Queer Eye For The Straight Guy
Jesse Cohn
I’m starting to hear voices in my head. Five voices, to be precise. They follow me around through my daily routine, chastising me for the balled-up tube sock I have left on the bedroom floor, imploring me to go to a real hairdresser for a change (rather than the ten dollar trims I actually receive from barbers whom I usually tell to “just cut it real short”), lamenting the state of the kitchen (“Oh my gawd, it’s like a tornado hit here!”), commenting sarcastically on my appearance in the mirror (“I see we have kind of a retro look going on here – Early Dweeb”). I’ve been infected. I’ve been watching Queer Eye For the Straight Guy on Bravo.
I must admit that this show was tailor-made for guys like me – well, almost. Unlike the earnestly inept, unshaven guys who are routinely subjected to a whirlwind makeover by the gay “Fab Five” on the show – “an elite team of gay men dedicated to extolling the simple virtues of style, taste and class,” experts in fashion, grooming, interior decoration, culture, and food and wine – I actually do know my way around a kitchen. (I make a damn fine Red Coconut-Milk Chicken Curry.) However, I have always shared the faults for which these Straight Guys are lambasted, episode after episode, by Carson Kressley, Kyan Douglas, Thomas Licia, Jai Rodriguez, and Ted Allen: I am prone to mess and clutter, allergic to shopping malls, oblivious to fashion and décor, somewhat neglectful of my appearance, and almost incapable of throwing away a T-shirt until it has gotten completely ratty and full of holes, or – I must admit – until my wife makes me. If only I could summon five gay men to straighten me out (so to speak), to make the material odds and ends of my life more tidy and aesthetically attractive, to practice what that late gay icon, the philosopher Michel Foucault, once called “care of the self” . . . ah, if only. But this show is a pretty good substitute for the real thing. I really am starting to notice things I might not have noticed before, like the fact that my desk is covered with crap I could throw away. I ask myself what Carson would say about the state of my wardrobe, and accordingly find myself more willing to go shopping for clothes, to Darlene’s obvious delight. (Straight women are almost certainly the other primary audience for this show.)
Why should guys like me find ourselves watching – and listening to – a show calculated to make us feel awkward, self-conscious, and inadequate? In part because the campy energy and enthusiasm of the Fab Five make it addictive. Even as we feel pity for the object of their criticisms, we also get to enjoy their sardonic, finger-snapping repartée. And, of course, it’s fun to watch these bumbling Straight Guys get transformed into confident, slickly-dressed guys with living rooms that make women swoon. But beyond that, we keep watching because we feel that we are being let in on secrets – stuff we were never told. Women are drilled in the practical business of creating and maintaining appearances from girlhood as a matter of urgent social necessity. Boys get to skip these lessons; indeed, up to a certain point, for a boy to be caught paying too much attention to appearance is to risk being tagged as “queer.” (Confession: as a shy, skinny teenager, my strategy for surviving ninth grade was to wear the same outfit every day – baggy grey pants and untucked Oxford shirt – as if I hoped to blend into the locker-lined corridors and disappear altogether.) Unless guys do the necessary catch-up work to master the art of appearances, perhaps sometime between high school and college, we remain clueless.
Which is why I find myself in front of the TV, taking mental notes as Carson tells me that stripes and checks go together.
This is not to say that I’ve been totally sucked in. First
of all, quite aside from my Straight Guy instincts, I sometimes bristle at
the naked commercialism of the show, which sometimes looks like an extended
ad for companies like Dockers, Norelco, and Pottery Barn. The prescription for
looking and feeling awkward is unvarying: Buy a lot of stuff. There is
something awfully repetitive about the clean little living rooms Thomas designs
for these guys: they all look like photos from a catalogue, or like stage sets,
which I guess they are: this is yet another form of that oxymoron, Reality TV.
At times I’m uncomfortably reminded of the scene in the hyper-macho movie
Fight Club
in
which a somnambulistic Ed Norton wanders through his living room ordering IKEA
furniture over the phone, which mysteriously materializes in the air around him
as we watch, complete with little floating price tags. The dream homes of
Queer Eye For the Straight Guy are strangely close to Fight Club’s
consumerist nightmare. And I wonder if the ability to forget about appearances
isn’t a kind of freedom that I stand to lose: who knows how much time and energy
men have available for other things simply because, unlike their female
counterparts, no one expects them to be constantly in costume and on stage? In
fact, isn’t the kind of aesthetic control that women have to exercise over
themselves a form of internalized domination – the very “discipline” that
Foucault wrote about in his famous book Discipline and Punish?
Do I want these voices in my head? Maybe not . . .
Or maybe I’m just being paranoid. There is a real difference between the kind of soul-crushing conformism that makes twelve-year-old girls into bulimics and whatever is impelling this 30-year-old man to learn to match jackets with pants correctly for the first time. This is the qualitative difference between the complex behavioral performance called “femininity,” enacted by women every day of their lives, and the exaggeratedly theatrical, hyper-feminine performance enacted (to various degrees) by some gay men – the performance called “camp.” One is conformity to a social norm; the other is deviation from a norm. One has become so habitual, through social training, that it is second nature, impossible for the “performer” to shed at will; the other is (to some extent) still deliberately adopted, self-aware, even self-parodying – and therefore freely chosen. Gay camp is about freedom and the power of self-invention. It was only in recent history, circa 1825-1845, as the lesbian novelist Jeanette Winterson points out, that all the elements of decoration and fantasy went out of men’s clothing: eighteenth-century “embroidered waistcoats, lurid colors, topiary wigs, dashing cravats, pan-stick faces and ridiculous buckles and heels” vanish, only to be replaced by Victorian propriety, all stiff straight lines. This abolition of “play, pose and experiment” in favor of a cold masculine code of dress, Winterson argues, was typically Victorian, rigid and repressive. So maybe the advent of a show like Queer Eye For the Straight Guy is a sign that we men are at last getting back something we have lost: the freedom to play with our own appearances, to play dress-up.
Seen in this light, the show looks less like an experiment in mind control and more like lighthearted liberation. In fact, it seems like a more benevolent version of the “male revolt” of the 1950s charted by cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich in The Hearts of Men, a revolt epitomized by the appearance of Playboy magazine in 1953. The previously dominant model of masculinity, during the gritty hard times of the Depression and World War II, had been based on the male role as “breadwinner” for a family: one showed that one was a “man” by virtue of providing for a wife and kids. Marketers were limited in what they could sell this stolid, virtuous man-as-husband: once he had a decent home and a decent car, his consumer needs were met. Along came Playboy, which featured not only nude photos but articles decrying “the responsibilities of marriage” as boring – and lots of ads for luxury consumer goods such as “imported liquor, stereo sets, men’s colognes, luxury cars, and fine clothes.” Prior to this moment, a man who avoided marriage and indulged in these kinds of purchases would risk being tagged as “queer.” The centerfolds, Ehrenreich argues, were a kind of camouflage for the protection of male readers, advertising that “there was nothing queer about these urbane and indoor pleasures,” that one was “still within the bounds of heterosexuality.” Queer Eye For the Straight Guy offers a more relaxed (and honest) version of the same thing: it tells straight men, Look, you don’t have to choose between being masculine and looking good, between being straight and having beautiful things. There’s no contradiction. On this account, being “queer” doesn’t mean being exiled from the safe universe of “normality”; it means being hip, smart, and funny – just what women want.
And maybe I just want to look a little hipper. To be seen as smart and funny. To feel a little more confident. Don’t we all? Pass me the remote.