Boys to Men is an interview series featuring conversations between author Thomas Page McBee and some of our favorite men about learning — and unlearning — masculinity.
If you’ve ever watched Queer Eye on Netflix, odds are you’ve witnessed Karamo (formerly Brown, he no longer uses his last name) comforting a guy through a teary emotional breakthrough. Karamo, the 39-year-old “culture expert,” has an uncommon openness, and a near-mystical ability to get cis men to talk about their feelings. In a culture where men are socialized away from empathy, listening, affection, and asking for help, Karamo’s scenes are instruction manuals: How-tos that unlock in even the most hardened guy a forgotten self. All that is repressed and rejected, hurt and vulnerable, reemerges and Karamo—like the dad so many of us never had—looks the guy in the eye and really sees him. I find his work on the show beautiful.
Karamo, who is engaged to the director Ian Jordan, is the father of two sons, and so he has a vested interest in reimagining masculinity. He is a fervent believer in the power of dialogue, a perspective that has landed him in hot water (recently, he received blowback for after calling the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, his Dancing with the Stars co-star, “sweet”), but has also been the driving force behind the most healing moments in Queer Eye. Karamo, a black gay man, has lived his entire adult life in the public eye, beginning with his appearance on The Real World: Philadelphia 15 years ago. I talked to him about how he handled Sean Spicer on set, when he first realized he was a guy, and how to apologize.
And it should be said: He did, on more than one occasion, make me tear up. Magic.
Thomas Page McBee: On Queer Eye you encourage men to be brave in ways that aren't typically encouraged in our culture, like being vulnerable and asking for help. How did you maintain these qualities that boys are socialized out of? Or did you have to find your way back to them?
Karamo: I would love to say that at a young age I had the tools to be able to be a part of conversations about toxic masculinity, but when I was growing up, those conversations weren’t happening on TV or in my community or in my household. So for me, it started with recognizing when somebody was stopping me from feeling.
I played sports, and I noticed that when I would get hurt, they would tell me to walk it off; and when a female athlete would get hurt, everyone would huddle around them. I remember thinking, "Well, why do I have to stop my pain, but this person gets to say, 'Hey, I need support and I need love?'"
Today, in my adult life, when I feel someone's stopping me from feeling, I ask them why. That’s what I've been doing since about my twenties: I acknowledge the moment, and then I ask a question.
TPM: Was there any particular impetus to you realizing the constricting aspects of masculinity?
Karamo: I think by the time that I got to college, I had gotten to the point where I was completely fed up. As a 6'2'' African-American male who also identified as gay, I had this idea that I had to pick a side: You either have to be feminine or you have to be masculine. And I remember having a deep internal struggle about that, because at home with friends I wouldn't feel like I had to seem more masculine. I could just be myself. It was freeing, and I felt comfortable. I think at that point I just was at the place where I was like, enough is enough.
Now that I think about it, the real moment for me was when I was when I was on The Real World [Philadelphia, in 2004] when I was 23, 24. The comments I got afterwards were like, "Oh, he's so masculine," or "He's so DL," or "He's so strong." They always felt so wrong to me. I was like, "I don't want people to describe me in these ways anymore, because those descriptions are toxic in themselves."
TPM: You're able to connect to men across ages and races and backgrounds, and that's a really compelling part of Queer Eye. I'm curious in terms of some of the themes that you see in the men you coach. Do they change if the men involved are men of color, or trans or gay?
Karamo: Obviously, I don't want to generalize any community. Of course, each of them come with their own baggage and issues. But I think that the majority of the experiences are universal. What I've noticed most is that the majority of the men—whether they’re of color, or white, or trans—need people in their lives who are empathetic listeners. If you can listen to someone empathetically without feeling as if you need to solve their problems, but allowing them instead the space just to share, well that’s really a key step to giving men a space to feel and to be without the pressures of society. Because what happens is that when they have conversations with the women in their lives, or other men in their lives, they normally have to change their speech, their train of thought, and so on because the other person's not listening. So they say things or do things to get the attention that they think is going to validate who they are.
So if people who understand this toxic behavior can just start to listen more, and not respond so much, and allow a man to share and just continue to share without stopping him and saying, "Well, what are you going to do? You gonna cry?" Then it stops the cycle for a bit.
TPM: Yeah, it sounds like you’re suggesting challenging “the man box” by not policing the perimeter of it.
Karamo: Exactly. That's exactly it. I'm just like, "Be quiet, let the man talk." And I’ve got to be honest with you, on Queer Eye, it's one of the reasons why 99% of the scenes I'm in, men start to cry. It's because I ask questions and then I let them just share. And what happens is, they start to get to just talk, and then it's like, "Oh, you're not forcing me to say I can't be sad or mad or hurt, or I can't be open.” That feels nice for any human being.
TPM: I'm trans, and the question that I always ask men for this column, because people always ask me this question, is: When did you first realize that you were a guy?
Karamo: I would say it wasn't at least until I was like 12 or 13. I knew that I was born male, but I don’t think I realized what being “a guy” meant until I was 12 or 13, when I started to do things that were considered “feminine” or “female.” All of a sudden I would get a push back from my father, or from male friends. And I'm talking about something as simple as art, which has no gender. Someone would say, "You're drawing, go outside." Or, my sister was a dancer, and I wanted so desperately to follow in her footsteps and I remember being told, "She gets to dance on the side of the field, you have to play on the field." All these things happened when I was around 12. I also started to develop a style, because my mom would let me pick my own clothes—to this day, I love a sparkly bomber or a glitter situation—and people were like, "You can't like that. Your clothes can't look like that." So I think it was around then that I started to realize I was a guy, because society made me feel I had to fit into a narrow-minded view of what a guy was.
