Fab

By Crispin Sartwell

Finally, there is a reality show that makes sense.

The premise of Bravo's "Queer Eye on the Straight Guy" is this: the Fab 5, a squad of more or less flaming lifestyle consultants - one for food and wine, one for clothing, one for decorating, one for grooming, and one for culture - descends upon the home and person of an aesthetically challenged heterosexual male, transforming his pathetic life into a marvel of style. They redo his apartment, his wardrobe, his hair, his cd collection, and his fridge until they reek of pure panache.

Obviously, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" explores real needs, real abilities, and real dichotomies. The show has great fun messing in the world of stereotypes, but that world intersects the actual world. In fact, a studied indifference to fashion and style is a social code by which men mark themselves as heterosexual, and it is one of the things that most irritates their female lovers. An obsession with style, on the other hand, is a fundamental way to code gay. This is not, of course, to say that all straight men are slobs and all gay men are interior decorators and hair stylists. Nevertheless, this is our semiotics of sexual orientation.

And so we watch fabulous poofters remaking hopeless clods: guys who got their last haircut two years ago and paid the barber seven bucks, who store their plates in the sink, whose notion of art has never really transcended Lynyrd Skynrd, who drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and eat at Burger King.

The show starkly reveals the cultural mythos of straight and gay: it's as though pure artifice meets primal nature, as if Marie Antoinette's Minister of Etiquette and Frippery were trying to acclimate a gorilla to life at the French court.

In several episodes the basic idea is that once the breeder undergoes his butterfly metamorphosis, the woman in his life will be willing to mate with/move in with/marry/tolerate him. Here we explore the sometimes tense subterranean alliance between gay men and straight women.

The show is hilarious and compulsively watchable: the Fab 5 rock, the makeovers are astonishing, the tips are indispensable, the product placements no doubt profitable. And in its own witty way, the program has guts: it actually explores the extremely delicate matter of the content of sexual identities on national television. A sub-theme is the flirtation of gay with straight men, and the straight guys usually seem almost pathetically grateful to have someone with taste help them pick out their furniture.

But what I haven't really seen so far is the dark side: the homophobia and heterophobia and resentment that might well arise in such a situation, the deep and scary tensions between gay and straight guys that surely is one possible zone where all this ends up.

And speaking of that, let me just put in my straight two cents. I would love to have the Fab 5 help me with my walls, my hair, my - um- odor, my recipes, especially because they show real sensitivity to the antecedent tastes of their victims. But one guy is listed as a "culture" consultant, and the chances that I am going to defer to a gay dj in matters of culture are none and none.

One of the basic aesthetic distinctions in popular music, for example, is between authenticity and fabulous fakery, and that distinction is a version of the ideology that associates heterosexuality with nature and homosexuality with artifice and underlies the fashion/anti-fashion dichotomy between gay and straight men. Robert Johnson is authentic; David Bowie rejects authenticity in all its forms, and rests everything on appearance or disguise. This matter is extremely complex, but it tracks straight/gay codes almost perfectly. We might speculate on the reasons for this: perhaps it has something to do with the closet and the process of emerging from it. On each side, the distinction between appearance and reality is fundamental and the positions opposed.

And so when I imagine a gay dj coming to load my cd changer, I imagine him ditching my Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Ramones, Burning Spear, and Eminem records, and replacing them with Judy Garland, show tunes, disco, house, techno, glam, and opera - perhaps the most extremely artificial music ever devised by the twisted mind of man.

I may need a queer eye, but these dudes desperately need a straight ear.