff) struggle to define their reason to exist, gay-ish culture is booming like never before. The success of Bravo is emblematic: the network that came to prominence in 2003 with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is by now largely about straight, married women, the winking visage of Andy Cohen the only reminder of its history.

“I don’t think Logo thinks gay men and lesbians need a network all their own,” said Dan Savage, the sex columnist who collaborated with Logo on a TV special about his “It Gets Better” campaign for bullied teens and who spoke at the network’s upfront presentation. “Some people in gay-land are a little upset that Logo is abandoning the gay market, and I don’t think that’s true.

“It reminds me of gay people bitching about straight people in gay bars. ‘These are supposed to be our exclusive preserves, our wildlife preserves.’ In the same way that gay people are in the mainstream now, a lot of straight people are in what used to be our little parallel universe.”

Mr. Zacky, who in his previous post in development at TLC helped turn that network into a reality-TV powerhouse with programs like Cake Boss, insisted Logo will be coherent going forward. “I get it. People look at it at first blush and may not fully understand it. But as we get closer to each of these shows launching, they’ll begin to see why it makes sense for it to be on our network.”

The shift includes transforming shows that already exist, like the Drag Race spinoff RuPaul’s Drag U. Heretofore, the show had shown drag queens remaking the lives of “women who had lost their mojo,” in Mr. Zacky’s telling—a yet queerer Queer Eye. In its upc oming season, the show will feature specific tips for the straight female audience watching at home. “It gives women one more reason to watch and participate,” said Mr. Zacky. “It’s the cherry on top!”

Not everyone thinks so. Ben Harvey, a reality TV enthusiast at the Huffington Post, wrote, “Gay TV as we know it is dead” and compared Logo’s shift to MTV’s move away from music video programming. “The new Logo will be a Cuisinart-blended cocktail of Bravo, Lifetime, and Oxygen, with a pink boa as garnish.”

J. Bryan Lowder at Slate chimed in, “This is obviously just a ploy to transition Logo to a more economically lucrative ‘lifestyle’ model,” though he contended that Logo’s move made sense from a quality perspective. “Logo’s reality shows (aside from Drag Race) were just poorly made, plain and simple.”

Lisa Sherman, Executive Vice-President at Logo, emphasized to The Observer that Logo’s changes were prompted by a broad view of gay citizens’ expanding role in the culture. “The truth is I don’t think it’s a mission shift at all. I think it’s a shift in the culture and the way gays are living more in a mainstream culture. The culture in the last six or seven years since we’ve launched has thankfully become a very different place for gay people.”

The channel launched in 2005, the summer after George W. Bush had won re-election on a “moral values” platform. It had to strike a delicate balance between appealing to a core audience and getting acceptance from advertisers (there were but three charter advertisers) and cable providers. At the time, MTV Networks chair Tom Freston said: “We’re not using profanity, we’re not using sex. This is going to be mainstream programmiGng that you see everywhere else, except for the fact that it’s targeted to the gay and lesbian community.”

Since then, Mr. Bush’s campaign manager came out as gay and same sex marriage passed in New York. Modern Family and The Ellen DeGeneres Show are both hits, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed. To Ms. Sherman all of these are bellwethers, and gays are leading what she called “far more mainstream, integrated lives.”

Logo’s shift isn’t just engendered by a vague feeling, though. The media research group Starcom performed a study of the gay community for the network, the results of which were presented at Logo’s recent upfront presentation for advertisers. Esther Franklin, the executive vice-president of Starcom, told the ad buyers in attendance that the gay community could be segmented into eight “identities,” five of which were “most exciting for advertisers.”

These included the “Just who I am” identity, which she called “the face of average, everyday American life.

“What I love about this community is its ordinariness—if that’s a word. The normalcy of ‘Just who I am’ is what makes it revolutionary.” These people, in Ms. Franklin’s telling, tend to be most interested in chilling out in front of the television, and not overly concerned with whether the characters they watch are straight or gay.

Another identity was “Out and Proud.”

“When I think about this community, Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration’ starts to play in my head,” said Ms. Franklin.

These communities were delineated in order to plan a programming strategy that could appeal to the widest variety of gay people—and their straight friends.

“It’s crucial that we speak to more than ‘Initiators,’” said Mr. Zacky, referring to the identity associated with advocating for equality and political change.

“You might have noticed that there’s a common theme,” he said at the upfront, before introducing a reality series about a bar-owning Italian family, led by a patriarch in the Archie Bunker mold. “We like to think of ourselves as beyond. Beyond refuses to be labeled.”

