He’s the world’s most famous gay Muslim
Tan France, the British-born star of TV makeover show Queer Eye, tells Luke Mintz why he’s a traditionalist at heart
As a child, Tan France was terrified he would enrage God if he ever kissed another man. Raised in a strict Muslim family in Doncaster, he went to the mosque every day, socialising only with other Muslims, and was banned from watching Western films that encouraged “love marriages”. The word “gay” was never uttered in his house, so he feared from a young age that his sexuality would prove controversial.
He tells this story in his new autobiography, Naturally Tan, to give the reader a sense of how unlikely it was that, 25 years later, he would become the star of a globally successful Netflix series called Queer Eye, inspired by the Noughties version Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in which five gay men give a “whole-life makeover” to a stylistically challenged volunteer. France is responsible for revamping the wardrobes of the show’s guests, which is no longer limited to “straight guys”, having featured women, drag queens and trans men, too.
An emotionally reserved designer who has, by his own admission, never been particularly cool, the
series has transformed France into an international celebrity who now gets mobbed on the London Underground.
“My husband thinks it’s insane,” he tells me, speaking with a soft Yorkshire accent, intact after six years living in the United States (in Utah). “The amount of times he says to a person having a full-on freak-out: ‘It’s just Tan…’ I don’t think he’ll ever understand it.”
His popularity stems in part from being Queer Eye’s “bad cop”, routinely delivering damning verdicts on participants’ outfits; he recently told one that he was dressed “like a skater boy from 1995”. France is fond of advising that male participants own at least three pairs of jeans and never go near cargo trousers, and is credited with having coined the term “French tuck”, a simple, smart-casual styling trick that involves tucking-in one shirt front panel but leaving the back out.
By some metrics, France (born Tanveer Safdar), has drifted far from his South Yorkshire moorings. He swears by a grooming regime that involves using mouthwash 10 times a day, plus a homemade Greek yogurt face mask applied with a green tea bag.
But he insists that his upbringing instilled in him a small-c conservatism that he has retained to this day. He doesn’t drink or dance, and despises nightclubs. Except for his husband, he didn’t know any gay people until he joined the programme last year, differentiating him sharply from his co-stars, Jonathan Van Ness, Karamo Brown, Bobby Berk and Antoni Porowski, all of whom better fit the exuberant, “out and proud” mould that is now expected of gay men on TV.
France doesn’t appear particularly plugged into the world of “woke” LGBT politics, either. In one episode last year, the so-called “Fab Five” help a man who has undergone gender reassignment surgery, and an awkward France is shown asking which pronouns he should use.
“I definitely would say I’m slightly more conservative than anyone else on the show, especially coming from Utah. If I was living in one of the coastal states, where there’s a larger LGBT community, I think that I would have been in a different position.”
France’s traditional outlook has driven his fashion career. Too many young designers are desperate to become the next Alexander Mcqueen, he thinks, but ordinary people need clothes that make them happy, too. After studying fashion at Doncaster College, he spent years trying to break into the industry before eventually creating his own label, Kingdom & State, aimed at Mormon women.
“I wanted to create something that was more stylish, so the pieces would be cool, commercial clothes that just so happened to cover the parts of the body that Mormon women had to cover,” he writes in his book. The company also gave him more reason to emigrate to Salt Lake City, home to the world’s largest Mormon community. There, lived his long-distance boyfriend Rob, a nurse and former Mormon whose family ran a cowboy ranch, whom he first met on a work trip in 2008. They married in 2013, and now live together in Utah. France’s family did not attend his wedding but, he says, since the Queer Eye series began, have begun to acknowledge Rob by name.
His fashion ventures were a success, and by his mid-30s he was ready to sell-up and retire. But then Netflix came knocking, asking him to audition for Queer Eye. He was sceptical, but Rob persuaded him to give it a go.
At the audition, France and 41 other gay men descended on a Los Angeles hotel for a three-day “chemistry test”. He was something of a fish out of water: he refused the director’s request to “Americanise” when on camera, and struggled with some of the other auditionees, including Van Ness, the ultra-flamboyant grooming expert who went on to be his co-star. “He came up to me and started talking very loudly about his intimate life… he had so much personality. I didn’t think we would get along.” (They later became close friends.)
Once filming began, France initially struggled to keep up with the extroverted ways of his American castmates; at least one person cries in every episode, and phrases like “your journey” and “being your best self ” are used frequently. “I don’t share as much emotionally as the other cast. I’m very much British. My intonation, my inflections, may have changed, but I find that [Americans] are more emotionally in-tune with themselves. I’ve loosened up in the last two years, and at one point you see me cry in season three. That’s something I thought would never happen,” he says.
There is one topic that France is particularly loath to discuss: religion. Raised in a family with a “profound cultural connection” to Islam, France is arguably the most famous openly gay Muslim in the Western world. He says it “feels really powerful” to hold that accolade, but dislikes discussing his faith in any more depth. “I’m hyper-aware that when I speak, I don’t just speak for me,” he explains
‘Religion was something I never wanted to talk about, and still don’t’
in his book. “The press reminds me that everything I say becomes either the voice of the gay community or the voice of South Asian [or] Middle Eastern men. I was never going to be just Tan France, always ‘Tan France, the gay British Muslim’. Religion was something I never wanted to talk about and still don’t. That’s too personal a path.”
Indeed, a few weeks after our interview, the headlines are all about Parkfield Community School in Birmingham, where a predominantly Muslim group of parents launched a drawn-out protest against a series of lessons on gay equality. As a gay British Muslim, France is well-placed to pass comment… but he remains tight-lipped, his publicist telling me he “won’t have time” to discuss the issue.
Despite initial hiccups, France now seems to have found his Queer Eye groove. The fourth series, which is available to watch now, exhibits him at his best: reserved, unapologetically British, and comfortable in his own skin. “I don’t do slapstick, I don’t do over the top – I do snarky. I’m not American. Brits don’t love to be cheesy – and I’m not willing to be someone else.”