I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
James, as usual, RULES!
As for Shales, I think the Fab Five would be well-advised to plot an Emergency Make-Over for him. He needs it bad.
I can only wonder what Shales's reaction to a show in which some people of color turn a whiteboy cool would be. Probably the term "minstrel" would get trotted out.
I keep missing Queer Eye, but I love the concept.
Jesus, Shales actually brings up "The Boys in the Band"!?!?
I don't want to poop on your post, Leah (you've been doing a fine job, btw, in Atrios' absence) but I have to disagree with you and Jim on this one.
When I heard about this show, I thought that it would probably be both funny and painful to watch. It's basically a show whose entire premise is based on a stereotype about gay men. Right? A lot of perfectly effective humor is based on playing up stereotypes, I'm not all against it, but stereotypes can hurt people in the end - so when does the humor get to be too much? 30 years after Richard Pryor, is the Def Comedy Jam formula 'Black people are like this, white people are like that" getting old?
How about a show whose premise is 5 black guys helping a white guy with his basketball moves? 5 Jewish guys help a white guy manage his money? 5 Asian kids help a white kid with his math homework? I know - 5 men help a woman parallel park! What to you think?
I suggest that before you give Mr.Cappozzola a clean bill of health take a good look at a recent post of his in which he stated that back office service by people from India was inferior even though this high and mighty blogger was willing to concede that Indian computer people were very smart.To add to his arrogant dismissal of nearly a billion people, he further insulted everybody by saying he would not entertain any responses to this post of his.
When you scratch a liberal, a racist will not be too hard to find
lurking underneath.
J.H.C., give me freekin' break!
HE is a WaPo "Style" columnist? Do they also have Charles Manson freelancing their "Miss Manners" bits?
We gay people come in all shapes sizes and colors.
A fair number have no qualms flirting with what others may consider ugly stereotypes.
To paraphrase something Q.N. used to say: We're here we're queer, GET OVER IT MARY!
I'm having such a hard time accepting the "playing up the stereotypes" argument about this show. It's hardly the same as playing up stereotypes that make gay folks the butt of the joke, as it were. If anyone is really being stereotyped here, it's straight men--they're all slobs who can't pronounce Gewurztreminer (God, I hope I spelled that right) or decorate an apartment.
Part of the other reason I'm not worked up about it is that whenever we talk about not playing up the stereotypes about gay men, it invariable means erasing men who are effeminate or queeny. We can't have those stereotypes running around; instead we have to point out the butch "straight acting" guy running around in his SUV and celebrate that. Well, some of us are queeny, even if only occassionally. There's a line in Angels in America (I'm going to forget the characters' names) where the mormon mother asks the first homosexual she meets, "Are you a typical homosexual?" and he replies "I'm stereotypical." Some of us are like that, in our whole life or from time to time. I'm sick of having that part of us erased.
The how's pretty boring, for the same reason all those makeover shows are boring. They take a schlub and make him look a little less schlubby. Ho hum. Carson's pretty funny, though.
Darker jacket than pants? Multiple black shoes?
(scribbles furiously in notebook)
Bodhisattva proves that it's not hard to find a race-baiting conservative under any complaint of "racist" liberals.
Jim points out that customer service desks are being farmed out to foreign workers and service is being lost in the translation. Which is about as surprising as an American firm not being able to deal with in-depth customer concerns from Chinese companies due to the language barrier.
This is the sort of idiotic "race-awareness" that only some on the right are capable of. If the Washington Post printed an entire edition in Hebrew, and a liberal asked why the paper was printed in a language that the vast majority of its readers don't speak, the liberal would be "anti-Semitic".
I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed "Jewish Eye for the Gentile Guy," in which five greedy, bulging-eyed Jewish men teach a Christian how to handle his money. Still, it was a good show.
i've seen the show, and its tollerable except for the jack clone doing clothes. Insteady of doing trendy, do classical style. think Cary Grant, not the latest trend. oh so NY city.
