Queer Eye Was Never Revolutionary. But It Moved Us All the Same
Queer Eye’s Fab Five have uttered their final “Yaas queens.” The Netflix series’ 10th season, dropping Jan. 21, will be its last, wrapping up a nearly eight-year run. And it arrives with little fanfare.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The season, filmed in and around Washington, D.C., contains a scant five episodes, and it’s mostly business as usual: In each installment, the Fab Five meet a deserving “hero” to whom they apply their process. We learn about said hero’s life (culture expert Karamo Brown uses therapy-speak to draw out emotions), they learn a recipe (via food/wine guy Antoni Porowski), get a hair, makeup, and style makeover (Jonathan Van Ness and Tan France, respectively), and their living space is updated (care of Jeremiah Brent and previously, for eight seasons, Bobby Berk). Heartstrings are tugged as what appear to be hardworking, hard-loving individuals receive aesthetic and material upgrades. This time around, each episode ends with a different Fab Five member reflecting on the experience of participating in the show. Gratitude and happy tears abound, but watching, you might get the feeling that everybody—on screen and at home—is ready to move on.
There’s no shame there. As Netflix’s longest running reality series to date, Queer Eye’s staying power has been impressive, especially given that virtually the same format had already come and gone before it. For many interested in gay representation, the idea to reboot the Bravo show originally titled Queer Eye for the Straight Guy didn’t seem like the slam dunk it would turn out to be (in addition to nine season renewals, 12 Primetime Emmys and Rotten Tomatoes averages that rarely dipped below 90%). With its “experts” of varying bonafides, the show was predicated on the fallacy that gay men have innately superior taste (anyone with a Twitter account in 2018 could have surveyed the landscape and testified to the contrary). By emphasizing the sexuality of the Fab Five, but presenting them in an environment devoid of romance or sex, the show invoked the “gay uncle theory,” which posits that gay men’s benevolence (via nurturing and the sharing of resources) toward family members’ offspring allows the biological continuation of homosexuality.
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Placing this neutered characterization on screen also recalled the antiquated sissy stereotype, referred to as Hollywood’s “first gay stock character” in Vito Russo’s 1995 gay-representation doc The Celluloid Closet. The sissy occupied a place between masculinity and femininity and almost always existed in service of the surrounding straight characters as well as the predominately hetero audience, for whom the sissy was a reliable source of humor. If the original Queer Eye seemed retrograde in 2003, doing it all over again in 2018 was like warming over dust.
Impressively, the Fab Five made it werk, as they are wont to do. They triumphed over the stereotypes, establishing themselves not only as distinct personalities for the show but as stars woven into the fabric of pop culture. It wasn’t always smooth for them (Porowski was dragged for his over-reliance on avocado) and the decisions they made were sometimes curious (Van Ness came out as nonbinary timed to the release of a makeup line), but navigating life in public rarely occurs without complication. Even if their exact qualifications for their roles on the show were sometimes dubious (Brown has been quoted as referring to himself as a “licensed social worker,” which the Washington Post reported is not true), they exceeded at their main job: making good TV. They were effectively IRL advice columnists on assignment, swooping in to give their subjects a dollop of expiring attention, sending them on their way, and hoping for the best. As boisterous and legitimately funny as they could be, they were ultimately in service of not just their heroes but the show’s comfortingly repetitive format.
Revolution was never high on the Fab 5’s list of priorities, but the show did quietly counter those with contempt for queer people by presenting them onscreen as kind (to strangers and, maybe more importantly, each other, though their off-screen dynamics weren’t entirely devoid of drama). Queer Eye provided an extremely basic version of positive representation, which was nonetheless useful for a country that’s still riddled with bigotry. Queer history is muted on an institutional level, and in the name of anti-DEI efforts, which exist to uphold the straight white male status quo. Queer representation in pop culture matters, perhaps now more than ever as LGBTQ rights are under threat in greater society.
What Queer Eye provided was part of a balanced picture of queer people in media. But if it felt quaint when it premiered, it looks even more so when compared to the recent TV obsession Heated Rivalry, which asks its viewers to consider its characters’ internal, romantic, and sexual lives very, very closely. The upcoming film Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling as men in an intricate BDSM relationship, is similarly unflinching in its demands that its audience interface with the whole of its characters. And though the sexuality and flamboyance of the Fab Five was never in question, so much of what their aesthetic makeovers accomplished was to iron out eccentricities from their heroes, effectively de-queering them. Their goal was often to help these people fit in more, as opposed to enhancing elements of their appearance that stood out. In that respect, RuPaul’s Drag Race was always more evolved than Queer Eye in its very premise, which encourages its contestants to look and act as wild as their imagination will let them. When it comes to TV, Drag Race has always been at the vanguard of culture.
The final five episodes of Queer Eye are solid hours of entertainment, frequently funny and sometimes moving. The show could have continued in this way forever, but it’s understandable why it didn’t. Who knows how effective Queer Eye’s system ultimately was for its heroes, many of whom didn’t seem to have the economic means to continue living in the standard set by the Fab Five. Even so, most of them seemed to enjoy themselves, and they walked away with armfuls of new stuff. Ultimately, the goal each time was humble: Leave it better than you found it. If we apply that to the pop culture landscape as well, the Fab Five can walk away with pride.