Coming to an End

Queer as Folk's Last Hurrah

I finally got to see the first two episodes of the final season of Queer as Folk--I missed the actual two-hour premiere because my hotel in D.C. didn't have Showtime, but fortunately Comcast's On Demand picks up each episode right after it airs.

It wasn't as good as I hoped--are the first episodes of new seasons of shows we await with bated breath ever as good as we hope?--but it still reminded me why I watch, and love, this show. As the writer of the article above says, "After I inhaled the 22 episodes of that first season over about a week of intensive viewing, I remember going to the supermarket and feeling completely disoriented when the whole world wasn’t gay. That was the real contribution that Queer as Folk made: it normalized queerness, and made heterosexuality seem totally bizarre."

That's what this show does--for an hour or two, it allows me to slip into a world where I don't think about the way I look at other people, or catch myself before I allow my eyes to follow an attractive fellow all the way down the grocery aisle, or consider whether it will be odd for my sister's wedding guests that there will be a man sitting next to me at the family table. It allows me to inhabit a world where everyone is gay and yet everyone knows and understands what it's like to deal with the heterosexual world, even if it seems to happen only when needed as a plot device.

It will never win Emmys; a lot of the things it depicts probably make even GLAAD cringe. But if I could only keep one of the series with which I've been obsessed these last years, Queer as Folk is nonetheless the show that I would choose. When I didn't know quite who I was going to be and how I would handle my sudden realization that I was gay and there was no turning back, the knowledge that this show existed gave me hope. Now that I know what I know, watching the trashy exploits of the characters gives me a window on another part of the gay world and lets me see people in similar situations to my own. (Let's face it, David and Keith on Six Feet Under are a whole level of dysfunction away from where I'm prepared to go.) Beyond that, the show pushed me toward Morrissey and The Smiths when "How Soon is Now" played over the end credits of a first-season episode, a push that eventually made "Shoplifters of the World Unite" one of my favorite songs.

Maybe someday the words of that song will come true, and we "shoplifters" will unite and take over. When we do, maybe there will be more shows where you can see a man kiss another man and not have the camera pull away immediately, where you can see two women expressing their love for one another and have it treated as naturally as any Hollywood movie might treat man-woman sexuality. Until that day, I'm going to miss my weekly dose of Queer as Folk.