Naturally Tan Page 18

  My real friends are people I’ve known for years. I love them, and I know that they love me for me. The quickest way to lose my trust in friendship is by asking to take advantage of my work. That’s a downside I wasn’t expecting. I think anybody who is in this industry or anybody who has acquired wealth probably experiences this, and it’s really hurtful. I’d like to believe I would never do that to a friend, and so it’s harsh when someone does it to you and puts your relationship into question.

  I love that you might be asking in my DMs if we can hang out. “We both live in Utah; can we go for dinner?” but the answer has to be no. You wouldn’t send that to any other stranger, so you shouldn’t send it to me. It would be highly unwise of me to say yes, to think that since we live in the same state, we should be best friends and we should go to dinner. You’ve got to understand that doesn’t make sense.

  I love when people feel like they have a connection with me, but making friends with somebody I’ve never met before is a huge risk. Will I be so happy if I meet you in the street? Absolutely. Will I smile and give you a hug and be thankful? Yes. But I’m the most boundaried person in general, and now I really have to be. I love and I trust the friends that I have. They’re my rocks, and I know they’ll be with me when all of this is over. They’re ride-or-die bitches.

  I’m not massively concerned about fancy cars, homes, jewellery … those things don’t faze me. I’m not a materialistic kind of person. Of course there are some clothes or a bag I’ll think is nice. But then I’ll look at the price tag and think, “That’s about a month’s wages for my family,” and I’ll get an icky feeling. I pray I never get over that. I would feel I’d lost myself if I spent a fortune on things I would wear once, knowing that could make a difference to a family member’s entire year. So I’m sticking with what I know and appreciate—accessibility. Does that mean I won’t happily go to a major designer show and support their art, or borrow a piece of designer clothing for the red carpet? No. I still love me some fashion moments.

  In my early to midtwenties, I used to say, “I’ll know I’ve made it when I can fly first class every time I fly, not just for business.” For me, that was the mark of success. Does it still feel that way? Kinda. As soon as that happened, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to be all right.”

  I feel very, very lucky to be able to fly first class, especially if it’s lie-down; it absolutely makes a difference to my travel experience. I will say, though, even now, every time I get to board first and get into my seat, I think, Little Tan would be freaking his shit out right now if only he could see this.

  NATURALLY TAN

  The reaction to Netflix’s Queer Eye has been very positive. For me, this was relatively unexpected. Up until this point, there hasn’t been another South Asian person on such a grand stage, and the support hasn’t just come from the South Asian community but from all communities.

  Within a few days of the show airing, I had hundreds upon hundreds of comments from people thanking me for being me. “Thank you for not hiding any aspect of yourself!” Whether it’s the gay side or the brown side, it’s true that I am completely myself.

  Now, all over the world, I get to hear people tell me how lovely it is to see themselves represented on television. Recently, I collaborated on a video with the comedian Hasan Minhaj, and while we were at a press event, I saw a brown journalist sit there smiling the entire time while watching the video. He said, “This must be what it feels like to be a white person watching TV. To see yourself.” It’s not that the people you see are exactly like you, but you know they understand you on a certain level. You feel represented in a different way.

  And when he sits there smiling, I truly understand how he feels. When I watched our show for the first time, even though I was watching myself, I felt represented. I thought, This is surreal. I’m not playing a taxi driver, I’m not playing a terrorist, I’m not playing a doctor. I’m just a regular Pakistani guy whose voice is heard.

  When I saw the movie Crazy Rich Asians, I loved that it was one of the highest-grossing movies of the year with an all-Asian cast. It just goes to show you, just because the lead isn’t white doesn’t mean a project won’t do well.

  I hope that our show and others like it continue to open up more options for people like me. Why can’t the lead or the heartthrob in a movie be a person of South Asian descent? Why can’t they cast people from all different backgrounds, not to fill some diversity quota but because a person from a different pool can be desirable also? I hope that increased representation can continue to encourage the idea that beauty doesn’t just belong to Caucasian people. Not just in terms of physical beauty but in terms of everything we have to offer.

  When I was younger, I struggled with this idea. Whenever a child is born in the South Asian community, the first question people ask is, “Are they fair?”

  This question—about whether the baby’s skin is light coloured—comes before anything else, even before inquiring about their sex. I’ve heard it so many times from family members.

  “Oh! Aisha just had a baby!”

  “How fair was the child?”

  I’ve heard it a million times, and everyone else in my community has also.

  Or an elder will turn up and say, quite openly, “Gosh, they’re cute, but they’re very dark.” Then they’ll immediately offer little tips and tricks—like covering them with turmeric paste—to try to lighten them up.

  People assume being male is important—and it is—but that question comes second. Only after you’ve determined whether or not the baby is fair-skinned do you determine whether or not the baby is a boy. People want their firstborn to be a son, which is archaic. But being a fair-skinned male is the best.

  As a kid, this will fuck you up.

