Where the boys are Television’s queer-friendly revolution is one-sided BY GLORIA-JEAN MASCIAROTTE

What with the success of gay concept TV shows, the recent Supreme Court decision to strike down sodomy laws, and the Episcopal Church’s election of an openly homosexual bishop, "gay" has been the adjective on the lips of everyone from couch potatoes to presidents. Though the conservative powers-that-be are determined to keep us all "just friends," this summer heralded a real sea change, seemingly making the USA more of a gay-friendly nation.

Why, then, is my inner Sphinx slouching toward the gates of this New World Order? Could it be the misogynistic tease that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fashion maven Carson Kressley threw to John, a cute straight guy, in an early episode: "What’s Tina got that I don’t, besides a working vagina?" His crude puzzlement clouds my rainbowed vision of the family of man, reminding me again that the gatekeepers at television culture’s queer carnival allow in only men.

Why does no woman hold a ticket for the Queering of America ride? Is it anti-lesbianism? Aren’t lesbians queer? While they may not be happy about their status as female workers who still earn only 75 cents to their male counterparts’ $1, are they not gay? Is it any surprise? Marx, Engels, and their Italian heir, Gramsci, warned that the ruling powers set up a social mechanism that vets revolutionary change, allowing in only the right elements. With the Fab Five as the gatekeepers, Kressley’s question is purely rhetorical. Just listen to the president of Bravo, who noted in the Boston Globe that Queer Eye and Boy Meets Boy are, "Social experiment[s] that emphasize the similarities between gays and straights rather than the differences."

No need, then, to challenge the wedding party with kinky sex, wandering desire, or extra-familial couple commitments. With the boys helping the guy get the girl, their investment in the process ties them neatly into the gift box of traditional love and marriage. Indeed, the repeated "jokey" come-ons between the boys and their guys leads some viewers to want a straight Prince Charming to choose one of the Cinderfellas. In the meta-narrative, Kressley and straight girl Tina are essentially the same: a foot ready for the tight fit of that happily-ever-after glass slipper.

So Carson’s query reveals itself as a prompt in the power play where those in charge, forced to extend their power, offer it to those most like themselves. And this bridge over troubled cultural waters crosses only male sexuality connecting man to man. While the overwhelming popularity of Queer Eye signals a wider tolerance of homosexuality, the overwhelmingly male population of the show and its counterparts underscores that gay-friendly really means guy-friendly.

Some cultural critics caution that this I’m-O.K.-You’re-O.K progress is dubious because the only community created between gay and straight is the capitalist community of consumerism. The Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein further notes that most queers represented in culture function in subservient roles of "body servants" or sidekicks to the still-front-and-center straight man. No matter how cool the queer guys and how dufus-y the straight boy, the heterosexual is still "The Man."

However, there’s more going on here than meets the eye. In the very first episode, the Fab Five scorn their straight guy’s girlfriend with a wicked "bridge-and-tunnel" cut, referring to her thigh-high footwear, as she greets him for their romantic date: "God, some hooker in Trenton wants her boots back." This comment isn’t unusual. The queer guys often diss the taste and cultural sense of their straight guy’s dates and female friends. Goldstein celebrates this "catty" gay humor as one of the few moments of real progress, because it shows queer men as witty in a way not based on self-loathing. Yet it still echoes the hisses of a catfight over the only guy in town — the straight guy.

The fight’s winner is revealed when the Fab Five watch their protégé woo his girl in the final minutes of the show. Just like us, they watch the entire process of the date on TV. Then, in the final moment, the clutch, the veritable money shot, the camera goes to black. Instead of a straight sex scene, we get the queer boys toasting and high-fiving for the work on their boy. This male bonding moment repeats the other climax that occurs right before the date. The straight guy tearfully group-hugs his new queer friends, thanking them for making him a better man and teaching him what’s important — his comrades-in-arms. It’s all very business-as-usual, especially during war time.

Right after WWII, critic Leslie Fiedler radicalized the study of American literature by pointing out that all great national novels depict the development of "a homoerotic bond [as] defense against feminization of culture." Fiedler’s subversive act celebrated "same-sex friendships" between the then-emergent African-Americans and white men. White and black women remained on popular culture’s sidelines, watching black men run around in friendly bondage with white guys. How prescient — how 48 Hrs., how Lethal Weapon.

