Aeryn Pfaff
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At a recent Ru Paul’s Drag Race viewing party with some friends, someone made a comment that gave me pause. We were talking about how good it feels to watch a show and to be able to say, “Look! Its someone like me!” when my friend Leland said, “This is how straight people feel all the time, with everything they watch.”
This month Netflix launched the first season of their reboot of early 2000’s makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, now called Queer Eye. After watching with a few different groups of gay friends, I found myself having a conversation I hadn’t thought about in a while.
Each group viewing revealed discomfort from some with Jonathan Van Ness, the show’s grooming guru, a cackling, campy queen. Let me summarize: Gay people are sometimes uncomfortable being represented in media by feminine gay men because they think it ‘makes us look bad.’
Youtube commenter SirDalTexDave puts it like this:
Twitter user @ovi_fisk tweeted something even more revealing.
People can be uncomfortable with traits in others that they see in themselves. Jonathan’s unapologetic femininity reminds us of traits we were told to mute in ourselves growing up. We project a lot of our insecurities onto famous queers.
I’ll admit, I live in a bubble. I live in a gay neighbourhood with all gay friends, so the question, “What will the neighbours say?” isn’t one that crosses my mind often, so what are they saying?
The majority of tweets about Jonathan are adoring. The fear that his femininity will ‘make us look bad,’ is imagined and irrelevant. He’s allowed to be himself on TV with no obligation to tone it down.
Jonathan is hilarious. He’s great at his job as a hairdresser. He spreads love and positivity and watching him build up his makeover subjects is a beautiful thing. He’s sweet with the makeover subject’s kids. He’s a fantastic representation of a gay person and of a man in general. Also, to state the obvious, there’s nothing wrong with being feminine.
SirDalTexDave is right about one thing: The LGBT community is diverse. With so few media representatives, feminine gay men are as deserving of representation as the rest of us and their representation helps young, feminine gay people who face the worst homophobia to accept themselves, a much more dire situation than masculine gay men hang-wringing over associations with femininity and projecting their own insecurities onto a reality TV star.
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