Homophobia tears a Venezuelan mother and daughter apart. The Fab Five reunites them. This week’s essay is read by Bobby Berk, a member of the Fab Five in Queer Eye.
JONATHAN: When people say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, it’s not true. Because you can reinvent yourself and learn new things whenever you want.
KARAMO: For the first couple of days, you kept saying you can’t fix ugly. And it broke my heart.
TOM: You all have fixed ugly.
KARAMO: We have fallen in love with you. And I didn’t really expect to have this moment with you, and you are such an amazing man.
VALENTINA: I saw a lot of makeover shows, and I told to her that it was more than a makeover show because it was so deep
MEREDITH: I’m Meredith Goldstein, advice columnist for the Boston Globe, host of the Love Letters Podcast, and longtime lover of television. And this is Because I Watched, a podcast exploring how real people’s stories have been changed thanks to their favorite Netflix shows and movies. Each week, we explore amazing stories from across the world, influenced by your favorite series, and read by the actors who helped make them.
MEREDITH: My grandpa Marty and I were really close and we agreed about almost everything. Except he couldn't quite figure out why I didn’t want to be married. He always asked me when I was going to get a boyfriend. And he would absolutely yell at me if I told him I went on a date and didn’t let the man pay. I tried to let him know what it was like for me as a woman in my time, that it wasn’t so important to be coupled, but he just couldn’t get it. And then something weird happened. He saw The Devil Wears Prada. He was obsessed with that movie and he said one of the reasons was because, suddenly he got it. He saw this character, Andy, whowould march through the city with journalistic intentions, and thought, oh! You’re like her! You live in the city. You love your job. You want to make a life for yourself. And there’s beauty in that. That even a movie can help us figure each other out. That we can be wrong and then our world can get that much bigger.
MEREDITH: Today’s story is about one mother’s transformation after watching what some like to call, more than a makeover show.
MEREDITH: Today’s essay is written by Evan Ross Katz, Read by my favorite interior designer, Bobby Berk.
BOBBY: Valentina Monsalve was only 13 years old when her father, Walter Raúl, died suddenly from a heart attack. In an instant, she lost the man that she still refers to as the love of her life. Suddenly and without warning, there would be no more rides to school in the morning with her dad blasting The Beatles and Queen. No more nights falling asleep to the sound of Walter Raúl’s voice reading her Wuthering Heights before bed. It was her favorite book - Walter Raúl would call Valentina “Catherine,” and she would call him “Heathcliff.” But now, Wuthering Heights would grow dusty on Valentina’s bookshelf.
Her father’s death set in motion a series of events that would forever shift the trajectory of young Valentina’s life. She and her mother Flora moved out of their house, and went to live with Flora’s parents. They didn’t want to continue living in a home filled with memories of a man so beloved. It’s not that Valentina didn’t love Flora, but her affection for her father was all-consuming, and sometimes left her mother feeling like a second fiddle.
Not that there was much fun to be had in Venezuela under the authoritarian rule of then-President Hugo Chavez - but Flora was particularly strict with Valentina. Roller coasters? No way. Airplanes? Not happening. To Flora, this was love. But her over-protective affection sometimes felt suffocating to Valentina, who was eager to discover a world beyond the tumult of her home life in San Antonio De Los Altos, Venezuela.
Nonetheless, Valentina loved her mother, and showed her own form of affection by handwriting Flora letters every day, and painting for her, all the while remaining shielded from many experiences by her mother’s vigilance. Was Flora really doing this to protect her? Valentina sometimes wondered. Or was it Flora’s own fear of a changing world that she was foisting upon her only child, unaware of the burdens of these limitations? It would have seemed natural for Walter Raúl’s passing to make the family closer. Instead, Valentina often felt that she and her mother were practically strangers.
