Queer Eye season 2 review: Glorious new episodes reinforce the power of gayness

“The original show was fighting for tolerance, our fight is for acceptance,” is one of the opening lines of Queer Eye season one, which debuted to smash success earlier this year.

The show, a reboot of the mid-naughties original minus the suffix of “For The Straight Guy” in the title, follows five variant gay men who arrive in, for the most part, a heterosexual man’s life to blitz their home, their wardrobe, their food habits (if a diet of avocado is a food habit), their beauty regimen and their soul.

It’s Ground Force meets RuPaul's Drag Race, and when it came back in February few people expected a show built on the archaic and superficial premise of the reality TV makeover to actually be any good. But we were wrong: these five men, or the Fab Five as they’re named with a tongue in a cheek, were plonked in what might initially appear as tense scenarios — screaming their way into tiny towns in Georgia, making over dump-truck drivers or avid Trump supporters — mining the kindness and the heart from these men they were meeting who just needed to, as cliched as it is, love themselves a little more.

There on our screens, we saw what we so rarely see: the head-on collision of avid difference and painful opposition resulting not in awful homophobia but instead in a real process of growth, of learning, of upending our classist assumptions that all Southern State straight men are tobacco-chewing meatheads who want to kill the gays. The Fab Five also offer a fairly decent line in busting certain gay stereotypes too: among them there’s a spectrum of personalities, of interests, of campness, and, while it seems we’ve come a long way, the value of diverse representation of gayness on screen is, for many young LGBTQIA+ folk, potentially life-saving.

Set once again in Georgia, the second season follows the exact same premise as the first. Eight episodes, eight different case studies: from the Mexican bartender Leo who refuses to grow up to the homeschooled Sean who just needs a little bit of confidence.

The format, the unexpected weeping (just me?) and the sites for learning, loving and growth all abounded in pretty much the same way as in season one. It was still beautiful, but, for the most part, no longer harnessed that wonderfully febrile feeling of the unknown or the unexpected because we’d seen season one. We knew the Fab Five were going to serve up a beautifully emotional breakdown alongside a stunning home makeover.

The initial tension felt slightly less amped save for two episodes, however, which were built around a different subject. After critiques that the fab five only focussed on making over cis men in season one, they listened with episode one following the makeover of the beautiful Tammye — a glorious Godly woman with a gay son who just gives and gives and never makes time for herself.

The Fab Five arrived and the tears flooded in all directions. They built her a community centre, they coached her son through a return to church (a little uncomfortable, but beautiful no less), and they made Tammye feel like a “diva” at her request.

Episode five centred on the story of Skyler, a trans man who had just undergone top surgery. While parts of the episode saw Skyler doing lots of labour, the Fab Five pushed him to try certain things — like wearing a suit tailored for his body or changing his gender marker on his ID card. “I feel more comfortable in this moment than I’ve ever felt in my life,” was Skyler’s closing quote, however, and this particular story highlighted the things many take for granted that become a daily obstacle for many trans folk.

These two episodes were particularly stand out because they offered both the viewer and the Fab Five a chance to learn something new. We got an eye into the trans experience, which opened the eyes of the Fab Five too, and we got to finally see gay men giving back to women on screen rather than taking their labour and calling them fag hags while doing it.

Yes, the show is built on a complicated politic for many LGBTQIA+ people: it’s one which deifies acceptability over radicalness, it priorities a kind of anodyne gayness that says “we’re just like you, in every way, we just happen to f*** dudes,” and the whole thing is centred on the capitalist trope that to be better you must have better things, you must shed the markers of being working class because ultimate success in life looks like having a stunning home and great clothes.

Upon endless conversations with my queer peers, this is something felt fairly ubiquitously. But then, in the back of our minds, there’s the little queer kid who was only ever seeking acceptance. There’s the little queer kid who has had terrible experiences with masculinity being shown that perhaps, in some faraway state in the American South, we can be celebrated for our gifts rather than rejected for our difference.

Foucault once wrote (lol), “there is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.” If Queer Eye, for all its complex politics and potential reductions of the gay experience, shows us anything: it’s that we as queers have value, have beauty to share and boundless experiences to be learned from.

Yes, not every subject in the show wants to be gay (although that would be brilliant: a mass expungement of heterosexuality), but they all unanimously learn more about themselves over the course of a week from these five fab gay guys, than a lot of them have in their whole lives. It’s a show that reminds us of first the power of difference, and second the power of gayness. And, in a world where both things have become huge sites of conflict, Queer Eye is urgency disguised as frippery, as acceptance Trojan Horsing as entertainment, and it’s absolutely gay and glorious.