Queer Eye: Five Gay Guys Changing the World

A lot of people told me to watch Queer Eye but I was too busy watching "serious" things. Why would I bother watching a reality show on Netflix, based on a Bravo series I quite enjoyed a decade ago, but was definitely over now? Thankfully, my friend Laura made me watch an episode when I visited her, and after that, I binged two seasons in short order. My word, how the world has changed.

A primer for those who are in the dark: Queer Eye is a show where five gay men (the Fab 5) take over the life of a person (usually a heterosexual man, but more on that later) and give him a makeover in a week. The man is usually some kind of shlubby man-child who can't get a date or has a wife who wants to see him in a nice suit for once, and at the end of the week, the Fab 5 have given him a new wardrobe, a haircut, completely re-designed his home, and given him some basic life skills to make him a better human. The original Bravo show was titled Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, but there is a very important reason why the Netflix reboot is only titled Queer Eye. Instead of solely catering to Straight Guys, some of the best episodes deal with gay men or straight women who need to zhuzh up their lives.

The crucial component of the reboot is the cast. The five men are masters of their craft and pros at what they do. But beyond that, they never impose their views on the people they are helping. Instead, they see their role as partially therapeutic - they want to understand why these people have let themselves go, and then work with them to come up with solutions that will genuinely be embraced and used for the long term. So no one is forcing anyone to wear a pink shirt or shave off their beard - instead, they consult each individual to see what they are comfortable with before irrevocably changing their lives. In addition, we also get a lot more backstory about each of the Fab 5, many of whom are married or have kids. This is progress we never got to see in the original show where the gayness definitely felt very foreign. Here, these five men are living their lives, and their sexuality is simply one facet to extremely multi-dimensional personalities.

The other crucial component is location. Unlike the Bravo series set in New York City, this show is set in Atlanta, Georgia, which means a lot of the people they deal with are white Southerners who voted for Trump and haven't always had a favorable view of homosexuality. This is where we see the two sides reconcile and have sensitive philosophical debates about the great divide in America. The Fab 5 come in with their prejudices too, and over the course of the week, it is often miraculous to watch how both sides chip away at each other until they become the closest of friends and vow to never pre-judge others again. There's the episode where they had to help a white cop and Karamo, who is black, had a heart-to-heart with him about police brutality. There's the episode where they help a trans man, and Tan, who is a British Muslim who had to live a quieter gay life and didn't immerse himself in gay culture, had a heart-to-heart about how he never understood why trans people wanted to go through surgery until he met this man and finally felt his pain. Over the course of that episode, we also got to see the struggle this man went through just to get his gender marker changed on his driver's license, as well as the extreme panic that could be occasioned through the unbelievably fraught task of getting fitted for a suit.

Queer Eye is a show with the simple but devastating goal of engendering empathy. Not just empathy for the five gay guys, but for the people they help as well. It is a profound commentary on humanity and stripping away the labels that people put on themselves to reveal the common human beings underneath. People may claim to not understand one another and profoundly disagree on many fundamental things, but it turns out that when you just have a conversation and try to understand where the other person is coming from, you learn more about yourself than you could ever imagine. In each episode, the person they're helping has a different struggle and different goal in mind for the end of the week. By the time you reach the end of the episode, you'll discover that your heart had a little bit of a makeover as well.