And then came Adrienne, a young boy Valentina had met at her neighbor’s quinceanera. Adrienne wasn’t like the other boys. For one, he wore pink shoes, and a matching pink bow tie printed with hearts. He was showy. He was flamboyant. Valentina could not take her eyes off of Adrianne as he danced with several of the girls at the party. When he finally took a breath from dancing, Valentina approached him, complimenting his shoes. He complimented her dress. They became friends instantly.
BOBBY: Valentina felt excited to meet a boy who immediately felt like one of her girlfriends. But her mother could not have been less enthused. “He looks weird,” Flora told her later that evening. Valentina was confused by her mother’s dismissive commentary - she thought Adrienne looked nice. “Boys don’t wear pink,” Flora snapped. Valentina didn’t understand - at the time, she didn’t even consider the idea that Adrienne might be gay. In fact, she didn’t yet know what being gay was. She just thought Flora didn’t like Adrienne’s shoes.
Valentina tried to ignore her mother. She loved Adrienne’s pink shoes. But more importantly, she liked Adrienne. He was handsome. Charming. He made her laugh. Valentina couldn’t figure out why her mom didn’t seem to like him. Flora never seemed to have any problems with her other friends.
A few years later, Valentina was on a school trip with her Model UN team when she met Rodrigo. Their chemistry was instant, and before long, the two had fallen in love. It was March when they met, and by August, Rodrigo had come to Venezuela to see Valentina a few times. Every time he came to visit, Valentina was excited, not just to spend time with Rodrigo, but because he got on so well with Flora, and Valentina felt like he was forming a strong bond with her family.
One night after dinner, the three of them were in the family’s playroom. Valentina was scrolling through Twitter when she came across an article discussing an initiative in Europe to make it easier for gay people to adopt. She showed it to Rodrigo. “I think it’s a lot better for a person to have gay parents than no parents at all,” he said. Valentina nodded in agreement.
“No,” said Flora. Suddenly it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. “A family has a mother and a father,” she continued. “It would be weird for a kid to have two mothers or two fathers.”
And there it was again, that word: weird. The same word Valentina’s mother had used to describe Adrienne just a few years earlier. Valentina was older now, and this time, she was keen to the subtext. And so she spoke up. She calmly explained to Flora that given the growing number of orphans living on the streets, she thought the idea of a loving home with two parents should be celebrated, regardless of the parents’ sexual orientation.
Flora? She didn’t agree. “It would be better for a child to be homeless than to be raised by gay people,” she declared. Talking quickly turned into yelling, and before long, the childhood wounds of a fractured relationship began to re-open. Valentina was devastated by her mother’s fearful nature. In her mind, Flora had been conditioned to hate something she simply did not understand. Like all of Valentina and her mothers’ disucssions about gay people, the conversation ended without resolution.
BOBBY: But then, a year and a half later, in early 2018, Valentina discovered what became an immediate obsession: Queer Eye. Valentina’s friend, a bisexual Lebanese-Venezuelan she’d met at university, had written to Valentina urging her to watch the show. Valentina loved reality TV, particularly makeover shows, and she had thought Valentina might come to love this one as well. Reality TV was also the thing that Valentina and her mother liked to watch together when Flora would come visit her at University. Watching What Not to Wear was one of the only times Valentina ever heard her mother laugh.
One night, when she finished binging Stranger Things, Valentina decided to switch from the Upside Down to Atlanta, Georgia, where the first season of Queer Eye takes place. She watched as Tom, a 57-year-old dump-truck driver and three-time divorcé who suffers from lupus, was guided through preparing for a reunion with his ex-wife Abby. In the next episode, she watched Neal, a 36-year-old computer programmer break down the psychological barriers he had put up that were preventing him from getting close to people. And most importantly, she met the Fab 5: Antoni, Tan, Jonathan, Karamo, and me. She fell in love with us immediately - her words, not mine.
Valentina could not wait to introduce her mom to the show that she had grown to love so quickly. She was hopeful Flora would do the same. But Valentina was worried. They hadn’t discussed the topic of homosexuality in a long time, and she was almost certain that her mom would react to the Fab 5 the same way she had in the past - that Flora would dismiss Queer Eye as “weird.” Still, Valentina was determined to at least try.
