Why are queer people considered to be so stylish? I may ask the question, I am one of them myself, not always one of the stylish ones, but one of the queer ones. So, frankly, I have mixed feelings about the news that there will be a German version of the makeover show Queer Eye on Netflix in 2022.
I found the American Queer Eye series unbearably depressing after a few episodes because the bottom line is that every episode ends with the realization: if you’ve lost control of your life in any way, all the “Fab Five” need to do is come around to to help you with a few shallow therapy pep talks, a new hairstyle and many, many shopping trips through fashion boutiques and furniture stores to find connection to the lamest aesthetic mainstream and thus “to yourself”. Most of the time, the apartments look straight out of the Ikea catalog after the Queer Eye makeover. What’s queer about that? Oscar Wilde, Marsha P. Johnson and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf would roll their eyes in their graves.
Everything is love!
I hope that the German version will be better, yes: more queer, that it will be less consumerist and more bitchy again. That was actually the basic idea of the series when it was still called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” in its original form in 2003: that gay hairdressers, stylists and interior design consultants can take revenge for the whole homophobia they suffered as teens had to suffer by cleaning up the oppressors of yesteryear, i.e. the straight dudes. How disgusted they comb through their smelly bachelor booths, dispose of moldy milk, squeakingly scan the bed covers for stains with the UV lamp and squeeze the out-of-shape ex-jocks into jeans that are far too tight. With a wink of course. Everything is love!
Two ideas: If you want to watch the German “Queer Eye” series, you should have seen the HBO series “We’re Here” with Bob the Drag Queen, Shangela and Eureka O’Hara beforehand. They are known from “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, and how these drag queens tour the conservative Bible Belt of the USA to help queer people there not just with a superficial makeover but with real community work is great, and emancipatory. There should also be an accompanying series, as a sort of follow-up: “After Queer Eye”. This documents how the helpers of the series are doing two years later, how their new hairstyles and apartments look then. Oops!
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 02/2022.