"Nip/Tuck"'s Gay Paradox

In Nip/Tuck’s latest season, we learned what, in part, has driven teenage psychopath/nymphomaniac Eden Lord to the depths of her vileness: the catty comments of her gay best friend Chaz Darling, played by Queer Eye’s Jai Rodriguez, a judgmental body Nazi.

Christian, Chaz

And as more minor gay male characters began to pepper the show, they were often used as visual punchlines to jokes, which, in the eyes of Nip/Tuck’s producers, seemed to require they be as queeny and stereotypical as possible. When Christian poses naked in Playgirl in an attempt to drum up plastic surgery business, it’s not women who show up at the office, but a string of leering, lisping, ascot-wearing queens.

A Lisping, Mincing Oliver Platt
Then there is the surreal case of Freddy Prune, played by Oliver Platt, the creator of Hearts N’ Scalpels, Nip/Tuck’s fifth season show-within-a-show (and a self-referential parody of their own show). The lover of Dawn Budge, a blunt lottery winner played (to perfection) by Rosie O’Donnell, Freddy reads as “gay” as one of Samantha’s funny uncles on Bewitched, and about as contemporary. The wink-wink-nudge-nudge joke, of course, is that everyone knows he’s gay, except for himself and poor Dawn.

How does Freddy eventually comes to terms with being gay? In typical Nip/Tuck fashion, it's by having a finger put in his rectum by Jack Plotnick's Ass Bandit, who, in a still-unresolved storyline, pretends to be a doctor so he can digitally rape patients.

"I love the character Oliver Platt plays," Plotnick said. "There are gay men like that. He hits it right on the nose, and he gives it so much heart."

But how has Freddy gone all this time not knowing he’s gay? And how is that he’s surprised, even in his forties, that some people assume he’s gay? Since Freddy Prune is just the punchline to multi-episode joke, the show doesn’t bother taking the character seriously enough to say.

Then again, Freddy Prune, like most of Nip/Tuck’s gay characters, is probably no more stereotypical or ridiculous than any of the other characters on the show. The whole point of Nip/Tuck is to shock and provoke, and (most of all) draw attention to itself. After all, women are usually portrayed as scheming and sex-obsessed, and they often end up getting killed or tortured. African Americans are often hyper-sexual, and southerners are usually simpletons.

But lest anyone accuse Nip/Tuck of being hateful toward minorities, keep in mind that its two narcissistic, egocentric straight male leads aren’t portrayed as “cool” ala a Quentin Tarantino film, but are, instead, repeatedly shown to be pathetic and ridiculous (though, admittedly, these straight male characters are not reinforcing existing prejudices about all men, at least not the same way that the female and minority characters are).

The point is, to the show's great credit, gay people actually exist in the universe of Nip/Tuck, and not just as plastic surgery patients. If they’re stereotypical, maybe it’s because all the other characters are stereotypes too.

“All the characters are over-the-top and damaged and broad,” said Damon Romine, Entertainment Media Director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, who says that his organization has never received an official complaint about the show. “It’s a soap opera. Nip/Tuck is as much about plastic surgery as Dallas was about oil.”

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