She pitched Queer Eye to her mother as something familiar, a makeover show, just like What Not to Wear. She told her mother that the Queer Eye hosts were gay, but she threw it in casually, almost as an aside. After all, her mother had surely seen a gay character pop-up on other reality shows, and Valentina had never heard her say anything negative about that. Still, deep down, Valentina doubted her mother would actually watch Queer Eye.
But boy was she wrong.
Flora watched the first episode, encountering Tom, Abby and the Fab 5. Then she met Neal in episode two, Cory in episode three, and AJ in episode four. Before she knew it, she’d completed the entire first season. Valentina had no idea Flora had actually watched until she got a text message from her mother. And when she read it, Valentina could scarcely believe her eyes.
“Baby, I downloaded all of the seasons,” Flora wrote over text. “And I’ll tell you some things. I love it. It changed my perception of gay people.”
BOBBY: Flora said the Fab 5 were wonderful - she loved the way they expressed their feelings without boundaries. She confessed that she’d been homophobic, and said she realized there was a lot she could learn from watching the Queer Eye. She admitted that the show had brought her to tears for reasons she could not yet fully articulate.
But Flora didn’t stop there. Valentina was shocked when her mother then called her - the two almost never spoke on the phone. “You were right,” Flora said, her voice crackling with excitement. “They are lovely, very nice people, and they would be incredible with kids because they are so good with people in trouble, or complicated or sad people.” Finally, Flora was expressing what Valentina had hoped to hear from her mother for so long: that she had the ability to see people, regardless of their sexuality, as people.
Valentina was amazed by the revelation that her mother now believed gay people would, in fact, make great parents, and should, in fact, be able to adopt. It was a radical shift for Flora, the same woman who had once said she would rather a child remain an orphan and homeless than experience the love of gay parents. But beyond Flora’s newfound acceptance of homosexuality, Valentina discovered that her mother’s atittudes were starting to evolve on other issues as well. When Valentina was a little girl, Flora used to tell her there were certain things a quote-unquote good woman shouldn’t say or do - like have an abortion. But once she and her mother were able to talk about homosexuality without fighting, Valentina felt emboldened to bring up other topics - like her belief in a woman’s right to choose.
She remembers the silence on the other end of the line when she said it. And then came Flora’s surprising reply: “I think I raised you with the tools so you can believe what you want to believe.”
Thanks to Queer Eye, Flora’s mind was starting to open. The Fab 5 had somehow done the trick. Valentina almost wondered if she herself was in the Upside Down.
Valentina decided not to return to Venezuela after college, instead moving to Mexico City. The decision was in part to be closer to Rodrigo, but also because of the ongoing situation in Venezuela, which she describes as “ugly and dangerous.”
BOBBY: Flora still lives in Venezuela, a country that does not offer the same legal protections to gay couples that it does for straight couples. For women like Flora, conversations like the one she was finally able to have with Valentina are uncommon. Valentina says topics like abortion or gay and transgender rights don’t get discussed in Venezuela, because people are worried about having enough to eat.
In the end, Flora’s feelings on gay people—that they were “weird,” and didn’t deserve the right to adopt—were likely borne out of Venezuela’s cultural norms. Venezuela is hardly the only place where this kind of homophobia exists - a deep-seated and societally-reinforced set of prejudices so firmly ingrained that people are often afraid to think otherwise, fearful that it would lead to condemnation.
There are many parts of the world where LGBTQ+ individuals can be punished, harmed, and even killed for the desire to live authentically. Equality can seem like a forgone reality for those of us living in a part of the world that celebrates marginalized identities - where Mayor Pete Buttigieg can make history as the first openly gay person to ever run for President, and Janet Mock can become the first out transgender woman of color to sign a major studio deal. This is progress that cannot be ignored.
