Queen's Evidence

The US TV series ‘Queer Eye For the Straight Guy’ is coming to Britain - but maybe gays aren’t quite so fabulous and stylish as their media popularity might suggest. Mark Simpson presents the case for the prosecution.

The Guardian 1/11/03

It’s long been a gay maxim that If you think yourself fabulous hard enough and long enough the rest of the world will eventually agree with you. This of course is the shortest route to madness. Or at least your own podium at Heaven on Saturday Nights. But the maddest thing about this gay fantasy is that it appears to have come – tediously, horribly – true.

The smash-hit US TV series of 2003 has been QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY, a sort of Reality version of QUEER OF FOLK, in which a ‘fab’ fivesome of urban gay men in a 4x4 target a dowdy straight guy badly in need of a makeover. With shrieks of ‘Ohmigoodness! Look at you!’, ‘Wow! Do you buy all your clothes at Home Depot?’, and ‘Ohmigod! Your apartment looks like a crack den!’ the Flaming Five descend on their heterosexual victim and in a whirlwind of limp predictability the hectoring homo harpies transform his hair, his wardrobe, his apartment, his complexion, even the way he says ‘hi’ to people until he looks like a half-cocked metrosexual. Turning him, in other words, into someone who looks like their bitch.

The Fab Five are now on their way to the UK, but they really should be stopped at customs for trying to smuggle cliches into the country that are SO last season. There is it has to be said something very tired and very Nineties about all this ‘aren’t gay men fabulous?’ twittering. Someone needs to say to the decidedly farty looking Fab Five and gay men in general: ‘Ohmygoodness! Look at YOU! Who does your hair? David Furnish?’

It will shock and distress many straight readers to hear this, but loads of gay blokes don’t give a left-handed toss about grooming or fashion and actually have as little – arguably less – interest in it than straight men. Contrary to the propaganda, buggery does not make you innately tasteful. Funnily enough, eschewing the ‘fairer sex’ to recreate locker-room fantasies can leave you with some rather rough edges. ‘Stylish’ A-Gays (the ‘A’, by the way, stands for ‘Asshole’) like Everett and Brule are entirely for the goyim. They have made their career out of being what straight people want them to be. The peculiar thing about the myth of ‘gay fabulousness’, is that straights are even keener to believe in it than gays. Shopping, grooming, fashion and flaming tips appear to be what gays are for.

But forget flaming gay fabulousness, it’s time to be frank and open and out about gay CRAPULOUSNESS. Let’s break the full howdy doody horror of homos down according to the Fab Five’s areas of supposed ‘expertise’: fashion, grooming, food, culture, interior design.

FASHION

Gay royalty Elton John and David Furnish, possibly inspired by David’s peculiar patronym, appear to be wearing more and more (sweetly matching) furnishing fabrics of the kind usually covering overstuffed chairs you see in wallpaper shops on the Fulham Road, or the foyers of country hotels. Elton may recently have redecorated his London house and chucked out his chintz, but is he ever going to chuck out Furnish? As the fashion expert on QUEER EYE would trill, accessories are SO importante! So why be seen with a flock armchair, especially if he just reminds people that you look like a five-seater sofa?

Perhaps to remind us he’s a permanent fixture, Graham Norton seems to have gone for the same comfy look, though with added shininess. And what about fashion maven Jean-Paul Gaultier? What’s with all those rancid little kilts? Does anyone REALLY want to see his knobbly knees and stringy calves? At the ‘volume’ end of the spectrum Brian Dowling, several shades of orange darker than Pat Beale, dresses in Top Shop teen style that is pure Tess Daly – his own special touch: buying three sizes too small and then boil-washing. Will Young meanwhile appears to have sent his stylist to Oxfam and gone for the student/posh tramp look: grand-dad shirts, blazer, flat cap: wery webellious Will. Then there’s Andy Bell. And there’s Lycra.

Speaking of yeast infections, at the ‘classy’ end of the gay fashionista spectrum we have Ivan Massow: a man who likes to visit gay bars dressed for gardening. Is he hoping to meet Scudder? Bobbly jumper and jeans that stop two inches above his brogues. If you think his town clothes are bad, you should see his country ones – all scarlet jackets, white breeches riding boots and fresh fox blood.

GROOMING

Can I just say two words? George Michael. The goatees, the blow-dry, the fell-asleep on the sunbed tan, the mammoth (hairy not huge) shoulders. Beverly Hills PD arrested him not for waving his penis about but for making that park look untidy.

Or how about Dale Winton, with a fell-asleep on the sunbed for a hundred years tan, the (rather surprised looking) Rip Van Wrinkle of TV, with hair that appears to have been styled by mail-order? Or Ricardo from The Salon, an inspiring look that says: I’d quite like to be a tranny, if I could only be arsed. Yes, dowdy Old Labour was ‘madeover’ into ‘fabulous’ New Labour by shiny-faced Peter Mandelson, but let’s not forget that early 80s wedge haircut and that 70s moustache.

Or how about Boy George with those naff hats and the shaded double chin which cleverly fool us into not noticing his head not only has no hair but no bones and is supported only by eyeliner? Or his ‘wooo-I’m-possessed-by-the-spirit-of-Leigh-Bowery-channelled-through-a-twelve-year-old-girl-from-Epsom’ presentation?

In fact, if you want to really know the traumatic truth about ‘gay grooming’ pick one up. Gay bathrooms definitely do not always live up to the propaganda. Many resemble walk-in petri-dishes. The Quentin Crisp School of housekeeping is much more popular than you can imagine. One concession to fashion however, is that, apres le act, you can never find any soap (it’s SO ageing, you know). Just lots of moisturiser.

FOOD & WINE

Ah, the discerning gay palate! Gay bars sport gym-pumped gay men with huge arms sipping alcopops – with names like ‘Watermelon Bacardi Breezer’ – and “cooking lager” like Carling. Those with a more sophisticated bent swig an aftershave called Bezique.

Gay restaurants offer painfully fussy food that seems to always come on a bed of rubbery pine nuts and smothered in some strange and much too sweet sauce that tastes like Watermelon Bacardi Breezer. Of course, no one really eats this stuff, instead they spend their time smoking and eyeing up the South American waiter and wondering where they can get some ketamine. Stephen Gately, a longtime poster-boy for the post gay club (and gay restaurant) cuisine of choice - chips - was recently photographed visiting the Ivy with his boyfriend. Glamour! Unfortunately, he was having a drunken punch-up with his boyf in the gutter outside afterwards. He was probably saying: ‘I thought you said this place did chips!’.

DÉCOR

The Drewitt-Barlows, Tony Barlow and Barry Drewitt, live in Cheshire now (spiritual home of the football wife), but when they first came to our attention they were living in a mock-Grecian bungalow in Chelmsford, Essex, with cream leather sofas and a yellow Lotus parked on the drive. And announcing they were planning to name one of their kids after a ski resort – Aspen. Classy. Did we mention Elton already? He has so run out of ideas of what to waste money on that he has silver lids for his Marmite jars at his St Tropez chateau.

And please. What is it with gays and those horrid silver framed black and white photographs of men wearing only socks lying on white sofas with their bums in the air? Do they think they’re tasteful? Do they think it’s art? Apparently a gay home’s not a home until it has a couple of buttocks on the wall.

CULTURE

Gay Pride, the climatic, dizzying apogee of gay culture, involves paying ready money to stand in a muddy field listening to Berlinda Carlisle croaking through her one and a half hits. ‘The largest gay night in Europe’ GAY sees gay aesthetes turning out in their crop-topped thousands to hyperventilate over Eurovision runners-up, ex Spice Girls with stalling solo careers and shameless old laggers like Bananarama. Or watching Australian duo The Hazzards perform their teeth-grindingly awful and breathtakingly patronising ditty ‘Gay Boyfriend’. Fags have become the ceremonial eunuchs, the novelty pajama cases for a generation of Will & Grace women who have made them their hags

I myself have been blamed for starting the ‘metrosexual’ palaver, but the Fab Five would probably find this homo even more of a lost cause than some of their straight targets. The daddy of metrosexuality, ladies and gents, is actually ‘lesbosexual’: I slob around in unironed sportswear and white socks I buy in once-yearly expeditions to out-of-town shopping outlets (usually bumping into Tom Watkins). I wear Y-Fronts. Baggy ones. I don’t even have those silver-framed pictures of bums on my wall because I can’t be bothered to drill the holes (in the wall). I go to the gym, it’s true, but only because it’s the only club that will let me in wearing sportswear.

Gays may have provided a self-obsessed prototype for metrosexuality, but this doesn’t mean they are still ahead of the curve. In fact, next to Beckham et al, they are looking more and more like the discarded, beta version. As much younger, hipper people than I might say: ‘So gay – so over’.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2003

www.marksimpson.com