What Happens When <em>Queer Eye</em>’s Experts Get Personal

When Netflix’s ,its cuddly fun makeovers came laced with a strange amount of tension: The threat of culture clash always loomed. The first episode opened with the Fab Five introducing themselves to the camera and heading from Gay Street—the New York City landmark in the original series’ —to Georgia. As the confident cosmopolitan quintet entered the dens of the South’s schlumpy and self-doubting, they gave off a feeling of oil being poured into water, or, well, of queer people entering possible zones of intolerance. You were never sure if the subject of any given installment would get along with the guys. In one episode, a rural cop—a friend of the Donald Trump–voting makeover subject—pulled