Is ‘queer Eye’ breaking stereotypes or reinforcing them?
For the past two weeks, the ads for the reboot of “Queer Eye” in my Facebook feed have been ubiquitous. “For everyone who can’t stop crying,” they read, “know that you are not alone.” The new Fab Five have been memed and billboarded. Netflix announced last week that it has picked up a second season. I can’t count how many people have told me to watch it.
Yet it took more than a few requests from my husband to join him in front of the TV.
When the original series started in 2003, my roommates at the time and I watched “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” — in which five gay men surprised a straight man and conducted a thorough style makeover — with a devotion that surprised even us. We didn’t just laugh along with Carson, Thom, Kyan and Ted, we picked up a few tips. (Oh, Jai. No one knew what you were there for.)
The more I watched the original show, however, the less I could ignore my discomfort with its premise. When I finally started in on the new series, billed as even more tender and transformational, the “Straight Guy”-less update didn’t offer much in the way of redress.
I didn’t care about the way the story lines could seem so neat. As anyone who has treated a massive hangover with HGTV remodeling shows, there is nothing so soothing as a 30-minute transformation. Those brand placements whip by so fast when your head is hurting that you barely notice.
My problem with “Queer Eyes,” both the original and the reboot, was that the format is built around every stereotype out there of gay men. I’m not talking about flamboyance. Hairdresser Jonathan Van Ness, of the hair buns and the yaas queens, has a gift I hold in awe, having seen it in a few friends: an uncompromising, extroverted feyness that can sweep up anyone, from 5-year-old girls to 60-year-old auto collectors, in delight. (If you were put off by Jonathan’s over-the-topness, watch his brilliant “Gay of Thrones” recaps on Funny or Die.)
What I hate most about “Queer Eye” is that a show that supposedly stars gay men makes us the lovable helpers, never the heroes of our own story.
There’s nothing revolutionary about having gay men teach you how to moisturize or pick out patterned shirts. It’s straight America’s fondest fantasy of us. We swoop in — we always swoop — and we say catty things and we work our faerie magic. Then, most importantly, we leave before we can start teaching your preschool kids how to read or order a wedding cake at your supermarket counter. The Fab Five’s easily digested queer culture is denuded of its righteous anger, not to mention
our lesbian, bi, trans and genderqueer compatriots, silenced yet again.
To my mind, the most radical role on the new show is played by Karamo Brown, the “culture” gay. With his social work background and emotional IQ of 1,400, Brown could dive into the men’s deep-seated motivations for being stuck in their baggy-panthoarder-living-room lives. And the heroes, just as radically, seemed to let him in.
The more episodes I saw, the more I appreciated the way “Queer Eye 2” diverged from the original show — specifically the radical empathy that the directors, and their five stars, brought to the show’s subjects. “Queer Eye 2” exhibits the same kind of clear-sighted affection that is the best part of queer friendships, combined with a willingness to look beyond America’s political divides that is refreshing after eight hours of scanning Twitter at the office.
Watching the Five teach Tom (episode 1) to use a green stick to reduce the redness in his lupus-swollen face, or have a seemingly direct conversation to Bobby (episode 5) about how his faith shaped his views on homosexuality, I could see why so many people I knew fell for the show.
It was amazing how the television cameras could make Red State spaces feel so safe for such extremely gay men. I caught myself flinching as Jonathan or Tan touched their subjects’ faces or shoulders, waiting for the straight guys to freak, but they never seemed to dodge away or avert their eyes. The cameras made the gay men’s compliments seem so chaste, so unthreatening. Has the world really changed? Or was this the Gay Agenda at work?
A decade ago, when talking about “Queer Eye” with friends, I’d always holler at some
point, “When do I get my own Fab Five?” As a gay guy who never spent enough on clothes and had a one-product hair-care routine, I’d watch the show and wonder: Could I become a different person if five stylists remade my life over the course of a week?
And so I watched the new series with the same mix of frustration and respect until the episode starring AJ. Secretly hot and secretly homosexual, AJ needed help with his apartment and with coming out to his stepmother.
The conversations that Karamo and AJ had about the pressures of being a black gay man, the surprise discovery of his leather harness and jokes about kink, and the way the Fab Five encircled him with support over introducing his boyfriend to his family — they felt like real conversations that gay men have among ourselves. It was the kind of mentoring we give one another, from one hero to another, outside the gaze of mainstream television.
I have never seen anything so true on reality TV as the moment AJ built up the courage to tell his stepmother he was gay. The way he sobbed through that conversation — a decade of pent-up self-torture, gushing out of him — was so raw, so wrenching, that I could only hope it could finally illuminate to viewers just how much strength it takes a man like Jonathan to shantay through a Target in rural Georgia, hands atwirl above his head.
Like the rest of the country, apparently, I cried along with him.