What's Comes After Queer Eye?

"Queer Eye" allowed America to congratulate itself for including gay men in mainstream media as America's premier fixer-uppers. Since they were not lobbying congress for the right to marry each other, or overturning anti-sodomy laws, and they were just vacuuming rugs and arranging flowers, they were not viewed as a great threat to the Family Values fundamentalists. They weren't adopting children or introducing kids to crystal meth. They were beautifying and improving the lives of straight people!

The show's pseudo-radical premise; that gay men might actually know more about a few things than straight people, was de-radicalized because the power relations between the straights and the gays remained the same (at least initially, before gays were also "made-over") on the show. The gays had to prove their worth in style, dialect, cooking ability...while the straights did nothing but laugh and wonder at the amazement of it all. The show seemed to want to allow equal rights to gays based on their functionality; there were ways they could help society move forward because of their keen eye for fashion, party organizing and social tact.

In the long shadow cast by Queer Eye, gay men are once again put into the position of having to prove their worth to heterosexuals in stereotypically homosexual and subservient ways. The mainstream media have yet to deploy any slobby, untactful, normal, non-uppity, non-superhero type gay men for use in TV sitcoms (the closest we get are Sarah Silverman's sensitive stoner gay neighbors who she consistently ironically ridicules for being gay). In Brokeback Mountain, the masculinized gay men break-up, and one gets killed. The message to gay teenagers is clear; find a functional place for yourself within society that embraces stereotypical notions of gay skills, or risk social, political isolation and possibly death.