She's a democrat lesbian feminist, called liberal by conservatives and called conservative by liberals. She doesn't believe in a gay "gene", she and her partner are raising their 7 year old son together. She leans toward libertarian-ism but like Tammy Bruce, she won't leave the democrat party behind, attempting to influence it instead of abandoning it. She's an atheist who respects religion. She is skeptical about global warming. She criticized Bill Clinton for not resigning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which she says led to America being "blindsided by 9/11". She voted for Barak Obama.

She's always been an academic achiever, whether at Nottingham High school or Binghamton University where she graduated as class valedictorian. She's an intellectual. She has said, "To me, comedy is a symptom of a balanced perspective on life, and people who are going around, like gloomy gusses, in that Sontag style of intellectual, these people are suffering from something coming from their childhood, it has nothing to do with the proper intellectual response to life..."

She did her graduate studies at Yale, noting she was the only open lesbian there from 1968-1972. She has had mammoth fights with feminists, lesbians, chauvinists, homophobes and academics her whole life. She outraged Susan Sontag & Gloria Steinem & Patricia Ireland & Molly Ivins. She criticized the American feminist movement, accusing it of, among other things, "harming young women by teaching them to see themselves as victims."

She wrote the highly acclaimed book "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" (1990). She published "Sex, Art and American Culture" in 1992. In 1994 she published "Vamps and Tramps" a collection of her writings since 1992. Her most recent book is,"Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia reads forty-three of the World's Best Poems"

"Is gay identity so fragile that it cannot bear the thought that some people may not wish to be gay?" Vamps and Tramps.

In an interview with Reason Magazine in 1995 she was quoted as saying, "In the first chapter of Sexual Personae, I made a defense of capitalism. I feel that capitalism has a very bad press with the pseudo-leftists who clog our best college campuses and that in point of fact capitalism has produced modern individualism and feminism. Modern capitalism has allowed the birth of the independent woman who is no longer economically dependent on her husband. I despise the sneering that our liberal humanists do about capitalism even while they enjoy all of it's pleasures and conveniences. I just despise it." She adds that she does believe there should be some kind of safety net, "that we should not tolerate, in an affluent society, extreme levels of poverty or deprivation."

When compared to Ayn Rand, she discusses how she see's some similarities and also differences between them. "She and I say to people, "Think for yourself! Don't be such a toadie! Stop going along with the group! Don't be such a sheep, just going along passively with other people!"

Her latest examination of the state of liberalism in the U.S.:..."It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power."'

Camille is a lapsed Catholic. She's a former girlscout. She was born and raised in New York. She's obsessed with Amelai Earhart. She writes for Salon.com. She a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Three gay men have had a lifelong influence on her thinking: Bruce Benderson who she went to highschool with; Stephen Jarratt and Stephen Feld. She is as comfortable with the working class man as the world of academia. "I'm also aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the idealogy of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.

"I'm very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk." This statement in itself succinctly describes the anti-ritalin, anti- ADD movement.

Paglia defies a label. These things are true: she is smart. She is an individual, marching in lock-step with no one. She walks the walk. And this is also true: how we respond to Paglia says more about who we are than who she is. She is the ultimate rorschach test.