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Analyzing 'Queer as Folk'

I hope you will allow that good folks and intelligent folks can disagree, especially in matters of taste. I thought that QAF was wonderful, spectacular, rich, satisfying, funny, and seductive. I thought it benefited from americanization, from a kind of lowering if you will, echoing American television's sitcom transparency.

Brian and Justin heat up Queer as Folk

I like my characters as artifacts, not as people, and QAF allows me to keep the distance, watching but not becoming, aching for the image of and sensation associated to, but not feeling the essential experience of character.

I prefer the pseudo-reality of this shallow child of Brecht. I like the absence of angst and grit, the sanitization of skin and hair, the glamorization of sexuality and narcissism. I liked QAF from its corny disco throwback opening graphics to its stagey set pieces like the guys in the gym chatting while idly pumping weights and walking through their dialogue, or Brian and Michael standing clumsily and quite not believably on the balcony, facing a cartoon implication of suicide, to its spectacular sex scenes.

I will watch the incredibly appealing Brian in his gorgeous, moneyed drug haze poised over Justin, almost unaware of Justin's awkward innocence, dealing instead with his own pleasure, over and over again. I crave Brian, because of his sexual hunger and irresponsibility, because of his anger and undeveloped personality. He is the ideal Lestat.

I crave to be Brian when he flings that married smooth-faced thin guy into the toilet and fucks him, when he ignores the guy's stylized protestations about kissing. In this scene, the line of believability is crossed into fantasy more obviously than in most, and the welcome suspension of disbelief, the substitution of image for content, of desire for reality, all these things come together for a moment of, what is for me, a kind of spiritual separation from the rigors of having to live. It is transcendent fantasy, genuinely providing the separation one needs in order to endure the banality of daily life.

Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
Review: Queer As Folk & Queer As Folk 2

A Date With Ellen: Aftershock

Queer As Reporters: The Columnists Weigh In

Related Sites:
Queer as Folk
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The show makes no pretense that it is a show about reality--it is a show about being a gay show, and alternates its characters in a kind of self-conscious, even bad sleight of hand. I am in love with it. I am in love with its cheap audacity. When the Stupid Beauty Justin adorably utters the spectacularly overwrought and hilariously self-satisfied line "I have seen the face of God", I adore him and the object of his affection, laughing out loud in recognition of the cartoon-like, heavy handed and very American irony in his statement of a religious creed. Desire is God, and Brian is His avatar.

And lastly, I think Justin and Brian are both staggeringly well-played by the actors that do these roles, Randy Harrison (Justin) and Gale Harold (Brian). Both of these actors wear their stereotypes like haute couture, showing off their dazzling city money sissy boy looks and their yearning, self-absorbed souls.

Novato
The Badpuppy Forums

The Show's Queer Title

Just in case anyone was dying to know and didn't already, I ran across a bit of trivia as to where the title "Queer As Folk" is derived from:

The title is derived from the British saying, "Nowt queer as folk." The word nowt is a northern dialect word meaning "nothing." Thus, the phrase means "There's nothing as strange as people."

scooterj
The Badpuppy Forums

I Know These Characters

Hal Sparks as Michael
in Queer as Folk

Showtime re-ran the 1st episode last night (good for those of us who were slow switching to SHO from MAX), I really liked the show. It was cumbersome like ANY pilot, as it had to spend a lot of time establishing characters.

It was realistic to me, right here in middle-America. The streets & bar scene looks just like what you see in any large city I've been to in the U.S. On a smaller scale, this plays out in every SMSA which approaches 100,000. I know Brians, I know Michaels, and I know Justins.

Yes, it is a TV show, with all the limitations inherent to the medium, but it's well worth watching on Sunday nights.

Ellipse
Badpuppy Forums