Of course i am blessed with hair that looks fine even if i went to bed with wet hair(at least in summer).
But if i could only get them to come here and clean the house.
oops, i'm a chick.
I have no idea what this Shales fellow looks like; I'd never heard of him before now, I don't take cable TV anyway so I'll never see the TV show (probably dreadful) that spawned this argument in the first place, and frankly, I _really_ couldn't care less. But I stopped reading this piece of Mr. Capozzola's the second he resorted to the threadbare trick of accusing Shales of needing to get laid. (Well, I did skim to the end after that.) If this is "elegant" I'd hate to see what "crude" looks like.
Jesus, Shales actually brings up "The Boys in the Band"!?!?
It's doesn't mean he's not a nice person...
Jesse's defense of Capozzola's post on computer support professionals from India misses the mark by a mile. He assumes that Indian people do not speak english, which is laughable to say the least. But that is not what Capozzola implies. He says that the service is inherently inferior because it is provided by Indians, a true racist assumption.
He then compounds this problem by condescendingly referring to smart Indian computer professionals and
by arrogantly refusing to entertain any responses to this post on his blog.
By the way, Jesse, if you want service in Hebrew, there are enough Indian Jews with computer training who can provide that service to you .
All you have to do is ask. But then you may not like their accent.
OT, but queer related. For those folks in Minnesota, Fred Phelps (you, know, the bigot who protested the funerals of Matthew Shepard and Mr. Rogers) will be in Minneapolis to protest at several churches and the Episcopal General Meetings the first weekend in August. If you'd like to turn it into something positive, check out what OutFront Minnesota is doing.
As somebody on this site once posted/commented, "reading Jim Cappozzola is like channeling Paul Lynde." In my own view, Paul came across as somewhat more masculine in his style of commenting on various issues or making humorous remarks on the old Hollywood Squares.
I gotta say it, but as a gay man, I find the whole show idea extraordinarily tacky. My gay roommate thinks so, too. I disagreed with James on this, but hey. Each to their own.
I'm actually more upset about the gay Bachelor coming up on ... Sunday?
Well, I found "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" and "Temptation Island" tacky too, and find the way most female entertainers dress (or don't dress) tacky as well. So? It's a tacky world. I choose not to watch what I find tacky.
Sure, the show is based on a stereotype. But unless it portrays gays in a derogatory way, what's the harm? One of my gay friends and I have had a joke for years about establishing a "GMSA" - Gay Male Seal of Approval - much like the Good Housekeeping Seal, except that instead of insuring quality, it insures good aesthetic taste. The sad fact is, most of the people in the country have bad taste. And one does find a much higher proportion of gay men in the design and style fields than in the population as a whole. That's why it's a stereotype - because there IS a basis in reality for it.
My friend is not offended by the stereotype in the least - nor is he offended by my asking for his opinion on various items for my home. If we both think it looks good, I know it looks good.
That's not to say that no one else has a right to be offended by the stereotype - but seriously, unless it's harmful, I can't see the point in getting really upset about it.
Oh - and Kenneth? I agree with you about the bachelor show - I do think that it will be degrading.
To more or less expand on what Jennifer was just saying - this is television, folks, not the place to go if you're looking for good taste in entertainment. So there is some stereotyping - my God, tell me when there was no stereotyping on TV. TV is all about stereotypes.
MNJeff says
"they're all slobs who can't pronounce Gewurztreminer (God, I hope I spelled that right)"
It's "Gewuerztraminer" (actually, the "ue" would be "u" with Umlaut--the two little dots over the "u")
I wasn't enthused about the show when I first heard of it. Since I've been in Germany, I haven't seen the show, but from the comments I've seen on other boards on which gay people post, it has been well received by them, so I'll give it a pass.
