August 29, 2003

August 29, 2003

THE GAY TAIL WAGS THE AMERICAN DOG

These days it is the gay tail that wags the American dog. In the sixties it was the Black tail that wagged the dog. Black injustice, Black pride, Black esteem, Black History Month, Kwanza, major TV productions about slaves made to seem interminable by their monumental earnestness, heavy-handed sermonizing, and pious heroes.

Then in the eighties the feminist tail began to wag the dog. Women’s injustice, women’s abuse, women’s discrimination, women’s pride, women’s self-esteem, female political correctness, the glass ceiling, women in the army, women in combat, equality, equality, equality.

Both of these transforming trends have attenuated slightly in the recent past, having resulted in many changes in the society—some good and perhaps some not so good. Now the tail wagging the dog is gayness.

Of course homosexuals began their crusade in earnest in 1969, but AIDS cast a dark cloud over their emancipatory momentum for a long time. Now they are back with a full and advanced agenda. You can’t open your morning paper without some headline that refers to a gay issue. Gay priests, gay marriage, sodomy laws, gay plays, gay movies, and now a spate of new TV programs featuring gay issues—Grace and Will, Boy meets Boy, and the new universally popular Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

The last has become so popular that Bravo has a new one-hour episode each week plus nine or ten replays a week at various times. This is clearly not a New York City phenom or even a bi-coastal thing. It seems to have captured the interest of much of America. What’s it all about?

Bravo has recruited five gay men—the Fab Five, Bravo calls them—who they say are experts in fashion, food, interior design, grooming, and relationships. “Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories….

”It's a full lifestyle make-over — a make better show where straight guys turn in their pleats for flat fronts, learn about wines that don’t come in a jug and come to understand why hand soap is not a good shampoo (and vice versa). When the journey is done, a freshly scrubbed, newly enlightened, ultra hip man emerges.

”The series was created by David Collins, a gay man, and developed by David Metzler, a straight man — a union of sensibilities that gives the show its depth, humor and edge.”

It takes only a brief glimpse of the show to see what makes it so popular. First of all, the five gay guys are charming, handsome, clever, and hip. They’re funny too, the way gays are funny when they’re in a gathering—mirthful and sparking off one another—and they’re disarming in their occasional self-mockery. There is one who’s the standout—the fashion expert, blond and a bit bitchy. The others seem fungible and it might take two or three episodes to get them straight. But the most important thing is that, despite their mockery and criticism of their helpee straight guy, there is an overall spirit of warmth and sincerity—they really like the straight guy who needs straightening out.

And that is because—other reasons aside—the straight guys are social basket cases. Somehow, most of their client/patients got stuck in early adolescence and never got past it. One, an artist, has not had a haircut in nine years; another, a wannabe musician, has to be taught how to shave. They don’t know how to look a little spiffy. They live in pigstys, their lives are lonely, constricted, and needless to say socially inhibited. They’re neither stupid nor crazy, but characters who’ve escaped from the world of Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. They’re sweet shlepps who need to be tutored in the basic aspects of being grown up.

Each episode is light, fast-moving, and has funny scenes in which the gay team attempts to drag their straight guy into adulthood and self-respect. There is always some event that challenges the gay guys’ imagination: the artist has to look and act attractive at the opening of his art show; or the straight guy wants to ask his girlfriend to live with him. Naturally, the gays’ tutoring pays off and the straight guy wins the challenge. In the process he may learn how to make a quiche for his girl friend, or get a pedicure so he can appear a little more attractive, or how to fix up his apartment so a girl would not feel repelled by the idea of living with him, or how to be courtly to a woman.

In short, the gay team manages to effect changes in the lives of these poor shlepps in a few days that my psychoanalytic colleagues might take years to accomplish. The question is what happens when the Fab Five moves on, and Bravo & Co. stop cleaning up and redecorating his apartment and the dishes begin to build up in the sink again, and he forgets to be nice to his girlfriend, and his toenails get long again? We’ll never know, but every week America can relive the Pygmalion fantasy with a new shlepper. And every week the adolescent part that still resides in every straight guy can enjoy, in some small measure, the fantasy of hope and redemption—that someday he will outgrow the urge to scratch his crotch in public, or pick his nose, or let his dirty laundry pile up, or be inconsiderate to the ones he loves without penalty. Or that some team of gay guys will come along and make it happen by magic, or better yet some beautiful woman will come along and make it happen the way it used to.

