Black eye for the straight guy
Making Tom and his surroundings attractive to Lisa is a job for the five homosexual makeover artists in "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." In each episode of the popular TV show, the Fab Five descend on a clueless American heterosexual and acquaint him with Western civilization.
Everyone's talking about "Queer Eye," but approximately 99 percent of viewers misread the message. It's not that homosexuals are lovable. It's that so many hetero males have become immature creeps. That's what makes the show, despite some hilarious quips, so depressing.
"Queer Eye" turns on its head common notions of who in our society is preserving traditional values. It says out loud what many hetero eyes have long observed: America's gay community has become one of the last defenders of conservative ideals — from defending historic old neighborhoods to grooming to maintaining pride in one's physical plant.
The straight guys, one quickly notes, are not products of our slums, nor are they mentally impaired. Tom is a software engineer. Another hetero fixer-upper, Adam, is a successful businessman. (He lives with wife and children in upper-middle-class squalor.) In the minds of so many citizens, these youngish fellows represent the flower of American manhood.
However, they are only half men. They've acquired an ability to make money in the marketplace, but put them in a social setting and they're zeros. They are waiting for Mommy to clean up the bathroom.
We know a lot of young men like these, and their tribe is growing. Some seem like nice guys. Some are insufferable narcissists. They feel no duty to expend one calorie cleaning up for the public because the public does not matter. The boys all have one big thing in common: They've been indulged to the point of imbecility.
Now in their 20s and 30s, these males appear to have been raised by middle-class wolves. Their mothers, one imagines, worshipped their boys' every mess. Their fathers were stick figures with no manly culture to pass on.
These are the sort of parents who wonder why their sons are not doing grownup things like getting married and giving them grandchildren. Chances are these moms and dads regarded what parenting they did as a service bestowed and not as a baton to be grabbed for future generations.
In the program's more touching moments, the gay gurus become the attentive fathers these boys never had — teaching them such basic male rites of passage as shaving. In cases like Tom's, they have to first persuade their charge of the need to shave. Tom thinks he can walk around with several days of beard and still get what he wants from others. To be painfully honest, he may be right. He receives his paycheck, and he has a girlfriend willing to put up with him.
Why Lisa hangs around for this unsightly jerk is subject for some future discourse on American womanhood. There's certainly a lot of nodding in the audience when one of the gay coaches remarks, "Frankly, if I were Lisa, I'd change my ID and move to another state."
Do Americans have any idea how radical Tom and his ilk are? It's not as though the United States hasn't been home to bachelor cultures before now. The difference is that bachelors past fixed up their pads, learned how to mix drinks and otherwise cleaned up their act to attract a mate, however temporarily. These straight guys don't even try.
Americans fretting over what they see as a homosexual takeover of the culture should know that the gay community came upon an abandoned wreck. In the straight world, an obsession with materialistic progress seems to have left little energy for, or interest in, developing the habits necessary for healthy social interaction.
When the Fab Five gets done with Tom, they're exhausted as well as disgusted. "One straight man down, about 300 million to go," one of them says wearily.
Indeed. The show could just as easily have been named, "Black Eye for the Straight Guy."
Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com