I didn't like Boys in the Band. I thought it a bit too bitchy and depressing--but I guess it was of a time and a place.
cerebrocrat, Jennifer is right: If you think there are stereotypes in there, what is the harm? We queers have overcome so much over the years, I would venture to say we could care less about stereotypes: there are so many different kinds of queers, most stereotypes miss so terribly as to become meaningless in most situations. For example I used to know queens like QE4TSG 10 years ago in San Francisco, but here in the Northwest it is quite rare. (SF is also not all fashion queens by any stretch). Watch a video of SF Pride and see how many of those folks would queen out on QE4TSG.
I in fact don't care for Will and Grace, but it is somewhat funny and tells an accurate cultural tale & doesn't seem to do any harm, so so what? I saw part of QE4TSG, and thought it was cute, but it wasn't about my "type," so fine (tho one of the straight boys reminded me of my 1st boyfriend, so go figger that one out!).
IT'S JUST TV, most people who bother to get to know homos around them find out quickly they are often very much like themselves, showing the stereotypes are just myths, like they are for many stereotyped groups.
Stereotypes can hurt, you are right. But your examples are better illustrations of that than stereotypes of my sexual ornamentation.
The Post identifies Shales as a "Style columnist" because he writes for the Style section. He does not write about style; he's the TV critic, and has been for over 20 years. He got that gig in the late '70s when I was in high school.
Bodhisattava, I didn't get any sort of impression that Jim was saying Indian customer service people were inherently inept, just that the ones he's run into were. And jesse apparently isn't aware of the fact that most educated Indians speak flawless English.
Jim doesn't go into detail about what problems he's had, but even without a language barrier, there is a cultural barrier that can impede communication.
I used to work for Blackwell Science, a publisher with offices all over the world. I went for a drink with a colleague from Copenhagen, and it was, well, comically weird.
Danes start learning English in elementary school, so this woman's English was flawless, but the kicker was she had no Danish accent; she sounded vaguely British, maybe Canadian. I kept forgetting English wasn't her mother tongue, and I'd gab away, hurling colloquialisms at her left and right (and I'm Southern, so there were lots of 'em). She's a brilliant woman, but she'd get this blank look, and I kept having to stop myself and explain what I was talking about in more, uh, standard terms.
When you call a customer service line, it's generally because something's gone wrong. So you're already somewhat put out. If you have trouble communicating with the person on the other end, it just exacerbates the frustration.
I've been reading Jim for a while now, and I can't imagine he has a racist bone in his body. Maybe he's just too impatient to deal with communication barriers when he's already worked up. And really, nobody should have to deal with it. If your customer service people can't communicate with your customers, that's a problem.
Let me be clear that I'm NOT saying I think the show shouldn't be allowed or anything, just that I think we can do better, and I'm not that entertained by Jim's making fun of this critic for saying so.
Stereotypes always come from somewhere, that's what makes them funny. As MnJeff pointed out, there ARE plenty of effiminate gay men, and they shouldn't be "erased." I have no problem with nelly gay guys; I've even been in love with one. But at its core, the *very premise* of this show is that gay guys = fashion sense. I really don't see that as different from the other stereotype-based shows I proposed. Someone else mentioned 5 black guys making a white guy "cool." Being cool is a good thing, right? That would be harmless as a TV show, right? Mostly. But it would still support the notion that (all) black people are one way, and (all) white people are another. It reinforces the idea of an essential difference tied to race. What about those black electrical engineers, can't they be geeky if they want? That's why when Jennifer says, "But unless it portrays gays in a derogatory way, what's the harm?" the harm is that it portrays gays as essentially different. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but it isn't completely harmless, either. And as a source of humor, it's lazy and unfortunate, whether it's coming from a television network or from Jim Capozzola.
Don't go there, people. Look at Shale's picture instead, which shows him clearly in need of non-ugly clothes, an actual haircut, and glasses from at least the 20th century. You are in danger of entering the world of Shale's own demented fear of gay people and hatred of himself for doing so. He was using something / anything to put down a show he was clearly uncomfortable with. How is the show stereotypical of gay people? It films real people who happen to be funny, photogenic, knowledgable, and who seem rather amused be able to say what they really think on the air. To read them as stereotypes shows we still have a lot of work to do in the old tolerance department.
