Camp Quisling Till I Die (SLEEPAWAY CAMP II: UNHAPPY CAMPERS, 1988)

No experienced trans person cares about the nasty things that bigots say about us, because they tend to be both ignorant and boring. (Like, am I supposed to be insulted when y’all call me a faggot? I worked hard for this!) The actual painful betrayal for trans folks comes from two reliable sources: our friends and family, and our own community. Enter the quisling.

A “quisling” is a trans person who pulls their money and media influence from their willingness to publicly shit all over other trans people, typically by holding themselves up as a model of “good” cisheterocentrist transsexuality in comparison to the unwashed leftist masses dyeing their hair blue and railing each other behind dumpsters. It’s a messy, nasty business, and it is currently booming. Useless blowhards like Brianna Wu make their careers off of it.

The quisling is a curious creature, one that simultaneously lives off of well-licked boot leather and the piles of cash cis people will pour into your pockets the minute you’re willing to be one of the “good ones” on a boring morning chat show. They are typically transmedicalist die-hards that believe transness is a shameful medical condition to be overcome, and they use terms like “gender ideology” to mask their envy of those who are brave enough to live in the light.

They’re steadfast public advocates for respecting the cops that correctively raped their elders in 70s jail cells. One might assume they’re ignorant of queer history, but the sorry truth is that they’ve paid enough attention to realize they can save their own skins by selling out everyone else. 

But don’t mistake a quisling’s embarrassing public pronunciations for mere cynicism: They’re also true believers, as rabid for the gender binary as evangelicals are for incestuous Jesus-based roleplay. They believe in it so hard that they want to see other trans people violently forced to comply with it, which obviously makes it difficult for them to find allies in their community. And so quislings turn to the fascists that also hate unruly trans folks, offering themselves up as cheery sacrifices to prove that they belong.

Art frequently imitates life, and so we turn to art to understand it. SLEEPAWAY CAMP II: UNHAPPY CAMPERS is a terrible film, but it is useful as an extended metaphor. I often write about movie makers who triumphed over limited budgets and resources to bring a singular artistic vision to life. The SLEEPAWAY CAMP franchise is not one of those triumphs. It is pure cinema grift, a sloppy and lazy attempt to capitalize on the slasher genre by splicing several well-known tropes into a single film that stoned teenagers might wander into. 

Which brings us to the only real reason SLEEPAWAY CAMP is still discussed today: It features Angela, a teenager who was forcibly transitioned from a boy into a girl and ended up murdering several people at her summer camp in order to cope. SLEEPAWAY CAMP is read by many cis critics as a summer camp slasher take on the trans murderer trope, but trans folks sometimes read Angela differently.

I would be remiss as a trans person writing about the SLEEPAWAY CAMP films without first pointing you to the work of BJ and Harmony Coangelo. Harmony Coangelo’s essay on the first SLEEPAWAY CAMP movie is essential reading. She explains that Angela does not fit the killer trans trope because as far as we know, Angela has no desire to transition. Instead, it is her Aunt Martha who coerces Angela into a gender that she prefers, not one that Angela actually wants to embody. As a result, Angela is alienated and alone, a popular target for teenage bullies and adult predators. 

It’s not surprising that Angela ends up killing some of them. Coangelo’s read is that the Angela in SLEEPAWAY CAMP is a tragedy of a cisgender approach to gender and sexuality. It ends with predictable bloodshed because Angela is forced to live her life as something she is not in order to humor the deranged adults in her life. This is a dilemma that trans kids are all too familiar with. They usually have to pretend to be cis, not trans, but it’s still relatable. 

Coangelo is careful to note that her essay is only meant to discuss the character of Angela as it pertains to the first film, which is where we will be parting ways. In a limping attempt to follow up on the surprise success of the initial SLEEPAWAY CAMP, producer Jerry Silva and team bought the rights out from the original creators and filmed two sequels at once in order to keep the budget for both as low as possible. 

The sequels are very different from the first film, leaning far more heavily into the winky meta-comedy archness that typified slashers in the late 80s. Aside from the ever-present summer camp setting, one could be forgiven for missing their connection to the original SLEEPAWAY CAMP film entirely. The Angela that appears in the sequels is even played by a different actress, Pamela Springsteen. 

It’s funny that Angela is played by Bruce Springsteen’s little sister, because the world of SLEEPAWAY CAMP II is the kind of 80s denim-and-flag paradise that her elder brother ironically invoked in his working-class anthems. Much like the boomers who take Springsteen’s wistful skewering of Americana as a serious endorsement, the camp setting in SLEEPAWAY CAMP II feels both hokey and deeply sincere about its nostalgic pride of place in Reagan’s America. Campers sing hymns to God and country at the breakfast table, hang American flags in the sunshine, and play wholesome young-people pranks on each other after lights-out. 

This patriotic idyll is the camp that Angela returns to in SLEEPAWAY CAMP 2. We learn about Angela from a group of campers telling scary stories in front of a fire; one of the apple-cheeked campers recounts the plot of the first film to his friends as an urban legend with appropriate disgust, being sure to call Angela a boy in the process. Another camper says the story is true, and that his cop father helped bring Angela to justice. He also stops to note that Angela’s “sex change surgery” was financed by tax payer dollars. If nothing else, it’s grimly amusing that right-wing idiots have been telling each other the same lies about us since 1988. 