  It’s a really weird thing in the South Asian community, but it’s not unique to ours. I’ve seen it in the Black community, in the Asian community, in the Middle Eastern community …

  It’s amazing how people of colour can be some of the most racist people you’ll come across. It’s not because they fear or hate other people of colour; it comes from a place of status and class, and how you don’t want your place to be misrepresented, and from subconsciously assuming that white is “better” because there are greater opportunities for white people.

  From a very young age, I was frightfully aware of my skin tone and how it “should” be fair, and how if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be in good social standing. I had been conditioned by the subconscious beliefs of my family and the people around me, and South Asian media at large, to believe that if I wasn’t fair, I wouldn’t have a happy life. There’s a belief that if you aren’t pale, you won’t get married because no one wants to risk having a dark-skinned baby.

  One of my best friends in the UK is Bengali and has beautiful dark skin. One of my family members saw us together when I was a teenager and said, “That’s fine if that’s just his friend, but she’d better not be his girlfriend, because they might have dark children.” (Little did they know!) Never mind that this is the most stunning woman you will see! To this day, I know people back home who are single and still lightening their skin because there is a belief that, in order to get married, you need to lighten as much as possible to increase your desirability.

  We want so desperately for our children to marry someone who is white, but they must not marry an actual white person. “Find someone who is pale as snow,” we are told, “but she must identify as South Asian.”

  The importance of being pale is very bizarre. The people around me certainly didn’t intend to pass on this belief, but I was aware of it and affected by it just the same. Culturally, you’ll see white people on TV, you’ll see a plethora of billboards in the Middle East and in Asia that are focused on lightening or bleaching your skin. When I was five, I remember thinking, God, I’d give anything to be white. I just want to be white, I want to be white, I want to be white. I had been so conditioned to think that if you were white, you were automatically
more attractive.

  I wasn’t dark, but I did hear comments about others from my extended family. So when I was ten years old, I used to bleach my skin. I actually stole the cream from one of my cousins who used it often. To this day, I haven’t had the balls to tell her I took it, because, since then, I’ve been ashamed of the fact that I succumbed to the pressure. No one else knew I was using it. I didn’t want family to know, as they were so sweet and accepting that I knew they would have stopped me because they thought I didn’t need it. I kept the dirty little secret to myself. I’d only use it at night, before bed, when no one else was going to catch me.

  Let me tell you, that shit hurts.

  Around the same time, there was a girl named Rachel in my class at school who used to go on holiday every summer and get so brown. To this day, I’ve never seen a white person get so brown. When she got back from vacation, so many people were envious of it. I remember thinking, White people love this shit. So maybe I’m not the devil because I’m brown? Thankfully, I matured, and the bleaching wasn’t something I wanted to sustain.

  Now, if you ask me what my favourite thing about my appearance is, I’ll say my skin. I think my skin colour is beautiful. As a ten-year-old, I could never have imagined that you could find my skin colour beautiful, and I’m willing to bet most nonwhite people have thought the same thing. That is a sorry state of affairs.

  Sometimes I still have thoughts like, I shouldn’t sunbathe, or where I’ll look in the mirror and think, Gosh, you look dark. That’s a shitty thought to have. I shouldn’t go outside today. No one should ever feel that way.

  Growing up, the other kids made fun of my siblings and me, and it came from both sides. The other brown kids would say we were coconuts—brown on the outside, white on the inside—because even though we were brown, we sounded white. At home, English was our first language, unlike a lot of the other families in our community, who learned Urdu or Hindi or Arabic first. We also watched a lot of Western TV shows, like Saved by the Bell, and because of this, our vocabulary was more expansive than the other South Asian kids in our community.

  On the phone, you can usually tell if someone is South Asian, but with me and my family, there was no way of knowing. The other brown kids said I sounded like a white person and made fun of me in a playful way.

  Meanwhile, due to the colour of our skin, we weren’t accepted in white culture. So we didn’t quite fit in anywhere.

  My parents thought if we perfected our English and could sound as non-regional as possible, we would be better off. In England, if you have a very strong regional accent, people sometimes assume you’re not well educated. I saw value in sounding non-regional from a very young age, because your accent does hold some weight, especially in the UK job market. Now, the one question I get from English people more than any other is, “Where are you from?” because they can’t figure it out based on my accent. Whenever I hear this, I’m like, Well done, Tan.

  My untraceable accent has occasionally caused some confusion in negative ways, as well. I was once told, “You speak English very well,” by another English person. I remember saying, “Are you fucking kidding me? Of course I speak English well, I’m English.” I think it was meant as a compliment, when really, it was so incredibly offensive.

  People can be just as offensive in the US, too. Back when I worked at Shade, I often ate at a place called Taco Amigo, a little standalone fast-food joint on a busy street in Pleasant Grove, Utah. I usually ate with a colleague of mine named Caroline, and the same woman was always behind the counter to greet us.

  I went there almost every day to order my lunch, and every single time, she spoke really slowly to me.

  “Hi, how are you?” I’d say.

