[Article] It's a queer thing - we can't get enough of it

ixoy

From the Sunday Times:

The British version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is no match for the warmth and fun of the US original, writes Bryan Appleyard



Evolutionary theory has always had a problem with homosexuality. Assuming it has a genetic component, why does it persist? Homosexuals tend not to reproduce — the “gay gene”, therefore, should rapidly be eliminated from the population. Well, Charles Darwin can at last rest easy in his grave for now we know the answer. Homosexuals exist to ensure that heterosexual males scrape their tongues.
Last Thursday the UK version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy began on Living TV. Five happily mincing gays instructed one Terry Frisby, a 31-year-old, poker-playing, office furniture-selling lummox, on how to live his life.



Aside from getting the hair, clothes, flat, food and culture right, a daily tongue scrape with a special plastic implement turned out to be de rigueur. The show ended with clean-tongued Terry ushering out the camera crew to get down to some, we were led to believe, hot lurv with his girlfriend. Assuming, that is, he could get her to stop giggling.

For the hopelessly uncool among you, I should explain that QESG began as an American show that both redeemed and revived the tired and largely repellent television makeover show format. Five very gay guys, each with an expertise, move in on the life of a straight guy and turn it upside down, improving his looks, his home’s interior design, cooking, manners and anything else they can lay their hands on.

The five guys in question — notably the inimitably outrageous Carson Kressley — have become as vivid and recognisable as the four girls in Sex and the City. If you want to know which one is for you go to quizilla.com, answer the questions and you’ll find out. I was slightly disappointed to get Ted, the food and wine connoisseur.

The QESG makeovers are intimate and total. Cupboards and drawers are opened to reveal horrors of squalor and bad taste. The team improve their target’s walls, shopping, underwear and hair and involve relationship counsellors. In the US show one muscle-bound hunk was shown in great detail how to read female body language. The role of the gay here is to act as interpreter, as sexual middle man. Or he may act as therapist.

Much straight failure with women is seen as inhibition and failure to understand that women like hearing the same thing over and over again. And so the gay guys tell their targets to say “I love you” as often as possible. One Greek mama was overcome with tears at the spectacle of her softened and smartened madeover boy. At the sight of her, the gays, of course, melted into one collective puddle.

What most obviously distinguishes this from almost all other makeover shows is that it’s funny and nice. The five US guys are a collective masterpiece of the high gay life. Preening, pouting, shopping, mincing and wincing but, above all, reeling back in horror at the straight male lifestyle, they redefine “camp” for our time. But it is their sheer warmth that makes the show a success. They really seem to want to help their targets and genuinely appear overcome with excitement when they succeed. If there is still such a thing as a gay cause, then this show has advanced it by decades.

The UK show replicates the formula almost exactly and, as a result, doesn’t quite work. British people have irony, they don’t respond well to warmth and get self-conscious about acting up for the camera. A few genuinely bitchy moments would have properly domesticated the formula. The British gays and their targets look as if they are acting the parts; the Americans are living it, they are sincere.

I suspect the fans will still conclude that their favourite queen is American. The addition of a dog, Lulu, however, is an inspired touch. Dachshunds are the gay dogs of the moment. I know a gay couple in New York who just got a second because one didn’t make them look quite gay enough.

But the big question is: what on earth is going on here? Plainly two very broad stereotypes are involved — the slim gay “exquisite” who cares passionately and with immense erudition about “lifestyle” and the straight slob who cares little and knows less about his skin, his hair, his food and his decor. Not all gays and straights are like that, but the distinction is true enough to most people’s experience to be convincing.

“We are going to show you,” says Kressley, “the Way of the Gay.” And we all know at once exactly what he means.

Of course, stereotypically, women tend to share the gays’ lifestyle concerns. But five women doing this show wouldn’t be funny because the embarrassment of the straight guy at being manhandled, as it were, by all these gays is a key component of the joke. But, more interestingly, women wouldn’t work because we know that making straight men socially graceful is something they persistently fail to do.

This horrifies the gay man. At one inspired moment in the US show, Kressley mimics the pathetic aspirations of women: “I like long walks on the beach, leopard-print bikinis and squalor.”

Of course, it is not quite fair to say that women always fail to civilise men. It is certainly true that the bedrooms of teenage males mysteriously stop smelling when they get a girlfriend. But that’s about as far as it goes.