And that’s when Angela shows up to chastise the campers for partying. Surprise: She’s not a camper anymore, but a counselor! It’s worth remembering that Angela’s experience of camp in the original SLEEPAWAY CAMP is deeply traumatic. She is nearly molested by the cook, brutally bullied by her fellow campers and counselors alike. SLEEPAWAY CAMP would not have made sense unless she was tortured so thoroughly by her camp experience that she ended up murdering people over it. It’s hard to imagine that she would want to return to a place where she experienced so much abuse at all, much less that she’d want to become a part of the system that victimized her so deeply.

But this Angela is different from the previous Angela, and not just because she is played by a different actress. This Angela is a full-fledged quisling, eager to prove her loyalty to the people who tormented her for being different a few summers prior. She is ready to be the best camp counselor she can be, and that includes forcing the vulnerable kids in her care to be the best campers they can be— by any means necessary. 

Like many quislings, Angela is violently agitated by people who do things “wrong.” She murders female campers with gleeful abandon, but only when they “earn it” by doing something she considers unbecoming. The girls in her care die for sins like smoking weed, kissing boys, and being too naked in front of the male campers. Angela’s values as a camp counselor are deeply socially conservative, and she expresses those values with a power drill. If only Brianna Wu knew she could simply murder trans people who crassly demand the barest sliver of human rights! At least then she’d have less time to tweet.

To Angela, this is a worthwhile pursuit because it proves that she is a Good Camper. When she’s not murdering the children she is being paid to mind, she is a model employee. She endlessly sucks up to the camp director, tirelessly leads younger campers through tedious arts-and-crafts and leads sing-alongs about how beautiful and god-blessed the camp is over breakfast. The other counselors despise Angela, mostly considering her a cringy but useful nuisance. Even the camp director she idolizes finds her to be a bit much, and he does not hesitate to fire her once her zealotry becomes an issue. The system she has newly dedicated her life to protecting and promoting is run by people who at best tolerate her for her willingness to do grunt work and at worst openly hate her guts.

And this is the secret sad part of a quisling’s life, the only thing it’s worth actually pitying them for. Conservative right-wingers and evangelical Christians hate quislings as much as they hate any other trans person. But the canny among them recognize that an obedient trans person is a useful tool. A quisling is a pacifier that tentative transphobes use to comfort themselves; after all, how could their ideas be that bad if one of those deluded trannies actually agrees with them? Quislings can be used to manufacture consent for trans genocide by providing a convenient mascot that begs to be killed, and that is why a smart bigot will give a quisling just enough love, money and attention to keep them on the hook. 

A quisling is a howling lonely void, a trans person who never found their chosen family and instead filled the hole in their heart by fawning over whatever fascist daddy figure will have them. The belief that they are seen as equals by the gorgons they labor for is nothing but a pleasant delusion. It’s like when a cat sits at a dinner table and waits to eat with the rest of the family, except a family that owns a cat generally loves it. Nobody loves a quisling. 

Eventually too many of Angela’s campers end up MIA, and that’s when she learns that she is still a disposable entity to the camp she has literally killed for. This leads to the climactic finale, where the aforementioned cop’s son is trapped with Angela in the abandoned cabin where she has been stacking corpses in cheery tableaus and pretending to feed them canned beans. The cop's son furiously confronts Angela with evidence of her crimes, calling her by her dead name and misgendering her in the process. Even under duress, he instinctively weaponizes Angela’s trans identity to hurt her and remind her that she doesn’t really belong to the community she craves.

And this is where Angela proves herself a quisling. While the Angela in the previous film was secretive about her transsexuality, this Angela cheerily acknowledges she’s had “an operation” alongside the mental health treatment she received following all the murders. “I’ve been Angela Johnson for four years. I did my time! Two years of therapy, electroshock, every kind of pill you’ve heard of plus an operation. I’m completely cured!”

Angela is ranting these words in the interior of the abandoned cabin where she committed several atrocities at Camp Arawak, a blood-soaked cradle that she hides in for comfort throughout the film. She insists that the pills and surgeries have cured her of her murderous compulsions while standing in front of the dead campers she has burned, stabbed, and drowned in a disused porta-potty. However, she says these things with the conviction of the true believer, a person whose faith requires an acceptable sacrifice to the warped patriarchal mindset she has newly dedicated her life to upholding. 

Nobody is forcing Angela to do these things, but that doesn’t matter. She’s a quisling. She’s proud of the blood on her hands, and she’ll do it again. It’s easy for Angela to escalate her ideological violence, because it’s directed at people who “deserve” it. She takes it for granted that the abuse she suffered as a camper was just, and so she becomes the same kind of monster. 

That’s the only truly scary part of SLEEPAWAY CAMP II. In horror movies, a refusal to understand your complicity in the cycle of violence you’re perpetuating is what leads to a sequel. In real life, it leads to a world where rich trans people laud bathroom laws and beg for a nonexistent middle ground while the rest of us suffer.  

I can’t recommend SLEEPAWAY CAMP II on it own merits. But there is something fascinating to me about the truth it accidentally tells about the way craving acceptance from people who hate you can lead a person to be used by a monstrous thing. Just like Angela, any trans person can become weaponized by conservative culture as long as they’re willing to sell their soul for a place at the table. 

So it goes for the quisling, and god help the rest of us.