“He sent a letter to the newspaper that blasted the normalisation of LGBTQ culture, and said we should not be rolling out the welcome mats at a public school,” Van Ness says.
A few weeks before the Fab Five arrived, the school had asked parents to sign permission slips for their children to be on camera, prompting protests from a local pastor. Everyone loves queer people now, even in Quincy.īut what we see on screen is not the whole truth. It’s a moving spectacle that implies a circle has been closed. The cameras show Van Ness performing with the cheerleading squad as students clap and whoop. In season four of Queer Eye, viewers saw Van Ness return to his high school in Quincy to makeover his arts teacher, Cathy Dooley, a beloved figure who stood out for not making him feel different or unusual. “So, you’re telling me you came to this interview not having seen Bring It On? What were you doing?” “I could almost throw you out of the back of this car for asking such a preposterous question,” he says. When I make the faux pas of forgetting who starred in Bring It On, the cult 1999 cheerleading movie, Van Ness gasps. Joining the junior varsity cheerleading squad at high school at 14 was an epiphany – he felt at home immediately. I was terrified.”īut there were pockets of joy, too. “He tore me out of the dress, holding me in the air so that I was perpendicular to the ground. “I remember very clearly my dad finding me in an evening gown with my two cousins,” he says. A particularly painful story conjures his father’s war on his gender exploration. As an adult, he would gravitate to the term “gender queer” to express his place in the world, but that wasn’t an option in childhood. He recalls at the age of four telling his father’s friend that he wanted to be a cabana girl or a cosmetologist when he grew up. What Van Ness knew early on was that the world of women was more interesting to him than the world of men. The other kids, she said, might not let him live it down. At the time, his mother gently suggested he might want to reconsider. The piece, inspired by an ice-skating routine, culminates in a triple-axel-style pirouette that is so wholehearted, so gutsy and so precious that it’s heartbreaking. For the number, he wore a kabuki mask positioned on the back of his head and a baggy black T-shirt emblazoned with a question mark. In it the 11-year old Van Ness performs an interpretative dance to Jewel’s Pieces of You – his entry in the school talent show. We talk about cats – he has four, including Liza Meownelli – and we watch an old video that surfaced late last year on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. “This is Goldie Hawn getting her lips done,” he says, lifting a finger for inspection. ‘On Sundays I sometimes don’t work’: Jonathan Van Ness. We are on Route 95 somewhere outside of Philadelphia and, as we navigate the traffic, we admire his latest manicure, each nail painted to represent a different cast member of the 1996 comedy the First Wives Club, a touchstone for Van Ness. “On Sundays I sometimes don’t work,” he says. Lately, he has learned to meditate as a way to manage his stress. How he finds time to watch so much, know so much, work so much, is a conundrum. A pop culture magpie, he slides from subject to subject and dares you to keep up.
Sitting in the back of a car with someone you’ve never met can be awkward, and I was conflicted. But he’d just received a 24-hour reprieve from work and, shortly before arriving, his publicist suggested I drive back to New York with him. But things are way more fun when Van Ness says them.įor our meeting, I’d taken the train from New York to Philadelphia, where Van Ness was filming an episode of the show, with vague plans to walk to the Liberty Bell. There’s like 15 bajillion eggs in the ovaries and who even knows how many, like, little spermies are in there, so the fact we got to be born and be living this long is kind of like a mathematical who-knew.” This is, I think, a roundabout way of saying we all deserve to be acknowledged. When I ask if any of his encounters on Queer Eye have changed him, he answers: “The act of showing up for your family and being able to live in the world I think is heroic. In the car he talks quickly, words tumbling out of his mouth in a way that can leave you trailing far behind. Van Ness has a hectic, energetic style and a voice that soars high and then higher.
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Looking sharp: the Fab Five from the first series of Queer Eye.