That refusal means an uncertain future for The A-List, whose future remains up in the air. That series, with its homosocial homosexuals, was not mentioned or shown in video form at the upfront presentation. And about a past lesbian-themed scripted series, Ms. Sherman said, “Every single one of those characters was gay. Their world was gay. Where they hung out was gay. And I think we would probably do a show like that, but it would feel broader. We would touch on the lives of those characters in a sense that they had other friends in their lives that weren’t gay.”

Was Ms. Sherman worried that the gay community—if such a thing existed—was losing an on-air refuge? “I would hate to think that we lose it. I would think that we just spread it more broadly around so instead of it just living in Chelsea or West Hollywood…” She laughed, then compared gay life to hip-hop in the 1980s.

“So hip-hop started in a very niche way,” she continued, “and then it sort of broke out and now you can be in suburban Massachusetts and you’ve got kids who feel the hip-hop vibe. I don’t think it takes away from the people that started that but yet it’s sort of felt and reflected and appreciated by more than that group. And I’d like to think that the same thing is happening to and for the gay community. And I think that’s a great thing.”

Mr. Savage said the change may already have occurred on the back of Logo’s competition-reality hit. “Straight people are watching Logo too,” he pointed out. “Half the straight people I know are more obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race than I am—and I’m pretty obsessed.”

RuPaul (Getty Images)

We recently spoke to RuPaul to discuss the state of camp, as discussed in a feature this week--and he told us that today's gay youth is grievously unaware of the canon.

"In theory, it's easier," he told us, of the Internet's custodial possibilities. "If that kid doesn't know where to look for it, though... The first time I had to explain to someone young who the Pointer Sisters were, I was appalled!"

RuPaul told us that camp would survive, if in attenuated form, through a small band of torch-carriers: "If someone has that sensibility, they don’t need to be told where to look... The truth is, most people cant see beyond the face value of something. Our egos tell us to believe who we are on our driver's license. Anything outside of that, a lot of people can’t hear it."

The star of RuPaul's Drag Race, whose current season debuted last night, wasn't seeing much in the way of camp at the multiplex: RuPaul's favorite movies of 2011 included Drive, The Descendants, Pariah, and Shame. "In this life, kiddo, you gotta have a balanced diet. You gotta have something to counter all the bullshit this society thrives on."

To what bullshit might Ru be referring? "There's so much more consumerism and people are so tied into the products that they buy, and for people to get you to buy these products, they say you are not really clean unless youre zestily clean."

He discussed signs in airports indicating that passengers ought not accept packages from strangers. "But who would ever do that? It’s a way to control people--it’s a way to instill fear. It’s an old trick. It’s just like yelling fire in a crowded theater. It’s mean, but it works."

And just like that, our time was up!

Megan Hilty as Marilyn Monroe--gorgeous, but not campy (NBC)

Camp is dead, and you’re invited to its autopsy the Monday after the Super Bowl. That’s when the new NBC series Smash premieres (though it's already available online). The drama takes place behind the scenes of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, following the cast and crew through their various personal and professional travails, and it comes with a reality twist: the musical might actually come to Broadway.

If you took as gospel Susan Sontag’s credo that camp is “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater,” then you’d presume Smash would be the campiest thing on TV, give or take a Glee. But despite its gayish trappings, Smash bears the imprimatur of executive producer Steven Spielberg, the fellow lately known for such solid, accomplished films as War Horse and Munich. Between Smash’s exuberant musical numbers, the show slogs through one grave, brow-knitting plotline after another, among them the question of whether Debra Messing will adopt a baby or not. (Historians may recall that the Debra Messing/baby plotline aggressively straightened up Will & Grace a few years back, ending in the show’s destruction.) Then there’s the question of whether the characters’ low-grade badinage will ever erupt into full-on fireworks. The final number, a sing-off/audition/dream sequence, offers a nicely over-the-top walk-off, but it concludes a surprisingly staid 43 minutes.

“I keep likening it to shows like ER,” said Megan Hilty, one of the two Marilyns manqué. “We’re not doing brain surgery—but you don’t have to be in the know in the theater world to enjoy it.” Still, what makes good sense commercially puts the show’s camp possibilities in intensive care. No scalplel is needed to untangle the layers here. Smash’s intentions are all conscious and overt; everything’s on the surface.. By going after a mainstream, Spielberg-sized audience, Smash does for camp what Schindler’s List did for the camps: It simplifies it, flattens it out, and repackages it for mass consumption.

Sontag’s contention that “Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques” suggests one culprit for the death of camp: The mainstream acceptance of gays—a welcome development, to say the least—seems to have come with an ancillary cost.

