Ask the Flying Monkey! (January 04, 2010)

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Send it to aftereltonflyingmonkey@yahoo.com! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

Q: Am I wrong or does the latest episode of Nip/Tuck send a very negative representation of the gay community, and the idea of gay marriage and adoption? – Dan, Rochester NY

A: A negative representation of the gay community just because they do an episode about an adoptive boy who gets plastic surgery so he’ll look more like his father so it’ll be more of a turn-on for the crowds of rich gay men who watch them perform in their live incest sex show?

Nip/Tuck's disturbing chip off the old block

Well, okay, but that’s just one gay storyline of this season, right? It’s not like they also did an explicit storyline about brutal prison rape, or one where a wildly promiscuous transgender woman decides she was wrong to get sexual-reassignment surgery and wants to be a man again – only to decide, whoops! she was wrong about that too (because she can’t get laid anymore), and wants to have most of that surgery reversed.

Incidentally, I hope Candis Cayne is enjoying the thirty pieces of silver they must have paid her to appear in one of the most mind-bogglingly transphobic storylines I’ve ever seen on television.

Candis Cayne's character (and dignity) goes under the scalpel

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the defenses of Nip/Tuck: all the characters in the show are screwed up, not just the gay ones, and they’re not reinforcing gay stereotypes – they’re parodying them! (In fact, I wrote a whole article two years ago basically defending the show.)

But Nip/Tuck started losing me the season I wrote that article – not just on gay issues, but on everything they do. The show isn’t just ridiculous and stupid, it’s pathetic. Not surprisingly, the ratings now completely suck, and the critical community has totally tuned them out.

So why I am I still watching it?

Truthfully, it currently has an interesting kind of train wreck quality to it. The show’s modus operandi has always been to shock and offend (and, thus, draw attention to itself), but what happens when you say and do the most outrageous things you can think of – but still, no one cares? You either reinvent yourself, or you become Mae West, who was still telling sex jokes and trying to act like a sex symbol well into her 80s.

That’s Nip/Tuck: the boozy old broad in the uneven bleached blond wig who everyone is just too embarrassed to tell to give it a rest.

Next page! Lance Bass and his cavalcade of handsome suitors.