Tan France says “Queer Eye” costar called him 'kind of a traitor' for being closeted to family before series premiere
Tan France says “Queer Eye” costar called him 'kind of a traitor' for being closeted to family before series premiere
Ryan ColemanTue, June 23, 2026 at 9:35 PM UTC
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The season 1 cast of 'Queer Eye': Bobby Berk, Karamo Brown, Antoni Porowski, Jonathan Van Ness, and Tan FranceCredit: NetflixKey Points -
Tan France says he got into a "heated argument" with a Queer Eye costar for being closeted to his family before the series premiere.
"When they found out that I wasn't out to my family," France says the costar told him, "'You're kind of a traitor to us on the show.'"
The season 1 cast of Netflix's 2018 Queer Eye revival included fashion guru France, design guru Bobby Berk, culture guru Karamo Brown, food guru Antoni Porowski, and styling guru Jonathan Van Ness.
The legacy of Netflix's Queer Eyerevival has been eclipsed to some degree by the inter-cast drama that began to spill out into the public eye following its 2018 premiere, and persists to this day. But according to fashion guru Tan France, some of those tensions sparked before the cameras even started rolling.
France spoke at length about being cast on the show while he was still closeted to his family, which led to his coming out just two days before the premiere on Tuesday's episode of the Dinner's on Me podcast, hosted by Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
The former designer and fashion director has opened up about his anxious coming out process before, but told Ferguson that he'd never previously addressed one aspect of the ordeal: a "heated argument" it caused between him and one of his Queer Eye costars.
Tan France in London in 2026Credit: Dave Benett/Getty
"I've never said this before, and I won't say who it was, but during filming of that first season, somebody on the cast was quite frustrated with me when they found out that I wasn't out to my family," France revealed.
According to France, this castmate told him "basically, 'You're kind of a traitor to us on the show if you're not out.' Like, 'How can you be on Queer Eye and not be singing it from the rooftops?' We got into a heated argument, and I was saying, 'You have no idea what my experience is as a queer Muslim, a queer brown person, a queer immigrant. It's all well and good you're saying this, but you will never understand what it's like as a person of color trying to come out when you've had nobody ever say those words in your community before.'"
The success of the Queer Eye revival changed the lives of each of its cohosts, vaulting them to a new level of exposure. But France explained that he "was navigating something so different to everybody else at the time, so it felt really heavy. But once my family accepted it and understood it, now, gosh, they're a huge part of my life. They love my husband, they love my kids. We are so close again."
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for France, Berk, Brown, Porowski, Van Ness, and Netflix for comment.
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France was born in England to Muslim Pakistani parents, which led to a distinct relationship with queer representation in media. "There were already white queer people on TV. It wasn't shocking to the whites to have another white queer person on TV. [There] had never been a me. [There] literally never had been a version of me," he told Ferguson. "They said, 'All you need to do is be yourself.' I was like, 'Great, I'm not going to try and copy somebody else and I'm not going to watch the show. I'm just going to be me.'"
But when it became clear that Queer Eye wasn't going to be a small show confined to a purely American viewership, France "started to really panic, thinking, 'Oh no, my family is going to find out. We need to minimize this as much as possible.'" He tried to avoid any press, especially U.K.-based press, before coming to the realization that "we're famous and the show's huge. I've got to just tell everybody in my life, 'Hey, there's this massive secret. And I'm about to tell the world at the same time as you.' I told my family two days before the show came out."
Though the experience was "absolutely shocking" and left him feeling "physically sick," France explained that his family wasn't hostile, just inexperienced with queerness. "My mom had never heard the word gay. She never heard the notion of somebody being queer. She watches brown TV. It's a network in the U.K. called ZTV. It just shows South Asian programming day and night. So she doesn't watch Western television. So they don't show anything. There's never even been a queer storyline," he said. Once they saw the positive impact he and the other Queer Eye cohosts were making on the show, they relayed to him, "'Oh, you're not the devil just because you're gay. You're actually doing something really nice. Absolutely, you can stay.'"
The new cast of 'Queer Eye' following Bobby Berk's departure: Tan France, Antoni Porowski, Jeremiah Brent, Jonathan Van Ness, and Karamo BrownCredit: Kit Karzen/Netflix
Though France did not name the costar he argued with over his coming out journey, there have been conflicts all around the cast since the show's 2018 premiere. Berk left the show after season 8, pointing to "a situation... between Tan and I, and it has nothing to do with the show" as one factor.
Van Ness was then accused of toxic behavior on the Queer Eye set, which he decried as "overwhelmingly untrue." And in the lead up to the series' 10th and final season premiere, Brown skipped multiple press stops to protect his mental health "from people or a world who seek to destroy it."
Speaking about "our Queer Eye family" in a January CBS Mornings interview, Porowski responded, "Families are complicated and we're definitely not excluded from that."
You can watch France's full interview on the Dinner's on Me podcast above.
on Entertainment Weekly
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