Men persist in being slobs, especially once they have got past the pursuit phase of sexuality and settled down. Female disgust and dismay at male habits is an eternal commonplace of social interaction. This, of course, is combined with a grim resignation to the fact that the average male is incapable of acting romantically. Even in the pursuit phase he is, unless he’s Italian, a complete klutz. To be anything else, of course, risks the charge from his mates that he is a closet gay.

The point about the five gays is that romance is their raison d’être. The point, the climax, of all their social wisdom is the possibility of great, world-transforming sex. The tongue scraping, the making of canapes, the rearranging furniture, the art . . . they are all merely foreplay. But, then again, “merely foreplay” is not quite the right phrase here. For they are, in fact, the act itself. The gays seem intent on making mere orgasm just one part of a total sexualisation or romanticisation of life. This is exactly the opposite of the wham-bam-thank-you-mam stereotype of the male straight.

Women want it but they don’t get it, which is why every woman I know watches this show with hopeless, not to say deranged, fascination. “Look, look!” they are saying, “this is how it should be done!” They are even more fascinated by the fact that men are doing it. The heterosexual woman’s love of the homosexual man — vulgarised as the “fag hag” mentality — is a persistent fact of life because the gay offers a fantasy of fulfilment, a woman in a man’s body.

I should say at once that these are merely the broad undercurrents that make a simple television show work. There are plenty of wham-bam-thank-you-man gays, plenty of women who like hard, perfunctory sex without the embroidery and plenty of sensitive, romantic straight guys. There are also Italian men, who are indoctrinated with the ideology of total romance from birth. But the show is definitely in accord with one general and undeniable aspiration that lies deep within human nature. Sex should ideally be the coming together of romance and rapacity, the former softening and civilising the latter.

For the role of woman is to civilise man. In those terms the gay man of the QESG type is the supreme triumph of woman.

He is civilised right down to his perfectly manicured fingernails. Of course, his flaw is that he is unavailable sexually. His evolutionary role therefore is to enable the woman to civilise her heterosexual partner because the lummox will take from a gay man what he won’t take from a straight woman. The gay gene persists because its stake in the future is the successful and civilised reproduction of others.

Or not. The less ambitious insight into this show is that it marks a moment at which a certain idea of gayness has come of age socially.

Kressley and his pals are exactly the same types as Julian and Sandy, the preening queens played respectively by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams in the Round the Horne radio show in the 1960s. But the point about Julian and Sandy was that it was not admitted they were gay and they lapsed periodically into Polari, the gay slang deployed as concealment in the days when homosexual acts were illegal. Julian and Sandy were not, in today’s terms, “out” and, funny as they were, the joke depended on them remaining that way.

But Kressley, Lulu and friends are “out” big time. Their gayness is as visible and bright as the sun. The irony turns out to be that, now they are no longer outlawed and in the closet, they turn out to be salutary emblems of domesticity and civilisation to the straight world. And that, as the straight guys would say, is a result.

moridin

Nice article.

I like the way that he portrays the guys from QE, and for the most part I'd agree... tbh I can't imagine them lurking in gaydar chatrooms or cruising about the place. If only the gay scene in general was as idyllic as it's portrayed in the show

I didn't manage to catch the UK version last week... anyone else see it?

AFAIK it took a while for the US version to find it's feet so I'd assume the same thing of the UK series... give it a chance?

ixoy

The guys do seem to have a bit of heart alright. It's nice to see their enthusiasm and not feel it's the typical slimy feigned joy of your average television presenter.
As to the show gaining an audience here - there's a smaller audience for it, for one thing. Being stuck on a cable channel doesn't help so maybe us non-digital folk will see it crop up elsewhere. However, the points made are generally attributable as a culturual thing, which is harder to shift. The forerunner of this show, Brian's Boyfriends (which aired on ITV) normally had either irate or severely embarassed people for a makeover. They never really got into the game the same way the Americans do and that makes for poorer viewing.

MarcusGarvey

So, in essence it takes a gay guy to show a straight guy how to be a real man ?

ixoy

Originally posted by MarcusGarvey
So, in essence it takes a gay guy to show a straight guy how to be a real man ?

Didja read the article in full? Firstly, the writer consistently acknowledges he's making broad statements. Secondly, he qualifies himself too:

I should say at once that these are merely the broad undercurrents that make a simple television show work. There are plenty of wham-bam-thank-you-man gays, plenty of women who like hard, perfunctory sex without the embroidery and plenty of sensitive, romantic straight guys.

The show, as the article says, just takes broad trends, on what people think, and works successfully with them. It's not meant to denigrate anyone.

