The twist, revealed to Jackie in the season opener, is that an undisclosed number of these suitors are, in actuality, batting left-handed.
GAY DATING SHOWS SERIES
Over the course of the season, she will choose a mate in traditional reality-show fashion, by eliminating two contenders per episode through a series of talking-head interviews and horribly uncomfortable televised picnics. The setup: Jackie, identified by the voice-over narrator as an “innocent young girl” with “small-town values,” is isolated on a Nevada ranch with 14 strapping lads. Perhaps that’s because, ever since Ellen DeGeneres’ legendary on-air coming out in 1997, lesbians seem to have carved themselves a cozy prime-time niche in which they can love other ladies with impunity, as long as everyone concerned is affluent, extraordinarily attractive, and most important, fictional-see Showtime’s new Sapphic soap opera The L Word.)īoy Meets Boy was stupid, mean-spirited, and shallow, but Fox’s new series Playing It Straight, the first gay-themed reality show to appear on network television, wins the race to the bottom. (As for lesbians, they have been conspicuously absent from the reality-TV scene. In the more depressingly Hobbesian world of dating shows like Playing It Straight, gay men function principally as romantic pariahs, the surprise Old Maid Card hidden in the deck of boy-girl romance, and are not portrayed as desiring beings. In their more positive Queer Eye incarnation, they’re allowed to be arbiters of style, smartass sidekicks, sexually non-threatening superheroes on a mission from Planet Fabulous. Whether overhauling the straight guy’s wardrobe or flirting with his potential girlfriend, gay men on reality television exist to impart some intangible quality of sophistication or savoir-faire to the otherwise drab lives of their heterosexual brothers. It might be said that by complicating the binary logic of the heterosexual dating show, gay men have earned themselves a tenuous perch on television, but at what cost? The one thing that gay men still can’t be found doing on reality television is the very thing that defines them as “gay” in the first place: loving other men. ET)-postmillennial versions of The Price Is Right, where what you win is no longer a 30-foot catamaran but a fortune, a lifestyle, and a mate-gay men have come to serve a different function, something between booby prize and bargaining chip they’re what’s behind curtain No. On dating shows like Fox’s new Playing It Straight (Fridays, 8 p.m. Constitution with an amendment banning gay marriage, practitioners of the love that dare not speak its name are repainting America’s apartments, critiquing our moisturizers, hurling us into black SUVs, and taking us to the barber.Īnd that’s just on Bravo’s playful makeover hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which has brought gay men into the mainstream, not as subjects or objects of desire, but as dispensers of fashion, taste, and wit. What’s going on with gay men and reality television? Even as the debate rages about whether or not to deface the U.S.