Wesley’s episode is ‘Queer Eye’ at its most complex

Watching Queer Eye on Netflix has been a recipe for a good, hard cry since its very first episode. There’s something about seeing those five hot, friendly gay men throw buckets of money and labor at deserving people that makes anyone with a heart turn on the waterworks. Beyond its makeover format, however, many of Queer Eye’s most tearjerking moments occurr when a “hero” confronts the psychological and emotional blocks that informed their behavior and has an on-screen breakthrough on what’s been causing them pain.

Some Queer Eye heroes learn to write nice things about themselves on the wall to combat their internalized self-hatred and shame. Others go to a dance class and understand the importance of valuing their romantic partners. And then there’s Episode 2 of Season 4, in which Karamo Brown facilitates a filmed meeting between a wheelchair-using hero and the man who went to prison for shooting and paralyzing him. 

Just to back up and explain how Queer Eye went from “boosting a random farmer’s self-confidence” to “confronting the specter of gun crime in the African-American community,” the hero in Episode 2 “Disabled But Not Really” is Wesley Hamilton, a single father who was shot and paralyzed from the waist down six years ago. Wesley, who uses a wheelchair to get around, founded an organization that encourages a “physically limitless mindset that breeds courage, confidence, and competence” for disabled people through athletics, and needs a little help from the Fab Five to get him to a place where he felt he could shed the “old” Wesley and move on with the new. 

In fantastic Queer Eye fashion, the Fab Five swoop in andwork their magic on Wesley’s life. Bobby redoes his entire house to be accessible for Wesley’s chair, Jonathan encourages him to cut the long hair he’d grown since the day of the shooting, Antoni teaches him how to put supermarket rotisserie chicken on a salad (yeah), and Tan buys him a new wardrobe tailored with shirts and pants that won’t get caught on his wheels.

Many of these efforts have been praised online by the disabled community as examples of the Fab Five listening to a wheelchair user’s actual needs even as some elements of the episode have drawn criticism. The Fab Five referring to Wesley as “our most inspirational hero ever” leans heavily towards inspiration porn, and the language around Wesley’s organization Disabled But Not Really can be read as interpreting disability and competence as opposites, but the Five’s material efforts are undeniable positives for Wesley and his daughter. 

Enter Karamo Brown. Karamo’s training as a social worker and powerful insights into the human condition have been the source of many Queer Eye heroes’ bigger breakthroughs. While Jonathan and Tan change the outside of the heroes, Karamo encourages them to examine what’s holding them back internally, which is how he brought Wesley face-to-face with Maurice, the man who shot him, in a coffee shop meeting that was the first time the men had spoken since the shooting.

In , Karamo said that the discussion between Wesley and Maurice was several hours long and cut down to a few brief minutes for the episode. He also says that both Wesley and Maurice were reluctant to go to the meeting but relented after he convinced them it would be “a constructive conversation so you can both get closure.” From what Queer Eye viewers see, both men discuss the events of that night in candid terms and eventually come to a point where Wesley thanks Maurice for shooting him, saying that his life changed for the better after he was paralyzed. 

There was no way the Queer Eye format could fully portray the nuance required to understand the complexities of Wesley and Maurice’s confrontation.

It’s hard to imagine a more important conversation for either Wesley or Maurice to have. While it’s possible they may have gotten there without Queer Eye’s intervention, the fact that such a high-stakes emotional confrontation was cut into a short, neat segment on a makeover show sits poorly in the mind. Countless layers of meaning exist in any room where gun violence, black masculinity, disability, fatherhood, blame, and misunderstanding inform the topics of discussion, and the personal depth of that conversation feels like more than any stranger watching at home should be privy to. 

To Karamo’s credit, his facilitation between Wesley and Maurice seems to be what guided both men both to the table and to a point of understanding and his handling of the situation at its face is commendable. That situation, however, perhaps should not have been one in which the cameras lingered for as long as they did. If people want to show their messy houses and spandex catsuit collections to the Netflix audience, so be it, but there was no way the Queer Eye format could fully portray the nuance required to understand the complexities of Wesley and Maurice’s confrontation.

Regardless of what the producers could have done to afford these men more privacy, the episode is out there in the world today. Wesley has even given a few interviews and praised his experience with the Fab Five and Maurice. Still, one hopes that this episode doesn’t become the first envelope push towards making Queer Eye heroes venture into dangerous emotional territory that the show can’t actually support. Queer Eye already delivers enough feels as is, and there’s no need for one of the last good reality TV shows to become a parade of impositions.