MarcusGarvey

Originally posted by seamus

Seems like a show that would be watched only be women and gay men anyway á la Sex and the City.

South Park ?

How did you come to that conclusion about Queer Eye ? The majority of straight guys put their name forward to be on the show not their gf's. Got a demographic on the audience that watches it ?

seamus

Originally posted by MarcusGarvey
How did you come to that conclusion about Queer Eye ? The majority of straight guys put their name forward to be on the show not their gf's. Got a demographic on the audience that watches it ?

I'm an early twenties, white, straight, middle-class male. I am the embodiment of the average male demographic. And I wouldn't be interested in this show in the slightest.

There are a lot of people out there who will do anything to get on TV. Particularly in the USA

ixoy

Well there's also the fact that contestants get a free makeover, free items of furniture, etc. There's something more than just television exposure. And the makeovers are, to be fair, pretty good and always an improvement on the original slovenly individual.

I originally took offence at this show and it's presumptious stereotypical attitudes but, in all fairness, it's a bit of light amusement that does no real harm and can, potentially, do some good. Plus it was a great source of material for that South Park episode

MarcusGarvey

Originally posted by seamus
I'm an early twenties, white, straight, middle-class male. I am the embodiment of the average male demographic.

Then why does this forum interest you and why are you posting here ? Surely your demographic would show you haven't the slightest interest in this forum or the queer topics contained in it ?

seamus

Originally posted by MarcusGarvey
Then why does this forum interest you and why are you posting here ? Surely your demographic would show you haven't the slightest interest in this forum or the queer topics contained in it ?

You can't say why something does or does not interest you, it just does

Twyford

Im gay, i have ntl and frankly i find that show to teeter somewhere between intensely irritating to dalm offence. The idea that gay people are puppy walking, cologne conscious hedonists is a misconception and its peddled on queer eye to appeal to distressed women's idea's of an ideal male.
Its not me, or a lotta other gay people i know who are sensitive about their relations with the "straight community" and dont want to confine their social relations to fag hags and other gay people. Who are these to monopolies "the way to be gay"?

TCamen

I found the article to quite entertaining, and a lot more balanced that I would've expected. Still the reporter definitely seems to think the gay scene (through the Fab Five) is wonderful, which is a little off the mark with regards Dublin at the least

As for the show itself, I've seen 15 episodes or so. It's funny, entertaining, and the makeovers actually do change the guys' lives for the better. It's hard to believe at first that the Fab Five do have the impact they do, but they seem to effect change with these hopeless straight men.
I don't find it offensive as a gay man that there are these effeminate guys on TV, cos they clearly love their jobs and can ya really blame them? Getting to shop, cook and preen themselves while steeping in culture at every turn. Sounds like heaven to me. Lucky 'mos! Let the bitchy backlash begin.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy will be starting on Channel 4 in June, on Fridays apparently, with Living continuing with the UK version on Thursday for a while before going back to the (superior) US one.

Twyford

Sure the fab 5 are having a ball touting tips to troglodytes on the how to be super oh my god fab-gorgeoustastic, but this show has serious take the piss potential. When it hits channel 4, twill be a veritable slagging treasure trove to the less conscientious among my mates. L

MarcusGarvey

You mean some less enlightened people might somehow assume all gay men are like those on Queer Eye and so your mates will mock you ? My god, you're right, it should be banned because someone might take the piss out of you. Get a sense of humour.

If you are bothered by mates slagging you about this harmless show, how are you going to handle the ignorant masses who seem to think gay men are hiv carrying paedophiles ? (Yes stupid people like this do exist)

BuffyBot

My god, you're right, it should be banned because someone might take the piss out of you. Get a sense of humour.

Well said.

I do hate it when we take these kinds of shows so seriously. If we're not careful, people might begin to think we're dour and humourless and slag us about that!

Twyford

Right so - lets increase awareness of the growing immigrant community by giving Gumba, a the loud mouthed, aids riddled Nigerian insurance fraudster, a slot on Fair City.
Many people im in contact with (im a part time security guard) are just as susceptible to that stereotype, as they are averse to the outrageous representation of the gay scene depicted in queer eye - Julian Cleary, Graham Norton, Brian from Big brother have reinforced this view enough. I don’t feel any particular desire to pander to these people (work mates), but I think its time gay character portrayal matured, and I (we?) didnt have some wild interpretation of my sexuality lampooned on the screens for sniggering ****heads to draw comparisons with.