QE Fab Five offer gay 'make-better' for straight guys (July 13, 2003)

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Fab Five offer gay 'make-better' for straight guys

 

John Sellers, New York Times

Published July 13, 2003 MAKVAR

NEW YORK If there were rap sheets detailing crimes of straight-maleness, mine would have more than a few misdemeanors. I have been to Hooters more times than I've eaten sushi. I refer to both men and women as "dude." And in my bathroom, right above the toilet, I proudly hang a print of dogs playing poker.

So when I heard about the new Bravo TV series "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" -- in which five fashionable gay men remake, redecorate and reoutfit the lives and apartments of hapless heteros -- I immediately wanted to sign up.

It seemed like such a good deal: By simply submitting to the whims of five seriously credentialed gay men, I would have the chance to make up for years of laggardly personal grooming and home decorating in a single, effort-free bound.

Like a league of superheroes, the members of the team are eachp gifted with a special power:

* Thom Filicia is a master of interior design who dispenses his lessons with sharp rhetorical   jabs.

*Kyan Douglas teaches grooming with the gentle wisdom of Yoda.

*Jai Rodriguez broadens cultural horizons and thereby social opportunities.

*Ted Allen serves up expertise about fine food and wine.

*Carson Kressley is the fashion maven whose indignant flapping and squawking provides some of the show's more hilarious moments. 

Bravo refers to these gentlemen as the Fab Five: In each hourlong episode, they fix their gaze on one hapless Neanderthal, counseling him and taunting him on everything from his underwear to his icebox. 

The debut episode (Tuesday at 9 p.m.) features a hurly-burly Broadway set builder named Brian but known as -- if you can believe it -- Butch. He has Lynyrd Skynyrd hair, smudgy overalls and a Unabomber apartment. But Butch is an aspiring artist, and in anticipation of his first gallery show, he is hoping for a new look.

The stars of "Queer Eye" claim that they're not out to reprogram the guinea pig's entire genetic code, but instead to highlight his true personality.

"It's not a make-over show," Carson says. "It's a make-better show."

That might be the aim, but to get there, the Fab Five lures the subject far outside his safety zone. In Butch's case, for instance, they purge his apartment of endless amounts of clutter, snip off the ponytail he'd been growing for nine years and give him a spray-on tan. At the end, he looks so different -- and, by all accounts, so much better -- that one of his shaggy-haired buddies shudders, "I might have to start calling him Brian."

A mini-makeover

I wasn't sure I could survive the full treatment, which usually takes four days, so for the sake of this article, I arranged to undergo a one-day demonstration. When the five experts arrive at my Brooklyn apartment, they blow in the front door all at once, filling my one-bedroom apartment with a tsunami of gay energy and a chorus of loudly disapproving chatter.

"Let's go look at his bedding," says Carson, heading for the whimsically patterned quilt my mom sent me more than a decade ago.

"You mean the air-conditioner filter that he sleeps under?" Thom says.

"If the Amish opened a Comfort Inn," Carson responds, "this is what their decorating theme would look like. Unless you're 90 years old and alone in the world, you shouldn't have this bedding."

And it gets worse. My towels are said to be "reeking of elder-care facility." Regarding my nonexistent bedroom decor, Thom asks, "Did you just get released from prison?" A chest of drawers is "like a freebie with a fill-up, right?"

The great thing about the team -- and the program -- is that even as your entire existence is being questioned, you're laughing along with almost everything the experts say. And they're not above giving the stray compliment when they think it's deserved. Thom appreciates the kitsch value of the obscenely large John Ritter picture over my couch. Kyan says, "I'm really impressed by your nails, my friend." And weirdly, Carson actually asks to keep one of my old T-shirts.

But then, having offered those tiny bits of reassurance, they roll up their sleeves and go to work. My betterment begins with a trip to a SoHo design store. To complement my burgundy couch, Thom picks out a grayish paint called Kelmscott.

"That wouldn't suck," I say.

I'm trying to be a good sport. But when talk turns to 400-count sheets, I feel as listless as when my mom used to drag me to Sears for the season's big white sale.

Getting culture

After an hour, Thom heads back to Brooklyn to redecorate a small area of my apartment. So he hands me off to Ted and Jai, who take me to lunch at Craft -- a hip but low-key restaurant chosen, Ted explains, because of my "dislike of food pretension."

I realize that Jai has a tough job. It's one thing to redo someone's color scheme, but cultural tastes are not just another lifestyle accessory. Trying to upgrade them in one afternoon seems a bit hopeless, and quite possibly foolish. But just when I think he's given up on me, he offers a strong prescription: a trip to the West Village for Kiki & Herb's ultracampy cabaret show.

After lunch, I begin to see why "Queer Eye" subjects seem so willing to give in to the whims of the Fab Five. Sure, they might have reached a snap decision about who I am, based on only the most superficial judgments, but having done so they seem genuinely to want to help me reach my full potential.

So when I meet Kyan at the Paul Labrecque salon and spa and he tells me "I want to give you the experience of being nurtured," my last bit of straight-guy provincialism melts away. I happily submit to an intense massage and then a haircut that proves to be among the best my curly head has ever known.

The pampering, however, is just the calm before the storm that is Hurricane Carson. He meets me outside Scoop (a spendaholic's paradise I've never heard of) dressed in a buckskin-style shirt with flappy leather wristbands. Asking me whether I want to be called Pumpkin or Peaches (and then randomly settling on "Chauncey") he declares that I'm "like a frightened bunny, scared and alone in a world of couture."

He makes me try a few looks, but recognizing my penchant for casual and slightly sloppy, he decides I do best in my own black blazer, a beige button-down Helmut Lang shirt, some dark-rinse Levi's and a pair of flip-flops -- which he says will set me apart from "any other jackass." (This from a man who's outfitted like an extra from "Dances With Wolves.") To my Lutheran-bred mind, Jesus was the only man who could get away with wearing sandals, but Carson is insistent, and so I exit the store, fully styled, and flipping and flopping my way home.

Back in Brooklyn, Thom has only had time to redecorate the area surrounding my sofa, but the results are dramatic. As I look at the now Kelmscott-colored wall, my first thought is: He Warholed my Ritter! My second is that it's too cool. The rest of my apartment will never measure up.

After 11 hours, our one-day experiment comes to an end, and it is time for the Fab Five to depart from my life. As they go, some important questions follow in their aloe-scented wake. Would I ever again find jeans as comfortable as the Levi's Carson bought me? Would I ever get around to replacing my "hospice chic" bedding? Is there such a thing as too much Ritter?

Bravo's show suggests that something has changed not just in the network's programming department (which is bringing out an increasingly gay-friendly lineup) but in the culture at large. Television has long featured straight male characters making jokes about gay men, or teasing each other about acting gay, or just generally reveling in their babe-watching, couch-potato-ing heterosexuality. Not infrequently, these characters have even been played by gay men.

Now the same medium features guys like Butch laboring intensely to look more gay. And all across America, straight guys will watch the show, and from their stained, sagging couches, where they sit in their boxers drinking Budweiser from a can, they'll see people's lives transformed by queerness, and they'll think, "Dude, maybe someday that could be me."