Page 273 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

262 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

she does like and watch regularly is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, where
five gay men perform a “makeover” on a straight man, including clothing,
personal grooming, and general living arrangements and lifestyle. The
Interviewer asks:

Interviewer: Okay. How do you reconcile Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
and your Catholicism?
Doreen: Oh, I have a hard time with this. You know we all have Catholic
guilt and I’m a . . . not like a fallen-away Catholic. I’m not shaken in
my faith by the priests and their little go-arounds with young boys and
I think they should be punished and the Church was wrong in hiding
it. My actual Catholic faith has kept me going. My God, look at all
I’ve been through with the kids I had, my heart, my cancer. So my
Catholic faith is the foothold of my life. I’m not too sure, though. Boy,
this is hard. Homosexuality is a hard thing for me because in my
professional life I’ve known several homosexuals and in my personal
life. And I have never met one that has been offensive, abusive to me,
ummm . . . anything but up and up. None of the ones I know have
ever tried to hide it and they have all been very good people doing all
very good things in their lives. Now, I know there are some really
pathetic queers around but fine, there are pathetic human beings who
are straight people. So, I have a hard time for the homosexuals I know,
I have a hard time believing that God will condemn them to Hell and
so . . . I have to put that.... There are several points in my life that I
have to put into a little pocket somewhere and not try to justify it
because I can’t. But I just don’t feel that I should, I don’t know, gays
don’t bother me. They never have.

On one level, this is an intriguing demonstration of how social change
occurs. The gradual connection Doreen has had with gay co-workers and
others in her own life has begun to erode some of the suspicions she may
once have held. It also demonstrates how the interview moment often
brings people to articulations of senses of themselves and their place in the
web of social relations that may be new or evolving. She clearly struggles
with received preconceptions (derived both from social and religious
contexts) about acceptance of homosexuality, and at the same time realizes
the ways that such conceptions run up against what may be a more basic
value – that of acceptance and tolerance.
On another level, it shows how the media do function to express (and
perhaps enforce) trends and values in the larger culture. Doreen’s
expressed ideas about homosexuality may derive in some measure from
her direct and personal experience, but Queer Eye may provide her with a
broader context and more to think about. Alongside the more formal
contexts of discourse about gay rights, such as in the political sphere, her