TPM: What's something that you've had to work personally on to unlearn about masculinity? Where did you learn it? How did you know that you needed to unlearn it, and how did you unlearn it?
Karamo: I used to be really big on femme-shaming other gay men, or even more effeminate straight men. It was what I felt like I had to do to hide my insecurities, and it was something that I felt horrible about doing when I would get home, because it wasn't how I felt in my heart. It was a defense mechanism. It was the way that I learned as a gay boy, and also as a black boy, to show the world that I was equal. So it was like: As long as I'm better than that person, then the target's not on me.
So I started to acknowledge that after I got off of the Real World, because I didn't like the way that it felt. I would be afraid to be both masculine and feminine, to be every part of who I am without knocking down someone else first. So I just consistently worked on it. If I said something that I knew was femme-shaming, I would acknowledge it out loud, not just in my head. And then I would challenge those around me, too. I’d say, "Hey, if you see me doing this behavior, please check in with me, let me know."
TPM: Related to holding yourself accountable, and post-Me Too, there's been a lot of focus on the inability of many men involved to apologize effectively. What do you think makes a sincere apology, and how do you let someone you've wronged know you're sorry?
Karamo: Well, I think the lack of sincere apologies that we see is because of that institutionalization of this toxic behavior. We allow this behavior. We let it slide. This was clear in this past election. Donald Trump said some of the most toxic, ignorant, homophobic, xenophobic things, and we were just like, "Oh, that’s locker room talk." So when someone has done wrong and they give an insincere apology, for some reason we've trained ourselves to feel like that's enough.
How do you give somebody a sincere apology? Well, the obvious thing is action. But I think that action should be followed up with conversation that includes the other person. So often we assume what the other person needs for the situation to be rectified. I think that not only goes for this conversation of toxic masculinity, but for relationships generally. Yes, apologize. But ask, “How do I change my actions so you know that this is real?” versus saying, "Oh, I did bad? Okay my bad, I'm sorry. And I'm just going to do this, and you're going to like it.”
TPM: You're not getting the feedback you need to actually change in a meaningful way.
Karamo: Exactly. Allow the other person to be part of it and give that feedback, because it's crucial.
TPM: You’re a real fan of talking to people across different viewpoints, and that's really evident in Queer Eye. And I also know and can tell from talking to you that personal integrity is important to you. You got some blow back this summer for calling your Dancing with the Stars co-star [former Whitehouse press secretary] Sean Spicer a “good guy.” Do you have a criteria for how you will and won't associate with people based on your values? How can we create pathways for people to change and grow when the stakes are so high, especially for people like you or myself who are marginalized by our culture?
Karamo: Well for me, the criteria is: Do I feel like I have the capacity and do I feel safe? When it came to Sean Spicer, I knew that I could engage in conversations with somebody who I disagreed with completely politically. I don't appreciate the fact that when [he was] in office, [he] lied to the American people and did do a lot of things to destroy the fabric of the country I love. But I knew that in this controlled environment of working with [Spicer] for almost 11 weeks, there'd be many opportunities for conversation.
I understood immediately that having a conversation about trans rights with Sean Spicer would be a very difficult task, especially in 2019 and 2020. There's a lot of ignorance. So I thought to myself, how can I not make this political, but make this a human issue? I started by inviting my trans friends to Dancing with the Stars. They would come and hang in my trailer, which shared a wall with Sean Spicer’s. And I would invite him into my trailer, and he’d meet everyday human beings who are having a conversation with him, talking about life, talking about politics. And then when we’d walk out I’d say, "Oh yeah, by the way it doesn't matter, but those people are trans." And I can then say, "When you say things about trans people, you're talking about these lovely people. I'm engaged, I'm an openly gay man. I'm raising kids, and this administration has tried to destroy adoption rights, and rights of LGBT parents. You're a part of that.” I would consistently say, "Here's my fiance, here's my kids. Let them play and talk to your kids." And then I would say, "When you're saying that LGBT people don't deserve families, you're talking about me, and you're talking about those people you just hugged.”
I'm not saying that that is going to solve the problem, but it starts a conversation that begins with the heart versus the mind, where someone then can start to feel versus think when they make a decision. And when I got eliminated from that show, he was sobbing. I always say to people, someone doesn't cry unless you've affected their heart. So do I know if he'll ever change? I don't know, but I'm hopeful. And don't get me wrong, I understand why people were upset. But here we are, I'm thrust into this situation that I had no control over. I either make the best of it or ignore him, and I just couldn't do that. I'm going to try to make the best of it.
TPM: Pretty much every time I'm in some sort of conversation with people publicly about masculinity, there's always someone who asks, “How can we raise better boys? How can we change what we're doing or intervene with younger kids, so that we don't keep repeating these same incredible social structural problems?” What’s your answer to that?
Karamo: I think acknowledgement and challenging is so key, especially for problems we can’t see. If you had a cut on your arm, if someone took a knife and wrote in your arm "toxic masculinity," and you were bleeding from it, you would do everything in your power to make sure you healed it. You’d wrap it properly. You would go to the doctor. But this problem, it’s in our minds and in our hearts, so it's harder to see and harder to heal.
But if you pay attention to it daily, if you treat it like a physical wound, if you acknowledge it, you can heal it in yourself—and then you can heal it in those around you.
