Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

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Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Photograph

By: Steve Azzara

Date: August 28, 2003

Source: This photograph is part of the collection of the Corbis Corporation, headquartered in Seattle, with a worldwide archive of over 70 million images.

About the Photographer: Steve Azzara is a professional photographer who has worked in a variety of modalities for nearly three decades. His photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and other print materials. He has produced a great deal of high fashion, modeling, and runway/ramp photography. He has also done photography for numerous book covers, CDs and other music media.

INTRODUCTION

"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" premiered on Bravo—the American cable channel—in 2003. The show features five gay men, who have been labeled the "Fab Five," each of whom has a specific talent, who "make over" many aspects of the life of a straight man—from hairstyle and wardrobe to home decor and dining tendencies. The show achieved nearly instant success, and was among the summer buzz topics across the television watching subculture, both in the United States and countries abroad that access television broadcasts from the United States. The original cast included purported experts in the areas of interior design and efficient organization of living spaces; food preparation, spirits and wine selection; fashion and clothing styling; skin and hair care and attendant products, personal hygiene, contemporary culture, interpersonal communication and relationships, and social behavior. Each episode generally revolved around a lifestyle re-do in preparation for some seminal life event such as a large-scale house party, an introduction to the parents of a future spouse, or a proposal of marriage.

In an era fraught with reality television series, the unique aspect of this show was its portrayal of exceedingly unapologetically openly gay men who appeared to comfortably camp and clown with heterosexual men, while materially aiding them in the improvement of various aspects of their lives. One of the more poignant aspects of the show was the statements by the heterosexual subjects regarding commonalities they discovered with the "Fab Five," causing them to rethink their perceptions of cultural differences and feelings of homophobia. Interestingly, some of the most potent criticism of the show came from within the homosexual community, which raised concerns about generalized perceptions of gay men. A small cadre of non-homosexuals also critiqued what they termed the stereotypic presentation of heterosexual men as inept in the style and culture arenas. What has been particularly noteworthy about the program has been its wide and popular reception, both in the United States and elsewhere. There has been little conservative outcry, and the show has had a rather wide target audience. Several other countries attempted imitations of the series, few of which met with commercial success. As a result, the American series is broadcast and subtitled in many countries around the world.

PRIMARY SOURCE

QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

An interesting sidelight of the show's popularity has been the crossover of slang and colloquial vocabulary from a subculture to the mainstream of society. Many subcultures have within-group names that they have adopted from the larger society, as well as those they have invented for themselves, as a form of internal code, designed to insulate them from non-group members. As a group that has been routinely legislated against in nearly all parts of the world and has been, at various times in history, subject to harassment, arrest, and severe punishment (or death) simply for engaging in the mores and rituals associated with some aspects of the subculture (flamboyant behavior, obviously effeminate mannerisms and speech, engaging in same-sex affectionate behavior, etc.), it was deemed necessary by many members to create a safe distance in which to exist apart from mainstream cultures. The term "queer" has been somewhat politicized, and was used first by the GLBT communities to refer to a young radical group of GLBT people who were committed to being completely "out, loud, and proud" in society, using a self-styled confrontational presentation as a means of educating the public about what it means to be non-heterosexual in American society, which was considered by this group to be quite heterosexist in its belief system. Although much of contemporary slang is assumed to have originated in mainstream culture, a considerable amount of what has been termed queer language appears to have come from within the subculture itself.

There exists a mainstream social perception that there is a homogeneous culture among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. In fact, there are subcultures unique to each group, with one main unifying feature involving belonging to a sexual and cultural minority that lacks full civil rights in most contemporary societies. In smaller geographic areas, there may be no recognizable GLBT subculture, as individuals may be either too isolated or too scarce to develop a subgroup. In larger cities, there are often population pockets in which many GLBT people live and socialize. The subculture in one area may bear little or no resemblance to the way the GLBT subculture creates itself elsewhere: for example, the GLBT population in an area with a high density of Native American people will likely look quite different than that in a major urban area of the United States such as San Francisco or New York City.

Gay men appear to have crossed the cultural barriers to become a visible part of mainstream American culture in larger proportion than other segments of GLBT society. In part, that may be due to a percep-tion of visibility, or a belief by heterosexual America that gay men as a whole can be accurately represented by effeminate, flighty, promiscuous, lisping, flamboyant, or other stereotypic mannerisms and behaviors. It is an interesting sociological commentary that gay male culture is not only better known and understood (and, sometimes, more readily accepted) by mainstream society than that for other factions of the GLBT world, but is also better understood within non-heterosexual culture than is lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism. Many, many members of GLBT societies fit none of the alleged norms portrayed by the media and are simply individuals, as are members of any other cultural group. Nevertheless, many GLBT organizations hold that any positive visibility of GLBT people in mainstream society, no matter how edgy or tenuous, is better than none at all.