If camp is by definition a sort of in-joke, a winking language of signs and semaphores understood by a discerning few, it melts away when a show about battling Broadway ingenues is targeted at the many. The aesthetic sensibility that converted TV’s Batman into a gay icon and "No wire hangers!" into a rallying cry has crossed irrevocably into mainstream culture. It’s available to all and therefore drained of its power.

It’s an tasty irony, but not a campy one.

To wit: We flocked to Ryan Trecartin’s marvelously twisted Day-Glo horrorshow at P.S. 1, and we gawked at Lady Gaga’s eggshell trick at the Grammys. But when camp is understood by everyone, well, what good does it do us? The thrill is gone.

“Everything now is called gay camp,” noted Michael Musto, columnist for the Village Voice, whereas before, “it was all closety and suggested.” He cited the Bette Davis Grand Guignol nightmare What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?—a prestigious-at-its-time film whose sense of gleeful mischief is signaled with winks and nods. “To this day, gays are still swiveling their arms around and saying, But ya are, Blanche.” By comparison, fast forward nearly half a century, and we’ve got a homoerotic freakout like Black Swan—based on the Sontag-certified camp fixation Swan Lake—delighting and horrifying moviegoers of all stripes on its way to the Oscars and the $100 million club.

Back in the day, the ultimate camp icon was Liza Minnelli—a mascara’d trainwreck who was beloved nonetheless for those pipes and that legacy. Today, we've got Christina Aguilera. Sure, she’s a diva who packs on weight, blows her live performances and is at once lovable and tragic, but she’s no Liza, alas—especially now that she’s judging vocalists on NBC’s ultrastraight The Voice. Lady Gaga? Sure, she name-checks Liberace and dresses like a drag king, but she’s more popular than just about any pop star besides the Carmen Miranda-esque Katy Perry, and she’s too controlled, too calculating, to self-aware to be camp.

Even General Hospital has lost its camp appeal—somewhere around the time James Franco decided to turn it into a piece of postmodern performance art.

The cognoscenti are opening their arms to cult art: This month, Raquel Welch will receive a career retrospective at Lincoln Center in February. Sure, fans will turn out for One Million Years B.C. and Bedazzled, but the tough ticket will be Myra Breckinridge, that camp Rosetta Stone (also starring The Observer’s own Rex Reed). On the phone, Ms. Welch recalled the film’s misbegotten ambitions. The director, Michael Sarne, “wanted it to be a Fellini thing, all wild and crazy,” she said. Instead, “It’s a curiosity.” The novel by Gore Vidal “is going to be something that people will refer back to,” she added, “and then they’ll go to the movie and say, what happened here?” That what happened here reaction, taking place at a midnight screening or around a passed-around VHS, is how the brain metabolizes camp; at Lincoln Center, it’s a historical relic.

The campiest thing on Broadway, Hugh Jackman, isn’t campy at all—though he might appear so to the out-of-town crowd. (You'd think that a movie star who rose to fame by brandishing his claws would be a little less earnest.) The great camp hope, Todd Graff, who directed queeny indie flick Camp in 2003, has now gone mainstream with this month’s Christian-choir melodrama Joyful Noise: the gay-musical-comedy equivalent of Dylan going electric. When the campiest diva out there is prestige queen Meryl Streep, whose every performance or awards-show speech feels like a thicker slice of ham, you know you’re in trouble.

And speaking of the Oscars, anyone who doesn’t get enough of Marilyn in Smash—“She certainly is having a moment, isn’t she!” noted Ms. Hilty—can see Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn or in full peroxide glory on the covers of GQ and Vogue. A world in which dressing up as a tragic dead celebrity can score you Oscar buzz instead of a gig at Lucky Cheng’s is a world in which camp has been replaced by good taste.

Camp is borne of passion, but its generally misplaced passion. The creators of camp spectacles are generally the last ones in on the joke. Camp is really a product of the audience, which grasps at these misfit entertainments, endeared by what Sontag called “a seriousness that fails.” Smash, in its pilot, never extends itself far enough to be a failure; it’s too professional to be truly passionate. So, too, are other projects on TV that look campy only when one squints.

Glee, for all its exploitation and explosion of beloved clichés, is at heart a conventional high school show studded with quotation marks. It’s too much of a moneymaker to go garish, and too square to be camp. American Horror Story, another production by gay dynamo Ryan Murphy, is a mashup of every midnight monster movie. It’s pretty liberal-minded, with a gimp-suited demon and a pair of murderous gay ghosts, but its sensibility appeals to the audience’s hyper-awareness of various cultural referents (camp being one of many) more than it does create a genuine mood of astonishment at the unexpected.

“Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful,” Sontag wrote; certain entertainments “want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat.” Sontag might as well have been talking about Jessica Lange’s dessicated-baby-doll performance on American Horror Story. Or the tightly structured reality competition RuPaul’s Drag Race. Or the in-on-every-joke female female-impersonators of The Real Housewives franchise.

All of the above are dressing themselves in the accoutrements of camp—a sort of drag routine, actually—aping the formula for a wised-up audience that has seen everything and can be counted on to “get it,” albeit without the delight of actual discovery that animates true camp. It’s camp in a can.

“The kind of stuff that I watch that’s campy is stuff that was intended to be mainstream—without a wink,” noted Frank DeCaro, the Sirius radio host and author of The Dead Celebrity Cookbook, a collection of dishes favored by various tragic icons. “I don’t want them to do the winking for me. Showgirls is campy. Glee has a big gay sensibility. I’m not sure where one ends and the other begins.”

As gay men have stormed the mainstream, their sensibility has permeated the entertainment industry—but absent the sense of secret, “just us girls” knowledge that always characterized it. RuPaul told The Observer that the Internet makes the process of discovery easier: “Everything is on YouTube,” he said (speaking out of character), recalling a favorite clip from The Carol Burnett Show that someone had copied onto on VHS—routine viewing after a night at the club. “It is completely camp—she really gets it,” he said. But the fact that the clip is now a few keystrokes away tends to reduce its samizdat appeal.

In the crowded media market of today, entertainment companies “get” camp insofar as a certain sly humor helps bring in viewers. It’s a marketing technique, the least subversive thing imaginable.

The recently installed chairman of NBC Entertainment, Robert Greenblatt, is an openly gay man, best known for developing the gleefully profane likes of Dexter and Weeds on Showtime. That’s a very big deal, but the fact that Mr. Greenblatt is betting big on Smash may say less about his personal sensibility than about how gay the culture at large has become in the post-Glee, post-Dancing with the Stars era. Rather than smuggling an outré slant onto the airwaves, Mr. Greenblatt is going where the audience is—or so he hopes.

Camp emerged as a challenge to the traditional power structure, which is one reason it’s so hard to find now that openly gay men have found increasing acceptance. “Occasionally I’ll make complaints like that—things were better when gay was more dangerous and hidden,” said Mr. Musto, only half-seriously. “Oppression can be a pretty good aphrodisiac.”

As entertainers seek slices of an ever-shrinking audience, “camp” is still a dirty word: when we called Joan Rivers’s publicist to arrange an interview for this story, we were stonewalled. “She is not campy,” her publicist told us. (Tell that to the other panelists on Fashion Police!)

Even with all of the legal steps forward for the gay community, RuPaul argued that camp was still needed: “It has always been the refuge for people who are from our perspective,” he said. “Otherwise we couldn’t take all the hypocrisy and bullshit that this world would have us take for face value. With camp, at least we can laugh at it! You can’t take anything seriously.”

But Smash and Glee and American Horror Story and Lady Gaga all take themselves grievously seriously, and not in the failed-art sense that makes Showgirls or Baby Jane so much fun. They’re competent, solid, knowing. Referring to the 2010 Cher musical, Mr. DeCaro said, “If Burlesque had been so much worse, it would’ve been so much better.”

He added, “It feels like there’s a lot more bad-bad than there is good-bad right now, and there’s a lot of good-good too. Sometimes I wonder—is Showgirls once in a generation? Once in a lifetime?”

Camp like Showgirls depends on overextension. It requires mad artists to invest lavishly in a fatally flawed vision. Today, the “bad” in entertainment is execrable—intended for a common denominator devoted to it over the million other options. The “good” is for an audience on whom no reference shall be lost, produced by a corporation that can’t place too many potential risks on its ledger. Why bother making something bad-good in an original way when you can make something good according to formula? “Camp,” the chemical reaction between bad and good, cannot possibly bridge the gap between an Adam Sandler movie and a George Clooney one. Smash could be the most misguidedly ambitious thing anyone would have seen in 1975, but today it looks tame—what tastemaker’s going to watch an NBC drama that aspires to ER?

There are a few minutes where, despite itself, Smash betrays a marvelous ambition to dazzle that is beautiful and sad in a way that feels, well, camp. The camera cuts to a smirking, gorgon-like Anjelica Huston, watching her two pet divas try to outshriek one another. It’s a just a moment, but it offers a brief glimpse of just how good the show might be were it willing to be bad.

Maybe the Marilyn stuff will help. Said Ms. Hilty, of the Monroe appeal: “There’s so many levels to her and her story is tragic and beautiful and her whole life was centered around wanting to be loved. That’s something universal that everybody feels.”

If Smash wanted to be loved more than admired, it’d be an instant camp classic. Alas, it will probably just be a hit instead.