schmiggens
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Registered: Apr 2003
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Pride, patriotism, and Queer Eye
The nation has changed quite a bit since Queer Eye for the Straight Guy debuted last summer. The Fab 5 talk about their role in the gay rights revolution—and how the show has affected their love lives
By Adam B. Vary
Excerpted from The Advocate, June 22, 2004
"It’s not that he was wearing stuff that was, you know, overtly tragic. It’s just, like most guys, he wasn’t putting any thought into it. He just wore lumpy, oversize, baggy sweatshirts and stuff. He didn’t like shopping; his apartment was filthy.” To hear Ted Allen tell it, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s latest makeover subject sounds much like the 23 straight guys who came before him in the show’s blockbuster first season. Save for one particular detail. “I kept grabbing him by the shoulders,” Ted says with a laugh, “and saying, ‘Wayne, for the love of God, you’re supposed to be gay!’”
That’s right—get ready for Queer Eye for the Gay Guy. For one week in May, the cast descended on the life of Wayne, a gay man living in New York City who was stuck in a rut from a breakup and quite keen for Ted, Carson, Jai, Kyan, and Thom to help him break out of it. “One of our own was in trouble, so we had to come to the rescue,” explains Carson.
“It was so fun,” beams Kyan. “A lot of the times with straight guys, you have to sort of talk them into it, explain why it’s good for them. With Wayne, he was so willing and open and ready and eager. That made it really fun for us.”
As the show begins its second full season (new episodes started airing June 1), Queer Eye really has come full circle. Since its July 2003 debut, using an arsenal of “sofa pillows and shaving cream and boot-cut jeans” (as Thom puts it), this hour-long makeover show has “living rooms across America—including Middle America and the Bible Belt—laughing along with five people they consider friends who just happen to be gay” (to quote Jai), and the now-famous Fab 5 have done so by simply helping two dozen straight men help themselves.
And that’s only in front of the cameras. Who knows how many hetero guys from among Queer Eye’s 1.8 million weekly viewers are suddenly rolling their own pasta or springing for salsa lessons?
In the past 12 months Queer Eye and its seemingly ubiquitous stars have come to represent an extraordinary nexus of countless pop-culture portrayals and landmark social advances gays and lesbians have enjoyed over the past several years. And they have accomplished this without making an overt political “statement.” Simply by being themselves—openly gay men who are commanding, funny, whip-smart, and disarmingly personable—they are shedding light on the subject of gayness for the nation to see.
The Fab 5 emphatically state that they never set out to be the poster boys for gay equality. Far from it. To a man, Ted Allen (the food guy), Kyan Douglas (the grooming guy), Thom Filicia (the design guy), Carson Kressley (the fashion guy), and Jai Rodriguez (the culture guy) as well as the show’s out creator, David Collins, all insist that Queer Eye does not have any agenda, nor has it ever, beyond entertaining its viewers every Tuesday at 10 p.m.
“I certainly don’t wake up thinking that I’m going to be political,” Thom says. “The forum that we work in is not a political forum; it’s an entertainment forum. I think that we have to make sure that we keep that focus.”
But are they turning back time on the gay world? Some of the show’s detractors have argued that straight America likes the Fab 5 because they conform to long-standing stereotypes of the urban, effeminate, style-conscious, and superficial gay man. But it’s an assertion they all vigorously reject.
“We’re proud of who we are,” argues Carson. “As you see us on the show, you’re seeing us as we really are in our everyday lives.”
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06-08-2004 08:27 AM