But neither can the Flora’s of the world, who fear LGBTQ+ people because that’s how the society they grow up in tells them they should feel. For Flora, getting to know the Fab 5 was an opportunity to combat her homophobia through visibility. She realizes that she did not hate gay people - she just didn’t really know anything about them. And once she was able to see the joy that the Fab 5 brought to so many people’s lives, she finally saw gay people as just people.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t without tense moments, when Valentina was certain she and her mother would never see eye to eye. But in the end, thanks to an unknowing but poignant assist from the Fab Five, Valentina helped change her mother’s mind. And not only that, Valentina was finally able to find a way to communicate with Flora - to feel a closeness akin to what she’d once had with her father.
Valentina and Flora’s story is a lesson not just in the acceptance of gay people, but in the accepting that which you do not know. After all, people are just people. Sometimes they wear pink shoes. And sometimes they adopt children into loving homes. And sometimes they have long hair, a twirly mustache and say gorgeous a lot, while wearing a dress.
When people say, 'You can't teach an old dog new tricks,' it's not true, because you can reinvent yourself and learn new things whenever you want.
BOBBY: Reading this for the first time was very emotional for me. Um, we’ve gotten thousands of stories like this since our show came out. I mean from the very first day. And to hear that we’re able to open people’s minds that may not have ever had their minds open and to hear that we’re able to bring families together, um, not just on issues about homosexuality, but just, just bring families closer together by giving them an outlet to talk about things that before might have made them a little uncomfortable. It kind of opens up the safe space for them to talk about things that even aren’t on the show, open up a much larger dialogue to just have a really, a free relationship with each other.
BOBBY: You know, to anyone out there, like Valentina, who has a wedge between them and their family just due to different beliefs or to that person in the LGBTQ+ community who is estranged from their family because their family doesn’t accept them, give them time. Um, most of the time their ignorance? Their hatred? It’s not their fault. They were conditioned that way their entire life, whether it be from cultural norms, religious pressures. When you’re taught something your entire life by people that you trust, by leaders in your community, by parents, by grandparents, by you know, people that you look up to, you believe it. And it’s only until you have visibility to things outside of that that you sometimes realize, wait, what I was taught is not right. You know, these people don’t have horns. They’re not horrible people. They’re just people like me who are different. You know, give them time. You’ve had your whole life to come to terms with the fact that you’re gay. They haven’t. Um, give them time. Show them the love and acceptance that you with that they would show to you, and hopefully in time, they’ll reciprocate.
BOBBY: I was at that point. I was an out teenager who, you know, left home because his family did not accept him as being gay. And just two weeks ago, my father, he asked me, ‘How’s Dewey? I haven’t seen him in a while. You know, you’ve got yourself a really good one. I really like him. And I’m so glad you guys found each other.’ And to hear that come from my almost 80 year old cowboy father, who I never thought would accept me for being gay or ever accept me being married to a man, it meant a lot.
BOBBY: If I could say anything to Valentina and Flora or anyone for that matter who has a story like this, who our show has touched, I just, thank you. Thank you for letting us into your lives. Thank you for being vulnerable. Thank you for accepting us when we’re vulnerable, and when our heroes are vulnerable. Thank you for giving us the platform to be visible so that we can continue to just try to make the world a better, more accepting, loving place.
VALENTINA: If that family member loves you, at some point, that member will decide to listen to you. So, I think that it’s so possible. You don’t have to pressure your family member. But you have to show how it’s important to you. I think that is, if it’s a good person, at some point, even a little bit late, that person will understand.
MEREDITH: Thank you for listening to Because I Watched. Next week we’ll hear about how Delhi Crime inspired one writer to speak up about the mistreatment of women in Pakistan. If you like what you heard, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It makes it easier for other people to find the show. Because I Watched is produced by Netflix and Spoke Media. Today’s essay was written by Evan Ross Katz and read by Bobby Berk. Special thanks to Valentina and Flora for sharing their story. This is Meredith Goldstein. We’ll see you next week!