[Ultimately the new Queer as Folk, by telling a wider and more
disparate set of stories, manages to produce a narrative thats broader
and deeper — and significantly queerer — than its predecessors.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘QUEER AS FOLK’ GETS A STILETTO-HEELED REBOOT THAT TAKES TIME TO
FEEL COMFORTABLE  
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Glen Weldon
June 9, 2022
NPR
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_ Ultimately the new Queer as Folk, by telling a wider and more
disparate set of stories, manages to produce a narrative that's
broader and deeper — and significantly queerer — than its
predecessors. _

Brodie (Devin Way) and Ruthie (Jesse James Keitel) are some of the
peacocking queer folk on Peacock's Queer as Folk., Peacock

 

If you've been tasked with rebooting_ Queer as Folk _for the present
day, and wish to stick to the general narrative parameters shared by
both the original U.K. series and the U.S. series that followed (they
ran on Channel 4 and Showtime, respectively, back at the turn of the
century), here's what you will need to bring to the table.

1. A blithe, defiantly melodramatic sensibility (_QaF_ is a soap,
first, last and always) and a cast of ...

2. Queer characters who have explicit sex a tremendous lot, most of
whom are ...

3. Noxiously self-involved if not lightly repellent, yet who somehow
manage to remain surrounded by a tight circle of mystifyingly
supportive friends, all of whom talk in ...

4. Breezy dialogue that tends to lapse into distinctly non-breezy
self-righteous speechifying, and/or ...

5. A fusillade of queer pop-culture references that serve as a series
of dog-whistles to reassure queer audiences that they're represented
in the show's writers room.

Which is to say, both the original U.K. and U.S. series were sexy,
sometimes funny, sometimes moving, but deeply flawed projects. And
while they are to be commended for storytelling that was always less
concerned with chasing mainstream straight acceptance than the _Will
and Grace_-s of the world, both told their stories from a narrow and
familiar point of view that centered the travails of the young, white,
cis gay man with a gym membership.

The new Queer as Folk has broadened the palette, which means it can
tell stories and give voice to characters the old series never could
or did.

The new _Queer as Folk_ has broadened the palette, which means it
can tell stories and give voice to characters the old series never
could or did. Even so, many of the old flaws persist: The characters
are selfish and hopelessly enamored of themselves. Dialogue veers from
an affronted lecture about intersectionality to a really solid joke
about poppers.

What's new, besides the series' matter-of-fact diversity, is how much
the show's creators have clearly thought about depicting its range of
characters and situations, and giving them real reasons to
meaningfully co-exist within the same social circle. The queer
community's tendency to build and police strict silos based on race,
age, body type, gender, income and disability was not something the
old homogenous _Queer as Folk _series felt they needed to address,
and largely didn't.

But the new _Queer as Folk_ eagerly embraces the challenge of
creating a diverse network of characters not merely for the sake of
doing so, but as a means to let them meaningfully interact and
delineate themselves, to variously clash and come together until they
emerge as fuller, more rounded people in the eyes of the viewer.

Fin Argus as Mingus.

Alyssa Moran/Peacock

Some relationships are simple enough to diagram. Brodie (Devin Way) is
a young hot gay man who returns to New Orleans after dropping out of
med school, to the dismay of his adoptive parents, played by Ed Begley
Jr. and, because the universe is beneficent, Kim Cattrall. Brodie is
best friends with Ruthie (Jesse James Keitel), a trans woman who's
married to Shar (CG), a non-binary person who's pregnant with twins.
In the pilot, Brodie selfishly urges Ruthie to join him for a night
out, which she does, selfishly. (You perhaps begin to detect a theme,
here.)

Dialogue veers from an affronted lecture about intersectionality to a
really solid joke about poppers.

There's also Noah (Johnny Sibily), Brodie's ex, who's hiding the fact
that he's been hooking up with Daddius (Chris Renfro) for reasons that
soon become clear. There's Mingus (Fin Argus), one of Ruthie's high
school students who's taking their first steps into embracing drag.
And there's Julian (Ryan O'Connell), Brodie's sardonically nerdy
younger brother who was born with cerebral palsy.

Had the series contented itself with this clutch of characters, it
could have churned through soapy plot turns — betrayals, breakups,
revelations, etc. — in the desultory way the old _QaFs_ did.

But creator Stephen Dunn introduces a controversial element in the
pilot — a mass shooting in a gay club frequented by many of the
above characters, not all of whom survive.

Were this event used simply to dramatize the threat faced by the queer
community, it might come off as tasteless and a bit ham-fisted, maybe
even exploitive. But the series quickly becomes about the
reverberations of that traumatic event, and how it causes the various
characters to spin out in a number of different ways.

And by involving the violation of a queer public space in the
narrative, the series finds a way to neatly incorporate the viewpoints
of characters outside of the already-established friend group — club
patrons like the drag queen Bussey (Armand Fields) and Marvin (Eric
Graise), a guarded, reflexively jaded young man who uses a wheelchair.
Both characters play larger roles as the series goes on, much to the
benefit of the show as a whole.

_QaF_ '22 feels most new and intriguing whenever it devotes
screentime to Graise and O'Connell's characters, because it gives them
room to emerge as people who are both living with
disability _and _horny as hell.

Something else starts happening a few episodes in, which didn't happen
a lot on the old series. Characters get called on their
thoughtlessness. Grudges are held, resentments fester, and ultimately
explode. The world around these characters starts to grow more
complicated.

At Ruthie and Shar's baby shower, Brodie makes a smug speech skewering
his fellow attendees' performative allyship, and Shar cuts him down.
The series is saying here that two things can be simultaneously true:
Brodie's got a point ... _and _he's a jerk.

Mingus, traumatized by the club shooting, impulsively donates all of
their drag. Later, when they see Bussey sporting some of it at a bar,
they drunkenly demand it back, only to be rightly reprimanded for
their preening sense of entitlement. Mingus is both going through
something real ... _and _is_ _a privileged, whiny punk.

At one point Ruthie gets a monologue about how the process of
transitioning intersected, in complicated ways, with her feelings of
sexual attractiveness, and it's a quiet, truthful, revelatory moment
that Keitel sells the hell out of. But she's _also _using the speech
to avoid having to come to terms with the night of the shooting. One
fact does not undercut the other; both resonate.

Similarly, the series is only too aware of how easily public tragedies
can be mined for private gain. The series' most stealthily hilarious
performance is provided by Benito Skinner, whose social media
influencer gloms onto the club shooting and becomes the self-appointed
public face of the tragedy; his character's the source of some of the
series' smartest, most ruthless comedy.

It does take all of these nuances, and others, some time to manifest,
and along the way the series' tone shifts wildly from scene to scene,
sometimes even line to line. It's messy. But ultimately the
new _Queer as Folk_, by telling a wider and more disparate set of
stories, manages to produce a narrative that's broader and deeper —
and significantly queerer — than its predecessors.

_Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on __Apple Podcasts_
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* Queer As Folk
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* queer tv
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* queer representation
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* peacock
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