A friend’s mother once told me that for a couple of years in the 1980s – as the Conservatives were waging war on the miners and she spent late nights at Marxist-feminist reading groups – she wore an almost daily uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. On her wedding day she broke with habit and put on a dress she had bought, at great expense to her, that was fun, sexy and, although she didn’t use this word, flamboyant. The next week at the school she taught in she saw a colleague wearing it. “Nice dress,” she said. “It’s OK for work,” her colleague replied, “but I wouldn’t wear it out.”

I found myself recalling this anecdote as I read Jack Parlett’s memoir-cum-cultural history of our attempts to push the boat out. To make any effort is to risk embarrassment, to be seen either as ridiculous or hopelessly naive. One way to avoid those charges is to use playful or cynical irony. Parlett finds examples of this in Oscar Wilde and what the cultural critic Susan Sontag once described as camp, a worldview obsessed with artifice and performance. Although Flamboyance is not a polemic, it’s clear that its author sees something lacking in these efforts at self-fashioning. The book is couched as an alternative; Parlett presents flamboyance as a model for how to live a life that not only “burns with a resistant energy” but “puts politics back into the picture”. In practice, this means that he has little patience for the notion of art for art’s sake; he insists, for example, that there is no making sense of flamenco without understanding the history of fascism in Spain.

Although primarily concerned with the culture of gay men in the English-speaking world, Flamboyance nevertheless makes a broad set of philosophical claims about the value of sincerity, love and political commitment. The term, Parlett tells us, has its origins in an architectural metaphor. Flamboyance, from the French verb flamboyer, to blaze, was in the 19th century used with a twinge of romantic longing to describe the gothic style of 15th-century churches whose ornate curves looked like flames rising up to the sky. He suggests that there is something erotically charged in this image, although it requires a bit of work to see the connection. “I would probably not be yelling ‘slay’ at the stonework around rural church windows,” he tells us.

Moving between the low- and high-brow, Parlett observes that William Morris, whose elaborate floral wallpapers have helped define English design, was “more like a candidate for a makeover on a show like Queer Eye” than one of its chic hosts. The point, made slightly patronisingly, is that flamboyance isn’t concerned with outward appearance but instead, as he writes in the final chapter, “what precedes the spectacle … the laborious work we do behind the scenes”.

This makes his book a case for a rather austere vision of flamboyance, an outlook whose motivations become clearer in the memoir sections. There he describes his struggles with alcoholism and his gradual recognition that it is possible to “find fulfilment without the aid of intoxication”. Read in the light of these revelations, it’s hard not to view Flamboyance as an extended metaphor about drinking and the author’s hope of finding some way of facing, rather than detaching himself from, his own life.

Unfortunately, the connection with cultural history is made weakly, and this in turn makes the discussion of art, literature and film seem unmotivated. On top of this, the breadth of coverage can at times be overwhelming: Wilde, flamenco, the slain 1990s rapper Big L, Frank O’Hara, Lil Nas X and Donald Trump all get a look-in. Often, passages are held together more by word association than argument. In one dense section we move from the Madagascan “flamboyant tree” Delonix regia to Proust’s protagonists’ love of flowers, to the word pansy as a slur, before arriving at Derek Jarman’s garden. Despite these shortcomings, Parlett succeeds in introducing a cast of writers, artists, dancers and musicians of which he has deep knowledge. This means that, though there is a lot to wade through in Flamboyance, there is undeniably much to learn.

Flamboyance: The Art of Burning Brightly by Jack Parlett is published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.