Aysen Gerlach harnesses several levels of queer experience from her own and others’ lives in her Just Lookin’ publications. Strategically designed to celebrate alternative and queer-leaning subtexts in popular culture, Just Lookin’ humorously engages with media archetypes that are overlooked by some and heralded as icons by others.
In Issue No. 2 of Just Lookin’, the tropic complexities of platonic friendship and support are unpacked within the context of four different music videos. The chosen musical artists gesture at the scorn that follows failed (heterosexual) relationships, which Gerlach begins to deconstruct as a decoy plotline to pacify normative expectations of narrative arcs in the commercial music industry. Chock full of images to attest to the projected hypothesis, Queer Eye for the Straight Music Video gracefully spins ambiguous aspects of visual media, setting the pace for its queer-leaning audience to think critically and engage with a storyline that relates to them.
