Most people know me as a drag queen, a gay playwright and/or an activist. So often — when I tell them that my 9-5 job is university professor — they say: “Good for you!” Yes, I’m not kidding. It is ‘good for me’ that I somehow triumphed over my crazy effeminate queerness and managed to snag a job. They do everything but pat me on the head.
I feel somewhat the same way about Calum Marsh’s latest article in the National Post: “Why Queer Eye makes me cry. Every. Time.”
Well ‘Queer Eye’ makes me cry, it really does, but for quite different reasons.
Calum says that the old show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was out of date because of “the stylish queen stereotype.” Now, the show has been “revitalized” with an “earnest unpretentious spirit” of “infectious positivity.” He portrays the queer-eyed guys as therapists who help people by — instead of just dressing them up — encouraging them, for instance, to eat more healthily, and to gain confidence.
Okay, got it. But these queer-eyed guys are still helpers. The message of the show is that homosexuals are the world’s perpetual personal assistants. Gays don’t have a life of their own. (God help us if Netflix were flooded with shows about the real life stories of modern gay men!) No. Gay men exist to facilitate straight lives; to make straight lives better.
This justifies our existence, somewhat, because — without our knack for decorating, dressing and therapizing — we would be — for most people — merely pretty ornaments and/or dangerous sex fiends.
All of this flies in the face of history. Without gay men we would not have the modern novel (Proust) or the modern computer (Alan Turing). We would be without great scientists like Leonardo Da Vinci, George Washington Carver, and Alfred Kinsey. We would not have some of the most beautiful fiction ever written (Thomas Mann, Truman Capote, D.H. Lawrence, James Baldwin, Yukio Mishima) We would not have some of the most beautiful music ever composed (Handel, Lully, Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Poulenc, Samuel Barber — and Schubert too, though the musicologists get very angry about this one). Without gay men we would not have some of the greatest paintings ever created (Caravaggio and Michelangelo — to name two you might have heard of), or two of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (Wittgenstein and Foucault), as well as an ancient philosopher you also may recognize (Plato). And without Bayard Rustin — Martin Luther King’s closeted, gay, unheralded right hand man — we would not have the modern civil rights movement.
Oh yes, and we also happen to dress very well, and we also happen to be very good at helping heterosexuals sort out their inevitably screwed-up lives.
(Just try being a heterosexual. I tried it once; it was a nightmare!)
So Calum — why are you so obsessed with our modern Netflix identity as the ‘world’s personal assistants’ as opposed to our actual role in human history, which is being a major force in creation of human knowledge?
Can you answer that one for me, Calum, huh?
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