Gloating
I knew I was right to like ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’! [see N&C August 27 if you care] Drone about stereotypes all you like, but hey, if it pisses off Brent Bozell, it’s right up there with Euripides and Chekhov, as far as I’m concerned.
“I want to vomit,” L. Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, which monitors TV content, wrote of Bravo’s smash “Queer Eye” in his weekly column last month. “Ever seen a show more dedicated to a ‘straight-bashing’ proposition? … Try this idea for a show and tell me how many seconds it would last in a Hollywood pitch session: ‘A team of five fabulous straight guys teach a masculinity-deprived gay man how to throw a football, hunt for game, drink something manlier than fruity wine coolers and appreciate the fiction of Tom Clancy.'”
Haaa! Suck it up, Brentster! You’re dead right, and that calls for champagne on the house. The dreary boring football-throwing game-slaughtering Tom Clancy-appreciating side doesn’t get to have a funny dishy silly giggly show on Bravo, oh isn’t that too bad. Well guess what, that’s because Tom Clancy is awful, hunting for game is boring and destructive, throwing a football is boring – in fact you’re kind of insulting your own sex with all those stereotypes, dude. Especially the Tom Clancy one – that takes more than being a straight guy, you have to be dead between the ears for that one.
And as an added benefit, Alan Wolfe seems to be irritated, too.
So how does marriage fit in? Not comfortably — at least not yet, says Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe, who directs the Boisi Center for Religion and the American Public Life. “Americans make a pretty sharp distinction between things in private and things in public, and right now the bottom line is that sexuality is nobody’s business, but marriage is public.”
As the director of the OB Margin for Noreligion and American Peculiar Life, I say anything that annoys Brent Bozell and Alan Wolfe has a lot going for it.
Sorry to make my first comment on your fascinating site so banal, but– has Brenster copyrighted this concept? I’ve been in a lot of Hollywood pitch sessions, and let me tell you, that concept would fly like a bird, baby. I’m seeing Rupert Everett/Bruce Willis. I don’t know about the Tom Clancy-reading bit, but the wine cooler and football scene sounds great. Ka-ching!
Does he seriously think Hollywood producers are too sensitive for this kind of thing? Where’s he been?
Oh, not a bit, don’t worry about banality – for one thing I’m the one who elected to write about the frivolous topic, after all, and for another you’re right. I was a good deal too credulous myself about Brentster’s claim, but of course it’s nonsense. If there were anything in it, would dear Nazi-hugging Schwarzenegger be getting so much attention? Would movies be so endlessly full of explosions and gun battles and vehicle chases and so empty of ideas and conversation?
Where has be been, indeed, and what was I thinking.