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This article considers the public intellectual Fran Lebowitz as a performer located within a camp tradition, exploring how her performance challenges notions of public and private in contemporary American culture and in so doing offers a queer alternative to dominant formulations of the public sphere. Lebowitz combines the theatricality of traditional camp with ethical seriousness in her public, performed identity as self-appointed judge of contemporary American life. At the same time, in the ironic gap between the verbosity of her identity as public speaker and her own paralysed literary output, Lebowitz enacts a tacit elegy to a 'lost public' of New York artists and their equally decimated audience. The links between her highly publicized writer's block and the impact of AIDS on the New York cultural scene suggest ways in which Lebowitz queers the elegiac mode by presenting a frustrated silence running parallel to her virtuosic verbal fluency. This analysis of Lebowitz's public persona returns continually to the ethical and aesthetic implications of a mode of performance that simultaneously invites democratic engagement while repelling notions of community grounded in the pollution of civic space with private concerns.