The truth is that it’s always highly pleasurable to watch a make-over, whether it’s This Old House or My Fair Lady, and no less so in Queer Eyes for Straight Guys. That’s one of the reasons it has become so popular. It reinforces the infantile fantasy of magical redemption.

So what’s wrong with that?

Not a thing. But that is not all that’s going on on Bravo ten hours every week.

What’s the subtext here? Ask yourself why the team of five helper-experts have to be gay? And the helpee straight?

Why can’t the helpers be a team of charming, attractive straight men and women, or a mixed team of both straight and gay? And why can’t the helpees be female or gay as well as straight and male—there are certainly enough candidates in all categories that need makeovers.

The answer is that the unspoken agenda is gay propaganda, spin, sensitivity training, or PR. The message is “Gay guys may be a little abnormal, but they’re smart, attractive, helpful, funny people who are a pleasure to have around. And straight men are nice but impotent, pathetic, clueless, and badly need help in the real world.”

Previous attempts at getting straight people to accept gays have focused on the abuse and discrimination they have suffered. See how we have suffered, we victims of your oppression. Accept us now and love us for what we have suffered. Gay movies and plays have mined this theme over the past twenty-five or thirty years until now it is an empty cliché.

A new century, a new approach. The Media, which is the natural turf of homosexuality, a world in which gay men and women are powerfully influential, has changed the spin from We are victims to We are practically normal, and even if we are a little kookie, we’re no more abnormal than you are, and besides, we’re irresistible and an asset in any social situation.

And if Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is an example of the new gay spin, it works. Even though each episode ends with the helpee at least temporarily feeling that he has been helped and has achieved something, the viewer can’t help comparing the pathetically drab, inert, lower-middle-class social world of the helpee with the bubbly, sophisticated, smart, apparently limitless world of the five gay men. We’re sorry to see them fade out at the end and make a mental note to catch them again next week.

But for all its popularity and fun Queer Eye for the Straight Guy gives a marvelous unwitting glimpse into the mind of gay men. Take a recent episode. George K. is a 27-year-old man who lives close to his mother in Astoria, Queens. She has furnished his little apartment (the way she did her own), cooks his meals, and looks after him the way she has since he was born. He is the center of her life and vice versa.

He is a body builder and has a job as a personal trainer. Although he has a vague dream about someday having his own gym business, he spends most of his time building his own body and talking about body building with others. He has no idea what is involved in creating his own gym business, nor does he spend any energy in finding out.

He has a kind of stunted interest in women; he says that he’d like to have a social life and girl friend but his behavior suggests that his main emotional interest besides his body is his mother and her interest in his care.

He has let his hair grow down to his shoulderblades and bleaches it blond, believing that it makes him look like Jon Bon Jovi. He loves to gaze at himself in the mirror and so has twelve mirrors in his small apartment.

In summary he gives the impression of a nice boy who is caught in a very gluey relationship with his mom and who will never become independent of her unless some earthquake happens in his life.

The Fab Five gay team and their bosses at Bravo have decided that one size fits all: that there is one set of values that cures their straight clients—developing their feminine side. This is achieved by encouraging their nest-building instincts (interior decorating), stimulating their body-narcissism (skin creams, hair dressing, pedicures, tanning, sexually attractive clothes), food preparation and feeding your loved ones, and teaching them to express and become more sensitive to the feelings of their love-objects.

These arts are, of course, those at which many women, through nature and nurture, excel, and in which many men are deficient or disinclined to learn. And it is this very curriculum—the feminization (some would call it the civilization) of men that has been tops on the cultural agenda of America for the last thirty years thanks to the American feminist movement.

The tendency in contemporary culture to tame or feminize men is only one side of the coin of cultural androgyny. The other side is, of course, the masculinization of women which goes on at the same advanced pace.

For poor George K., of course, it doesn’t really matter very much. He is so locked in an inseparable embrace with his mother that a few more lessons on how to be more feminine won’t change much.

For the rest of us more or less straight guys who know enough to get a haircut once in a while, and to chose a nice bottle of wine when we take our women to dinner, and to make enough money to give them a gold watch every now and then instead of rippling our muscles at them—for the rest of us Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is just some more writing on the wall, another penny in the piggy-bank of androgyny.