It is no accident that the beauty industries - the worlds of fashion and makeup - have historically been some of the few real professional spaces that allowed for openly gay men, or those coded as such, and even bestowed on them a measure of celebrity.
This unthreatening character type, which appears in everything from ’80s movies like Mannequin to Queer Eye (old and new) to Sex and the City, helped make gay men respectable by depicting them in service of something other than themselves. The figure of the gay man working behind the scenes to make others - especially women - beautiful, acting as a sounding board and sidekick, has been a dominant trope of queer narratives for decades.
