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[...]interestingly, what Mahy does not address explicitly is the trauma of repressed sexual identity. Since the 1960s, when the gay rights movement made some early progress, there has been an increasing number of American and British YA novels which explore teenage sexuality, such as Sandra Scoppettone's Trying Hard to Hear You (1974), Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave (1982) and Francesca Block's Baby Be-Bop (1995).1 As global attitudes towards homosexuality became increasingly liberal, the New Zealand Homosexual Law Reform Act was passed in 1986. [...]while though Páll Óskar, an Icelandic singer and gay icon, tells us that 'most gay men have a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder', since '[a]ll the bad remarks you hear about being gay while you are still a child/teenager in the closet can leave you broken', repression and social ostracism for being gay are not raised in any of Mahy's books.2 Yet there are many camp characters in her fiction. Kerry Mallan and Roderick McGillis, in 'Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children's Culture', have examined the 'deployment of male and female camp characters' in Disney movies, proposing that '[c]hildren will or may enact the conflicting and disorienting ways of understanding identity, gender, and sexuality - camp's raison d'etre'.5 More recently in The Middle Ages in Children's Literature (2015), Clare Bradford, while discussing Mallan's Gender Dilemmas in Children's Fiction (2009), points out that '[m]edievalist camp in pictures books [...] manifests most often in narratives which use the medieval to produce disjunctions between conventional gender stereotypes and the incongruity encoded in camp displays and performances'.6 Mahy's fascination with 'androgynous characters', such as the image of Bella Star - 'riding a horse, and with a gun, dressed as a man' - conveys a similar gesture to throw off the shackles of gender norms: as Mahy says in her interview with Stephen Hensman, 'it's a little bit the idea of women [and] girl characters having the power of life and death over other people because of weapons, or strength or something'.7 Accordingly, several critics have noticed Mahy's literary experiment with gender roles, which includes the implied representation of homosexuality. If tragedy is an experience of hyper-involvement, comedy is an experience of under-involvement, of detachment'.14 Accordingly, disconnection is a key symptom of trauma: 'a sense of alienation', as Judith Herman points out, 'pervades every relationship' of a traumatised individual.15 Furthermore, trauma and camp share a similar devotion to performance: as 'camp people use the exaggerated gestures of the theatre to draw attention to themselves', the traumatised subject will experience flashbacks and nightmares as though the curtain of repression were being lifted.16 But whereas Freud and Josef Breuer argued that the loss of affect results from the absence of 'an energetic reaction to the [traumatic] event, the camp sensibility of Mahy's characters is the opposite: their dramatic irony provides a way to act out the unpresentable trauma even as the theatrical and ironic deflections mask the severity of these experiences.17 In what follows, I will explore how camp aesthetic facilitates the representation of trauma in three of Mahy's novels: