2003-08-18 - 10:40 p.m.
I thought I was going to hate Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. All the advance hype was really starting to make my teeth hurt. Here we go, I thought--yet another show that traffics in tired old cliches and reinforces stereotypes of some put-upon minority group under the guise of humor. Fuck that.
Boy-howdy, was I off-base there. As it turns out, QE actually treats heterosexual men with the utmost dignity and respect.
The only thing I hate about it is that it's made me into a neat freak. I spent the next three days cleaning my apartment after the first episode aired. I even reorganized my office, for chrissake (and in case you were wondering, that ripping sound you heard was the last seal of the apocalypse being broken). Plus, I now have a steadily growing list of random kitchen and personal-hygiene gadgets that I didn't even know existed before, but now will have to go out and buy before I can ever feel complete again. Anyone know where I can get an electric nose-hair trimmer for less than 85 jillion dollars?
Other than that, this show cracks me up more than anything has on TV since the "Andy Andy" episode of Cheers back in the '80s.
I've read a few of the more clenched-sphinctered criticisms of the show that are floating around, and honestly, I don't know what the writers' damage is. There used to be a time when all of us men aspired to be stylish and civilized--to look sharp, to appreciate good food, to know what was happening in art and culture, to clean up after yourself, to make women feel special, or maybe just to be aware enough of personal hygiene so that you didn't go around town smelling like a scabies-infested goat. THAT WAS HOW YOU GOT THE CHICKS! But then, one day, all of those things suddenly became "gay," and straight men ran away, and ran away, until eventually being a farting, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing mook was the only way you could reassure your buddies that you weren't a homo. And meanwhile, where did the women go? Off to look for gay men they could actually talk to. Or become lesbians.
Who knows? If, thanks to shows like Queer Eye, heterosexual American men once again know what kind of wine to serve with dinner, it just might make the world a better place. Women will get along better with straight men, gay men and straight men will find common ground, and everyone will be having more fun and possibly getting laid more often. Except for the Queer theorists, who'll be off writing about how oppressive it all is.
Or, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker: If you took all the Queer theorists in the world and laid them end to end ... Hell would freeze over.
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A brief explanation of why I didn't update for three months: Besides imminent deadlines, illness, travel, social obligations, and just plain apathy, I just plain felt that I'd stopped being funny.
This diary has--or used to have--a four-pronged mission: 1) to work on my chops as a writer; 2) to be funny; 3) to provide some much-needed meta-commentary on the uniquely North American narcissism lying at the heart of the very concept of the online journal; and 4) to take over the world. Continuously spewing about the evil, greed or simple incompetence of the Bush administration undermines every aspect of that mission: My writing suffers, I lose my sense of humor, I become overly self-involved (as if anyone in the U.S. with the right to vote is going to be swayed in any way by what one more online crackpot says), and who'd want to grovel abjectly at the feet of a would-be Evil Overlord if all he did was act like a constipated, humor-impaired dweeb with no joie de vivre and even less personality? Unless his name was John Ashcroft?
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