  “Iiiiiiiii’m fiiiiiiiiine,” she’d reply. “Howwwwarrrrre youuuuu?”

  “I’m well, thanks. May I please have a taco bowl?”

  This is the part where she wouldn’t only speak slowly to me but would also use Spanish words.

  “Whaaaaaaat kiiiiiind of pollo doooo you want?”

  “No chicken. I’ll just have the beans, thank you.”

  “Are you suuuuure? No (pause) meat? (Pause.) Ve-ge-tar-i-an?”

  “No, I’m not a vegetarian. And, as a reminder, I speak very good English.”

  This is the part where she finally spoke in a regular tone.

  “Oh my gosh! I forgot! Every time I see you, I forget that I can speak English!”

  These instances were such a casual version of racism; it was insane. You could knock me down ten pegs with just that one thing, assuming I needed someone to slow down for me. It was a real kick in the dick.

  Finally, one day I went to Taco Amigo and the woman did the same thing, and at this point I’d had enough. “I just need you to understand that I speak English better than you!” I said. “And you are slowing me down.”

  I got the same exact reaction as I’d had every other week (“Oh my gosh! I forgot! I thought I was helping you!”). I knew that she wasn’t being malicious; she was just culturally insensitive. I also knew that if I ever went back, it would happen again. So I never returned.

  To any person who speaks differently to someone else just because they aren’t white, I have to say, you deserve whatever response you get.

  I do feel hopeful that we’re moving in a positive direction. We’ve got a heck of a long way to go, but if you asked me twenty years ago if I thought something like our show would happen in my lifetime, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Even when the original Queer Eye came on the scene fifteen years ago, if you’d asked me what would happen if they took away Carson Kressley and threw in a South Asian man instead, I would have told you that wasn’t a show that anybody would watch.

  When I was growing up, there weren’t any people in the media who were my colour and also seen as desirable. I’m so glad that we’re now finally getting to a point where more kinds (and shapes and colours) of people are being celebrated. There are more South Asian people on TV now than there used to be, but I’d like to see so much more of it.

  When we did our press tour in the UK, Karamo pointed out how much more colour was presented in ads and media in the UK, and in Europe in general. We would notice so many people of colour in various campaigns, and it felt much more balanced than here in the US, where there will be a predominantly white advertisement with one token person of colour. It’s like they’re trying to meet their quota. I think a lot of times, the media will think, Well, we’ve got a black person, so we’ve covered all the bases! But having diversity doesn’t mean just one black person. It means multiple people, where all races are represented. Until we get to that point, we don’t need to call out, “Well done, everyone!” What about Latinos and Middle Easterners and Asians?

  I’m so fucking glad that I’m on a show that’s been met with so much acceptance from so many places, because I want it to be seen by kids who can say, “Tan’s on TV, and he’s doing fine. People want to shag him, so maybe they’ll want to shag me, too.” I would have killed to have had that when I was a kid. Just because I’m brown, that doesn’t take me out of the game.

  I hope that in my lifetime, a show like Queer Eye becomes archaic. I hope that there comes a time when there is no need to talk about being queer or gay or Muslim, when “Me Too” is no longer a thing, and racism is no longer happening. I pray we get to a time when all of this feels obsolete.

  DMS

  On a typical day, I receive anywhere between five hundred and eight hundred direct messages from people on Instagram. Most are lovely, and though I don’t have time to answer the majority of them, I will answer as many as possible each day. Then there are always a handful—certainly not the majority—that are not so nice. And these questions get asked over and over and over again. Here’s what I fantasize about saying, if I weren’t trying to be so inoffensive all the time …

  Where do you get your highlights done?

  How? How can you think these are highlights? Look how short the sides of my
hair and my beard are. There’s no way I could keep up with highlights on those. No, these are not highlights. I’m just getting old.

  Why do you think it’s okay to be so affectionate with the other boys when you’re a married man?

  Ugh, thank gosh you were considerate enough to ask this in such a nonjudgmental way. I’m so glad you asked about my marriage and what works for us. My marriage is, of course, your business, completely. But now I have a question for you: Why can’t I be affectionate with the other boys? Women aren’t judged for being so affectionate with their friends, so why can’t I be so with my friends? This question says way more about you than it does me.

  Why does your accent sound fake?

  That’s because it is. I’m actually from a small town in Alabama, but I learned to do a wishy-washy North England accent many years ago and used it to land the job on Queer Eye. I’m now stuck with speaking this stupid way forever.

  Why don’t you just stick with fashion and being gay instead of getting political about a country that’s not even your own?

  Oh my gosh, I can already tell that you and I going to be great friends. You think because I’m on a show, that’s all I have thoughts about? That I can’t possibly have other opinions because I’ve chosen my career and we’re only allowed one discussion point—fashion? Do you ever talk about politics? And if so, do your friends ever tell you to STFU because you’re actually a banker/teacher/plumber/whatever and so that’s all you’re allowed to have an opinion on? No? Then STFU.

  How can I nominate my dad for the show?