GLR November-December 2022

TELEVISION

QAF Is Back, and Much Has Changed

I T’S ONE THING for the cast mem bers of a popular TV series to gather one last time for a reunion—think Af terMASH , the much hyped Seinfeld and Friends reunions, and the film spin offs of Sex and the City —but it’s another thing for a TV show to mutate over the course of twenty-plus years. Queer as Folk is unique in this respect. Created by Rus

English eyebrows. That age discrepancy was softened for American viewers, and Justin’s age was raised to seventeen, still unsettling to some. Dunn has done away with all of that—a wise and timely move given that conservatives today are using a scare tactic like “drag queen story hour” and once again accusing gay people of “grooming” America’s youth. Some things

C OLIN C ARMAN

QUEER AS FOLK Created by Stephen Dunn Red Productions, Universal Cable Productions

never change. What has changed is a cast more reflective of today’s soci ety: an excellent Devin Way plays Brodie Beaumont, a medical school dropout and the baby-daddy to an interracial couple, the AFAB (or assigned-female-at-birth) character named Ruthie and her heavily pregnant partner Shar. Shortly after a breakup from Noah (a wooden Johnny Sibilly), Brodie meets Marvin, a disabled man who brags that, despite being in a wheelchair, everything below his waist is in working order. There’s also Mingus (Fin Argus), who prefers they/them pronouns and, as an aspiring drag performer, makes their debut on stage as “Chic

sell T. Davies in 1999, the show first appeared on England’s Channel 4 and was arguably the first prime-time series to dram atize the sex lives of openly gay men. On the strength of its UK success, Queer as Folk was soon repackaged for an American audience in the year 2000, and it ran on Showtime for five con secutive seasons. The characters were transplanted from Man chester, England, to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, but the main plotlines were left intact. The series centered on a close-knit group of five gay men, one lesbian couple, and a brassy diner waitress intensely proud of her gay son Michael and a poster girl for PFLAG .

kee Filet.” Political self-conscious ness sometimes dampens even the steamiest of sex scenes: The pilot opens with a white man bottoming for Noah, who is Black, while moaning: “Let me pay reparations!” Elsewhere in the series, Ruthie is told: “You can be trans and toxic. It’s called intersec tionality, bitch!” Kids these days. Juliette Lewis is a superb actress who plays Judy, a working single mom and Mingus’ fiercest supporter. This mother and son share eyeliner. Lewis made her debut, at the age of eighteen, in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) and has been making even the most mediocre material mar velous ever since. The other maternal powerhouse is played by Kim Cattrall

Johnny Sibilly and Armand Fields in Queer as Folk

(of Sex and the City fame) as Brodie’s mother Brenda. At times the political self-consciousness feels forced and scripted by an intern at MSNBC . Judy picks Mingus up at school and smilingly chides him: “You didn’t have to pull the queer card again? Wow, a D plus that you earned all on your own without weaponizing your marginalization.” Who talks like this? While Americans have grown more comfortable with LGBT storylines, they’ve also grown complacent when it comes to the frequency of mass shootings, particularly those targeted at mi norities. Stephen Dunn is no stranger to trauma. His Closet Monster is an oedipal psychodrama in which a gay teenager pushes his homophobic father in a closet and runs off to a queer costume party. The pilot, which Dunn titled “Babylon” (the

Now, seventeen years after the U.S. series ended, Queer as Folk has gotten yet another makeover. At the helm this time around is Stephen Dunn, writer-director of 2016’s Closet Mon ster . The setting is pushed south and west, this time to New Orleans. But why re-reimagine Queer as Folk in 2022? It’s certainly no clone of its predecessors. Dunn has deliberately dumped the white, cisgender men who dominated the earlier version and opted for a more racially diverse cast. In the orig inal, a fifteen-year-old character named Justin lost his virgin ity to a 29-year-old Brian, which raised more than a few Colin Carman is an assistant professor of English at Colorado Mesa University and author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys . His forthcoming book is titled Jane Austen’s Road to Happiness .

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