MILLENNIAL DIARY
THERE’S a long list of misconceptions with which our American cousins arrive in Ireland — they believe ‘‘top of the morning’’ is a thing; that we subsist on corned beef; that the entire nation is ginger and permanently drunk; and that our half-Indian gay Taoiseach is a woke champion of misfits, the oppressed, and other people like him.
Jonathan Van Ness, (commonly known as JVN) breakout star of Queer Eye, the Netflix makeover show aimed squarely at premenstrual women and men who have never scored a second date, recently graced our shores with his standup tour — and like so many Yanks before him, JVN ended up falling for lazy cultural stereotypes.
JVN is new to stand-up but it’s a no-brainer of a format for this universally beloved human ray of sunshine (I mean that literally — his plentiful hair is shinier than the sun) who delights Queer Eye audiences, podcast listeners and Instagram followers with his specific brand of relentless optimism, compassion and wicked, self-aware humour. A hairdresser by trade, JVN came out this year as both gender-queer and HIV positive; this only cemented his place in the hearts of gays, straights and anyone in-between the world over.
At his Dublin show, he wondered why his bit about ‘‘doing a Hillary’’ by marrying ‘‘cute’’ Varadkar and then running for Taoiseach himself wasn’t getting the expected laughs. That a room of millennials invested in queer culture failed to recognise the hotness of Leo probably seemed inconceivable — but not as inconceivable as the truth.
“We love Leo, don’t we?” said JVN — at which point someone in the crowd tried to put him out of his misery, shouting, “He’s
Fine Gael!” before realising that that would mean precisely nothing to a man who thought he was being risque slagging off Adele to a ‘‘UK crowd”, adding, “Conservative!”
He physically reeled at the news (in a manner that will be familiar to even the most casual of Queer Eye viewers), twice asking “Really?” incredulous, then disappointed.
When interviewed afterwards, JVN said: “I made a bad assumption and I assumed… the Taoiseach was a member of the LGBT community and I thought everyone must love him.”
It’s true, that in the age of Drag Race and
Queer Eye, gayness has acquired a moral value. Indeed everywhere we look, gay men are making over harangued mothers, offering inspiring pep talks, and generally advancing society with an intuitive first-hand understanding of the ways in which culture and government make the lives of marginalised people difficult.
But hypocrisy in politicians knows no creed, colour — or sexuality.
When asked what lessons he’d learnt from the experience, JVN said: “Mainly: research a country’s politics before you go talk about it.”
There they go again, gay men being all humble, open-minded, and willing to learn — giving all of them a good name.
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The first question The British Tribe Next Door begs is, ‘‘why?’’; the second, ‘‘how?’’; the third, “why are women still doing so much housework when they’ve got washing machines and dishwashers? Why do we feel the need to clean floors that aren’t dirty instead of sitting back and getting fat, like Himba mother-of-nine Ueripanga would do if she didn’t have to clean everything by hand?”
The Channel 4 show sees the Moffatts, stars of Gogglebox and family of
I’m a Celebrity’s Queen of the Jungle Scarlett, and an exact replica of their home being plonked into a village in northern Namibia to stay with the Himba for a month.
Like with so many of these tasteless reality TV punts, the reality is possibly not as bad as we feared.
The format is inherently racist, and part of a long tradition of crude and disrespectful programming — but it’s fair to say that, within these confines, The British Tribe Next Door isn’t the worst thing we’ve seen about ‘‘Africa’’ — and the Moffatts do seem like a genuinely nice family, who are keen to be good guests.
The show works really hard to avoid the pitfalls of ‘‘poverty porn’’, making westerners and our passion for ugly scatter cushions the spectacle rather than the Himba. Twitter reckons it’s not poverty porn at all — because they are not poor! They are rich in community and love and body confidence! But so far we know nothing about education, child mortality, disease.
This adds to the sense that the Himba are there simply to provide the backdrop for Scarlett
Moffatt to undergo her journey of self-acceptance. That this will be the story is clear from the start: Scarlett tells us about her confidence struggles, how the idea of being in a bikini makes her feel sick, “the thought of people judging and looking” — as well it might, because we all know what certain tabloids like to do with pictures of celebrities in swimwear.
She is moved to tears by her Himba friends’ incomprehension of her body hang-ups, her unwillingness to reveal her breasts, and their envy of her stomach rolls.
Transplanting a stageset of the Moffatts’s own home into the middle of the Namibian desert was a clever gimmick: it will have neutralised a lot of the potential pitfalls of such ‘‘cultural exchanges’’, which can veer into racist circus territory.
The family didn’t have to turn up and sleep on a cow-hide with a rock for a pillow, and eat porridge with their hands. The culture-shock is staggered, which perhaps makes for more patient, open minds.
Betty can have a nice cup of builder’s tea before heading into a hut made of sticks and dung, and discovering that we all fold blankets in the same way, no matter where in the world we were born.