Queer Minstrels for the Straight Eye: Race as Surplus in Gay TV

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of gay shame lately, particularly on the question of queer sex acts and shame.¹ Most of these formulations leave me, as a gay man of color, cold. The shame we feel in relation to our queerness, in relation to queer sex, or in relation to the nonerotic aspect of our minoritarian lives cannot be known or analyzed apart from the ways that queerness is, for the queer of color, always about adjacent antagonisms within the social, including, but not limited to, class and race. The queer shame question is just one example of recent queer theory's inability to think about the social with nuance subtle enough to analyze difference both in and outside queerness. This is the quick version of an argument that I have made before and that has been articulated most recently by Roderick A. Ferguson in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique.² I further argue that renderings of queerness that do not factor in a broader critique of the social represent the waning of the utility of queerness as a term that has any political force as an activist or theoretical rubric. Moreover, I want to point out that this problem with queerness is evidenced in a program like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which represents queerness as an almost exclusively white formation.

The program's weak multiculturalism—namely, its inclusion of one Latino, Jai Rodriguez—is merely a neoliberal injection of a little brownness that is meant to ward off any foreseeable challenges to the overwhelming whiteness that radiates from the increasingly dominant version of queerness in both TV land and academe. The fact that Rodriguez is posited as the minister of the "merely cultural," to borrow Judith Butler's phrase, makes a lot of sense if one is to advance the argument that Queer Eye (and quite a bit of the queer critique that wishes that race would go away or take its place in the corner of the queer planet) signals the onset of full-blown neoliberalism.³ The show images what Lisa Duggan describes as neoliberalism's gay agenda, the production of "a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity."⁴ When the show is considered within mainstream culture or gay subculture, Rodriguez's role is much parodied, the perennial question being "What does he do?" The answer: Not much. Duggan and others argue that progressive left critique falters when it operates as though the cultural and the economic could be separately conceived. I agree with this point and add the observation that gay neoliberalism wishes to enact this separation as well. We can see this fantasy acted out in Queer Eye, which assigns queers of color the job of being inane culture mavens, while the real economic work is put into the able and busy hands of the white gays, who shop, to the delight of aesthetically challenged heterosexuals.

In neoliberalism's gay formations, race is "merely cultural" and therefore a kind of symbolic surplus value. Nevertheless, it is not containable in the way that much queer academic writing and shows like Queer Eye would like it to be. Throw in narrative, for example, and things get much more interesting. In The L Word, for instance, the racial particularity of Bette and her half-sister Kit seems initially to be light multicultural window dressing, although that proves not to be the case, insofar as the narrative does not try to contain or manage race. The race plots that these characters generate keep The L Word from slipping into a mode of neoliberalism in which race is sidelined. Indeed, the show often becomes "the R word," and that is when it gets good and many queers, of color and not of color, are sutured.