Does It Really Just Take A Fairy?

Executive Director of PhillyGayCalendar

“Sometimes it just takes a fairy.” – Patrick Swayze, To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar

Last month the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy ended its four-year run on the Bravo TV cable network. For those not in tune with recent pop culture history, the premise of the program was to have five gay men, experts in fashion, styling, culture, and the like, perform a make-over (“make-better” as they’d call it) on a subject, usually a straight man, by updating his wardrobe, redecorate his house or apartment, and give him advice on grooming, food, culture, and sometimes even romance. When the show first went on the air back in 2003, there was a huge buzz about it. There was also some criticism that the show was making generalizations about sexual orientation by implying that gay men have better taste in fasion and style than straights.

Queer Eye turned out to be the culmination of movies and TV programs in the previous decade that featuring gay men that were willing to help other people out and take up the role as the “good fairy.” In the movie Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, three drag queens are trapped in a small town while their car is repaired and wind up saving a woman from her abusive husband and sprucing up the sleepy town in the process. There was Rupert Everett giving a scheming Juliet Roberts pratical advice along with doses of Dionne Warrick tunes in My Best Friend’s Wedding. Harvey Fierstein played Robin Williams’s gay brother and used his make-up skills to help with Williams’ disguise as Mrs. Doubtfire.

With the initial success of Queer Eye, Bravo started to look at additional makeover shows that played with gay-men-as-good-fairy images. First there was the spin-off Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, where three queens (and a lesbian thrown in the mix) do a makeover on a woman this time around. It only lasted several months. More recently there was Tim Gunn, the fashion maven and on-air mentor to the designers of Project Runway. He became such a favorite on that reality show that the network decided to feature him in a second show, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, where he and model Veronica Webb work on and improve the style and fashion of the female guests. The show is currently running although it has not been as enthusiasticly received as his previous program.

Gay men being seen as abriters of taste and style, which is then assimilated into the (heterosexual) mainstream, is nothing new at all. For over a century mainstream society have assigned gay men with those qualities; It just wasn’t always openly discussed even if it was tactfully recognized. The difference between the Queer Eye crew and, say, their 1950’s counterparts, is that the former spells out explicitly the influnce of gay sensibility onto straights. The fact those QE guys can do that is the end result of the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement insisting upon the relevance of gay culture and demanding that the mainstream recognize that influence.

Why do some gay men opt for that image of the “good fairy” fixer-upper? Maybe they see it as a way to achieve some form of upward mobility within the existing social structure. Maybe because they feel that if they help out other people almost to the point of pushing their own needs aside, it will help convince straight people that gay men (and lesbians) are derseving to be treated as equals. Anderw Sullivan, in his book Virtually Normal, argues that since most gay relarionships result in having no biological children, he suggests that gay men can transfer those parental instincts into onto other roles: “They can be extraordinary teachers and mentors, nurses and doctors, priests, rabbis and nuns; they can throw themselves into charity work…or they can use all their spare time to forge an excellence in their field of work that is sometimes unavailible to the harried mother or burdened father. They can stay late in the office, be the most loyal staffer in an election campaign, work around the clock in a journalistic production, be the lawyer most able and willing to meet the emerging deadline.”

“Gay men have always been sort of caretakers in some way because we have to fend for ourselves and rely on ourselves more often, so we try to make things nicer for others since no one made things nice for us,” says The Divine Ms. Jimmi, troupe member of The Dumpsta’ Players and drag performer. He also said that in a sex-phobic society that often treats gay male sexuality like a loaded gun, the “good fairy” is an image deemed palpable for the American mainstream media. “They want him sort of de-sexed and almost genderless so he can be rendered less of a threat. I think we saw that Hollywood had a problem acknowledging Brokeback Mountain because it was the first movie to really concentrate on gay love and gay sex. These men weren’t going around being cute and harmless gay men. Their lives were messy, real and complicated. It made society face the fact that two men could feel sexual love for one another unlike the eunuch good fairy.”

“It’s such an awful stereotype about gay men,” said Butch Cordora, host of the TV show In Bed With Butch. “It paints gay men with one broad stroke and puts us all in a tiny little category and as you know, just like the black movement (African American people are often seen as nothing but rappers and thugs), gay men are everything! Including bad dressers, bad decorators, bad hygiene, bad haircuts, slobs, messy, etc. So I hate that shit.”

Another downside to this image is that it can force the person to be an overachiever– afraid that he cannot just be accepted for who he is, that he has to prove a point that he, as a gay man, is better than than others, afraid that he will called out as selfish if he focuses on his own needs and desire and not worthy of being treated with respect.

The image of the good fairy fixing up straight men and women can reek of straight imperialism to some gay leaders. Congressman Barney Frank once told the New York Post; ”It’s perfectly possible to enjoy that show and say, look at those clever homosexuals. What they do with hair! And not support gays at all.” An example to prove Barney’s point would be Camille Paglia (ironicly an out lesbian) assigning gay men as beings of art and culture, while at the same time dismissing them if they focus on politics and their problems with discrimination, going so far in her book Vamps and Tramps: New Essays to call AIDS activists as selfish, focusing on nothing but themselves. Like the sexist male pig that would tell the feminist to shut up and go back to the kitchen, she tells the gay activist to stop bitching, go back into the studio and make her a statue of a naked man. And a good percentage of the straight population would likely hold a similar opinion and don’t want to hear about the problems gay men face.

Butch continued the discussion saying: “A month ago, singer Ari Gold was on my show and when I stated on the air that I thought his new CD was very different and mature as opposed to his first two offerings, he said, quote: ‘We need to move forward to the next place. We’ve been visible, you can see us in movies and television, but how do we get to that place where we achieve human rights? How do we get to that place where we’re not just seen as people who can make straight people look better. It’s time to move to the next phase.’ And I couldn’t agree more.”

Watching Carson Kressley giving advice on how to dress can be seen as comfort food to some people both gay and straight. But we gay people need to be more criticial of images such as those on the good fairy, not just passively accept them, and demand that the media give us a wider range of the gay population; that some of us aspire to be the president and not just the First Lady’s hairdresser. And when that happens, “all things just keep getting better” can be more than just a theme song to a makeover show on cable.

Read Related Posts...