For me, the appalling part of watching this program was seeing these guys' "before" homes and realizing my place looks just like that.
I haven't seen the show; I gather its a take-off on "Trading Spaces," which is very popular with very young people, highschoolers even. MTV has a similar show with Todd Oldham, Discovery Channel has Christopher Lowell and HGTV has a bunch of decorating shows. The 5 Gay men show may be the "Jumping the shark" of decorating shows????
What possible difference does Tom Shales' appearance make? If he looked like Brad Pitt, would his review be any better or worse? Lets not sink to the level of the infamous Lieks "Micheal Moore will have a massive coronary on a bathroom floor because he's fat" post.
Its the same reason I sometimes feel guilty reading Tbogg-he's clever as hell, but if he ever has a chance to mock someone's appearance, particularly in sexual terms, he will. What's the point?
For what it's worth, I'm a straight guy.
I like the series and I like the 5 guys. Hell, I wish there were some way they could come to Boston and have a makeover go at me and my apartment.
God knows I could use it!
Bloggers Slam Gov. Dean Hoping to Boost Traffic
(2003-07-26) -- Several so-called "webloggers" announced today that they would begin ridiculing presidential candidate Howard Dean on their so-called "blogs" in order to increase site traffic.
The announcements came after a Washington Post story said supporters of Gov. Dean's presidential bid are using email to deluge reporters who write negative things about their candidate.
"My sitemeter's been languishing around 25 visitors per day," said one unnamed blogger. "I figure if I can tick off Dean's backers I could get that up to 50 or even 75."
Editor's Note: The vast editorial staff at ScrappleFace will never resort to attacking the anti-American leftist wacko Governor of Vermont in order to increase visitors to this site.
Personally, I think the Gay Agenda™ would be better served if we homos took care of our own first.
All the fashion sense I have, could be stuffed into a martini olive while still leaving room for the pimiento. I mean, I have only two pairs of black shoes!!
BTW, Tom Shales looks a little like Roger Ebert's younger bro (I kid you not.)
And I still think Cappozolla's not as bad "rant-wise" as Ann Coulter and her Rethuglican tomes like Slander and Treason.
Chris
It's "Gewuerztraminer" (actually, the "ue" would be "u" with Umlaut--the two little dots over the "u")
I knew the umlaut issue--I just hate writing the "ue" because it looks inelegant (even if correct). sort of like the ss as opposed to the "B"-looking thing) My bigger concern was actually with the "tra" where I had "tre." Oh, well--obviously, it's not a wine I drink terribly often, although it's sweetness does go well with really spicy Indian food.
Personally, I think the Gay Agenda™ would be better served if we homos took care of our own first.
All the fashion sense I have, could be stuffed into a martini olive while still leaving room for the pimiento. I mean, I have only two pairs of black shoes!!
And I only have three. I just hate how the places they go shopping for clothes (and this is a general complaint for me) have great looking jeans, but they only go to a 34" inseam, and for those of us with a 36" inseam, that's not terribly helpful. Why can't clothing companies realize that we tall folks want to look good, too?
Jeff, thanks for the Phelps link, from on MNan to another. Any opportunity to piss him off is well worth it.
I've seen the show, and it's mostly harmless. I don't think it portrays gays in a bad light; and I might also add that not all of them come off as 'stereotypical', either. In fact, I'm sure most of them could 'pass' as straight men if you put them in any situation.
The guys who look the most foolish on the show are the straight guys. Jeebus, if all straight men were judged based on these guys, we'd be in serious trouble (oh, waitaminute...)
If you REALLY want to be concerned about a TV show, take a look at "Boy Meets Boy", a new show on Bravo which features a bunch of straight men posing as queers in some pathetic version of Paradise Hotel.
It's about as appropriate as wearing black dress socks with bermuda shorts.
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