by: Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
Fifteen years ago, more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruling to allow same-sex marriage, Bravo debuted Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
The show combined reality television with home decoration and personal makeovers. And it was a network hit, running for five years. Netflix’s latest update on the show, called simply Queer Eye, is updated and rebooted for 2018.
Just a year after Queer Eye for the Straight Guy debuted in 2003, scholar James Keller analyzed the show’s budding popularity, arguing that the concepts of the “queer eye,” “queer gaze,” and “queer leer” give the show a political subtext, thanks to the show’s successful appropriation of power for the queer community.