With Mardi Gras at our doorsteps and gays flocking to Sydney's LGBT heartland, it's the perfect time to reminisce on queer culture past and present. Straight-man makeovers, anyone?
Keen to bank off our apparently irrepressible appetite for resuscitating TV shows from the '00s, Netflix last month announced the return of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, ordering a new series comprising eight episodes.
As a gay man, you might think I'd be excited. In fact, I'm anything but.
Between 2003 and 2007, Queer Eye aired on the Bravo network. The premise was simple: Five outwardly homosexual men – known as the Fab Five – gloriously invaded the worlds of heterosexual civilians, revamping their lives, their outfits and their homes, in an effort to impress their partners, families and friends.
There was Ted Allen, the food-and-wine expert; Kyan Douglas, the "grooming guru"; Thom Filicia, interior designer; Carson Kressley, fierce fashionista, and Jai Rodriguez, culture and social savant. The show was beloved by audiences across the globe, winning 2 GLAAD awards and an Emmy. A new Fab Five, who will set alight the lives of a new range of hopeless hetero homebodies, will replace the original cast.
In a decade where television revivals are all the rage – see Gilmore Girls and the soon-to-be-reinvigorated Will & Grace – this comeback serves as no surprise. Yet despite being excited to see gay men returning to mainstream audiences in a popularised capacity, I find myself uncomfortable and questioning: Will the Netflix Queer Eye reboot adhere to modern times for a modern audience – or will it stay true to the original? And if so, is that actually a good thing?
I fear that this reboot won't be a cultural delight – rather GayLite™; a hollowed-out representation of homosexuality, for mainstream crowds who so often shriek, "Look at those fabulous queers!"
The original Queer Eye stands as what one might call a "museum piece" about gay culture; a reflection of the ways mainstream producers preferred to present homosexuals in order to avoid putting off the masses. The Fab Five – though delectable in so many ways – were caricatures of gay men by their very design, sanitised for straight people's consumption.
They were Queer Guys For Straight Eyes, and served merely to solidify the notion that gay men were limp-wristed queers who existed to glitter up your wardrobes and your lives. They represented the gay best friend and the flamboyant uncles who we all recognise in pop culture: those homosexual icons who reflected just enough gayness to be considered comically endearing, but never enough to make straight people uncomfortable.
Though we loved the Fab Five, we never knew them as anything other than our stylists, our hairdressers and our interior designers.
Gay men in the early 2000s were rarely ever depicted as sexual beings, and remained perpetually single. Any reflection of their love interests or sex lives was seen as too unconventional – or worse, degenerate – to exhibit to mainstream audiences. And those shows that did present homosexuals as three-dimensional humans – ones who loved, lusted and lived through crises faced by real-life gay people – were labelled "indie" or "underground", such as the forever-fantastic Queer As Folk.
Yet this is 2017: Gay is no longer a euphemism for flamboyant (or vice versa). And while fabulousness is certainly part of queer culture, it's only one side of a complex movement that continues to gain rights and strengths, while also enduring ongoing ordeals.
We finally have gay sex scenes being aired on television in shows like How To Get Away With Murder, with the same passionate ferocity as heterosexual lovemaking. We have LGBT culture and history depicted for not only its unfamiliar quirks, but for the struggles that we've faced throughout history. Uncomfortable queer topics are at last being broached – like coming out, living with HIV, and the struggle with being seen as inherently feminine in a man's world – in Emmy-winning shows like RuPaul's Drag Race.
These depictions of the "gay lifestyle" don't exist in the modern media as a slap in the face to homophobic audiences. They are present because gay people exist in your lives. These are our struggles and our stories, and after years of having them stifled for fear of sparking discomfort, we are finally having them told.
We have wept rivers of tears for fallen peers subjected to homophobic violence, and we've felt the hand of ostracism from broader society and bigoted governments. In 2017, these welts and bruises are finally on display for all to see – and we love you, our straight friends and families, for openly soothing our wounds.
When audiences cry out with excitement for the return of the Five and squeal, "This'll be so gay!" – know that the word means more than cultural queendom or a flair for hair.
If Netflix wishes to reboot the fabled Queer Eye, it should do so with caution, care, and concern for our history. It should make direct eye contact with its audience; aspire to lead them with not only a sartorial hand, but also one that expresses the nuances of gay culture.
The new Queer Eye must not merely represent our hairdressers, our stylists and our interior designers – it must represent our gay brothers, sisters and friends. And the new Fab Five must embody real-life gay men; thoughtful, independent, and shaped by shared queer struggle. Not cartoonish caricatures for mainstream consumption.
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