On a larger scale, it’s no different today. Despite his holier than gay politics, Bush and his swaggering crony court look very much like those five queer boys, internationally making over blighted countries for a romance with US capitalism.

Bush’s guy-boy culture is more clear on the home front, where the Fab Fellows spruce up welfare to the tune of $300 million on demonstration projects like premarital counseling and pro-marriage education campaigns for women. Sort of primping the poor for romance? While dismantling women’s reproductive choice and dissing universal health-care, they introduce a new policy that allows states to make "unborn children" eligible for medical coverage. This policy covers the fetus, and, only incidentally, the pregnant woman. After the baby is born, mom is pushed back in the ranks of the uninsured. Far more than TV’s queer boys, the Bush boys want to get those women — gay or straight — off the social screen. What else can be behind spending money on the unborn, but not doing so for federally funded daycare so women can go to school or work?

Instead of those man-friendly gatekeepers, I’d give the job to my trans-gendered, trans-species grrlfriend, Sphinx, who’d focus on the real difference — working vaginas vs. working dicks. In an attempt to really remake the New World Order with her threat to kill anyone who answered incorrectly, she’d make the game harder, probably answering those questions with these conundrums: Why is Will & Grace "funny," but not Ellen? Why are lesbians in popular culture reduced to objects of titillation in sexual adventures (Sex and the City) or endless "kiss shows" in which some straight girl flirts with a bisexual/lesbian for an entire season until they lock lips and literally get over the attraction (LA Law, Roseanne, Star Trek: The Next Generation)?

And why do so many of television’s straight women have the requisite gay friend, but no lesbian friend? (The recent premiere of Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show may change this. Ellen’s run for the position of America’s girlfriend, however, depends on her, in her own words, not "being" a lesbian.)

Of course, the first two puzzles have easy answers: 1) It’s like killing two birds with one stone, laughing at flaming feminized men bitching about loser women; and 2) Straight male porn fantasy rules all popular pleasure, so two women kissing is hardly revolutionary. It’s just a spread in Playboy, Hustler, or Maxim. (Certainly, the response to the latest Madonna-Britney-Christina entry — "desperation of a stalled career" — only re-enforces the unchallenging status of the lesbian kiss.) The third is harder because it doesn’t involve patriarchal Porky’s-like pleasures.

There was one strong lesbian on TV, Willow in WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of course, she’s a witch — not much of a coincidence there — but the devilish doubling helps answer the Sphinx’s questions. Willow found selfhood and a girlfriend in a Wicca women’s group at college. The girls found that working together increased their individual powers and was sexually exhilarating. Ahhh . . . lesbianism symbolizing a woman coming into her own outside of patriarchal rule.

Ideologically, lesbians exponentially empower womanhood to a "phatal" degree. A single woman is straight; two women, an odd couple; but three are a cabal, like Macbeth’s "Double, double, toil and trouble." Lesbians represent scary self-sufficient women, and grouped with straight women friends, well, too many women spoil the brotherhood, diverting the destiny of Fab Fraternity, like whistleblowers Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Colleen Rowley of the FBI, and Sherron Watkins of Enron. Now, there’s the difference between men working it and "working vaginas."

Real progress might be a show like Queer Girls for the Cronies’ Churl. Instead of getting girls, queer girls might teach men to work, to simply be, with women. There’d be the lipstick lesbian, who teaches him about girlpower; the glamour butch, who offers attitude; the ’tween, who learns the churl how to play both boy and girl, depending on the social situation; the PC dyke, who earnestly outlines the importance of not making an ass of "u" and "me" by thinking from below his belt; and finally the vagitarian, who teaches him how to . . . well . . . do the thing that might lessen a girl’s stress in confronting patriarchal faux pas.

Until such a show, the queering of popular culture continues the ancient practice of erasing the need for "working vaginas," oops, women. And beware, because this time ’round, grrlfriend Sphinx is sure to devour anyone who answers her riddle with Oedipus’s Procrustean reply: "Man."

Gloria-Jean Masciarotte can be reached at gjmas@aol.com