How queer can Queer As Folk be as Showtime’s hottest series? It depends. If you are an activist transsexual lesbian fighting for a seat on the city council to represent sexual minorities, it probably offers nothing much. Yet, this show wants to be everything to everybody as the edgiest gay show in an explosion of television shows with gay characters. There's even a current documentary about the show on VH1. As the new episodes unfold, the show seems to be guided by the iconography it has created, glossy ads and media attention.
Season four resolves plot hangovers from season three faster than you can say "gay soap opera." Liberty Avenue remains the fictionalized, apparently all-white Pittsburgh gayborhood where straights are most often one-dimensional villains and gays can become comic book heroes, when they are not enacting scenes from the queer Our Town.
As much as the show's writers and producers seem to work every GLTB & Q(uestioning) gay issue into the storyline, sacrificing dimensional character development, their scope seems limited. Nothing steers them completely away from genuflecting at the trendy stations of the gay male cross (the club, the gym, the parties, the meat-rack) as the perpetual backdrop to queer current events.
All is hedonistically well in the cruising district thanks to backdoor adman Brian Kinney (Gale Harold) who has saved Liberty Avenue for dancing, drugs and sex and even, for the more socially adventurous, gay families and gay pride. Even though Brian lost everything exposing homophobia in the police department, he is back on top with his own agency called Kinnetik (named by his ex-ex Justin). Kinney is thrown a real curve ball with a bit of news revealed at the end of one of his countless trysts. (Great visuals when Kinney flees the sex club in lights that make his face look like Rage from Michael’s comic book.)
Meanwhile, thinking out of the box is a breath of fresh air when Emmett (Peter Paige) (shaking off his animus toward his old boyfriend Ted Schmidt) and perpetual nice guy Michael Novotny (Hal Sparks) go off to find their inner queers (Dumpling and ClearDay, respectively) at a gay spiritual retreat where they dress as fairies (mid-tranny nightwear) and there are bonfire "love-circles." For the less zenned out on camp, there’s always nude volleyball.
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Queer As Folk: The Fourth Season
