Straight Eye For The Dull Guy

It’s tough out there in the culture for straight guys right now. Let’s face it, being straight is just so retro these days… and not in a cool 70’s rock band or discontinued Pontiac sports car model way, either… heterosexuality is just flat-out boring. How boring? Well, let’s just say I was at a party the other day talking to a group of people I’d just met. When I mentioned my wife, one of the guys in the group said “wait, you actually have sex with a woman, like on purpose?” When I answered “yes”, he rolled his eyes and said “OK, Boomer.”

Lately I’ve had several heterosexual screenwriters tell me that it’s so bad out there that they’re considering telling showrunners they’re gay in order to boost their odds of success when they meet for TV staffing jobs. This might actually work over a short time horizon, but I would caution anyone considering the gambit that this is a game which rewards early adopters. You don’t want to arrive too late in the cycle and find yourself in a situation where the showrunner responds “Oh, you’re gay? Cool, I’m just going to need you to step into this windowless room here. That gentleman in the leather and spikes is Chuck, he’s going to run you through a few exercises… can’t be too careful, these days.”

It’s so tough for straight dudes right now, even Mr. Beast with his eleventy-billion social media followers had to put a trans character on his show before they would give him a TV deal.

This is not a new cultural trend, either. Over the holiday I was talking with a friend who is a big Val Kilmer fan. I recommended he watch “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”, a fantastic Shane Black movie he’d never seen. In the 20 years since “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” came out, Robert Downey Jr. has turned himself into one of the coolest men on the planet. But back in 2005, Kilmer, playing a gay Los Angeles detective, was the coolest guy in the movie and it wasn’t close… and this from the filmmaker who once wrote “Lethal Weapon.”

As early as the turn of the 21st century, we were told, straight dudes were already starting to lose their mojo… we just weren’t blowing up the skirts of America’s single ladies like we used to. Enter “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”, which premeired 22 years ago this summer, in which a team of gay men performed makeovers on straight guys who were struggling to attract provably-female mates. The show was a big hit, running for five seasons and 100 shows, not including a 2018 Netflix revival which is still going strong nine seasons later.

I mean sure, Hollywood also makes shows like “Forged in Fire”, in which bearded bros in Texas Chainsaw Massacre outfits and unattended haircuts forge bad ass weapons out of hunks of steel and then a martial arts expert uses them to hack pig carcasses in half, but if you’d tried to tell my new friends at that cocktail party that “Forged in Fire” is “cool” in the cultural sense, you’d have been laughed right out of the room.

“Queer Eye”, on the other hand, is probably as responsible as any other cultural artifact of the new millenium for the rise in home makeover, fashion and cooking reality shows that now dominate the cable networks and streaming. It used to be that demolition and construction were exclusively straight male pursuits, but on cable TV, much of that work is now done by women and gay men…

But take heart, my forgotten straight male compatriots… no cultural trend lasts forever. And if nothing else, the country still needs us (and our genetic materiel) to provide the next generation of workers to prop up the collapsing American Entitlement system. We’re not going anywhere… they quite literally can’t afford to let us… at least not until some wag figures out how to create babies using synthesized sperm.

Anyway, barring that particular scientific breakthrough, I believe there will come a day when Hollywood will finally remember that we are out here, that we have disposable income and that we too like TV shows and movies. And when they do, perhaps we will finally see a revival of the 80’s man’s man action hero.

Whoa! Hey now, wait just one got-damned minute…

OK look, everyone relax… let’s stay focused here… think about baseball or something… remember, we’re supposed to be the boring ones.

In the meantime… I’ll be over here learning about which mid-century furniture would look best in my rehabbed Victorian Craftsman and making sure I work my hair gel in from the back and not the front. You’re welcome to come on over, but if you wouldn’t mind bringing something to eat, that would be great… perhaps “The Great British Baking Show” on Netflix might provide you with some fun ideas. While you’re at it, maybe check in with “Project Runway” for tips on what to wear.

Until then, toodles!