Where Is A Hit Queer Dating Show?
Love sells, right? Nearly every television show has an element of romance to it, from the bond between Mickey and Minnie on early morning children’s TV to the deeply complex relationships grounding prestige dramas on HBO, love is perhaps the most stable bet to make as a television producer when crafting a program. Not only is it a universal and timeless theme, but the way love can make a character behave - irrationally, emotionally, even viciously - creates a gold mine of opportunity for drama on reality television. And when it comes to reality TV centered around heterosexual couples, there is truly no stone that producers have left unturned in producing shows. You can watch straight couples hand out roses to each other, you can watch them fall in love on the beach, you can watch contestants hand roses to each other on the beach. You can watch heterosexual couples disguise themselves with prosthetics as furry-like creatures to date each other without the influence of looks, you can watch them pine after a Prince Harry lookalike, or you can watch gorgeous heterosexual singles struggle to stay abstinent for a month - even with the promise of $100,000 if they do. For straight reality TV, just about every geographic location and odd set of circumstances seems to have been covered, but even naming three shows featuring LGBTQ+ cast members would be nearly impossible for most of us, because in truth, TV has not produced them. Why?
Would it not be easy to make queer versions of already existing reality shows? Apparently not, as according to hosts and producers of television’s most popular dating shows, this lack of queerness is not a coincidence, but rather an intentional choice made for a variety of business factors. Chris Harrison, former host of the Bachelor for nearly 20 years, spoke on the matter in 2014 for an interview with the New York Times. When asked about the possibility of a gay lead, he made it clear that this was not in the realm of possiblity, saying, “The question is: Is it a good business decision?...Look if you’ve been making pizzas for 12 years and you’ve made millions of dollars and everybody loves your pizzas, and someone comes and says ‘Hey, you should make hamburgers.’ Why? I have a great business model, and I don’t know if hamburgers are going to sell.” The established market that Harrison and early pioneers of the reality dating competition show have created is formulaic, with a new cast of characters fitting the mold each season. He suggests that disturbing that carefully crafted mold could alienate viewers and affect business. He doubled down on this stance further as recently as 2019, saying “The Bachelor doesn’t create and drive social issues… It’s an entertainment show, so let’s stay in our lane.” When Love Island premiered a recent season, they addressed similar issues in terms of a disturbance to established formatting as production cited “logisticaly difficulties” preventing queer cast members appearing on the show.
Whether they’re right or wrong, most producers of straight-focused dating competition shows still find themselves unwilling to take a big risk in breaking their mold - a mold stable enough to reap constant success over the span of decades, but fragile enough to collapse with the introduction of queerness. So what about original programming dedicated to queer people looking for love? Though not existing in the same breadth and scope of straight-focused dating shows, it would be factually inaccurate to claim that no one in TV history has ever tried. But the very few examples of queer dating shows thus far are nearly all connected by a dangerous thread meant to spark entertaining drama: deceit.
Bravo’s 2003 Boy Meets Boy acted as a sort of Bachelor style show, where its gay male lead whittled down a group of 15 men until he found the one. But, the leading man didn’t know the twist beneath the surface: nearly half of the men were straight, looking to trick him into picking them. If a straight man successfully made it to the show’s end, he would win $25,000. 2007’s A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila framed the lead’s bisexuality as an element of surprise for its contestants, as the male contestants did not know of the existence of the female contestants (and vice versa) until the end of the first episode when the two groups combined, titled “Surprise! I Like Boys and Girls.” In an introductory sequence, Tila said, “This show’s the perfect experience because it’s really gonna help me figure out Do I really like a guy? Or do I really like a girl,” presenting the attitude that bisexuality exists as a middle ground until the individual “makes up their mind.” Many of the shows of this era did feature queer contestants, but with a catch. A catch that disturbed contestants' experiences exploring their sexuality on a national stage or reinforced harmful stereotypes for the sake of entertainment.
If straight-focused shows can’t accommodate queerness for business concerns and queer-focused shows play into stigmatized attitudes, then perhaps the format is incapable of presenting queerness authentically. That was, until season 8 of MTV’s hit show, Are You The One, premiered. Featuring 16 sexually fluid cast-members, the show was built on the premise that a variety of computer algorithms and relationship experts came up with “perfect matches'' between contestants, and it was up to the cast-members to deduce who each other’s match was by the season’s end, made extra difficult by the fact that their pairing was not gender-restricted. The prize for doing so? One million dollars. I tuned, in under the pretense that this show would finally be the kickstart for great queer reality televison. Prior to its launch, the show was receiving significant press, with articles by Vogue and The Atlantic claiming that this is “the future of queer dating shows.” And the show was great. It was informative, with episodes featuring deep conversations about sexuality and gender, and it was just as drama-filled as any other reality show I’d seen before. And most importantly, while the contestant’s queerness may have been used as a marketing tactic, it was never a gimmick, a joke, or a trick played on its contestants or its viewer.
Though Are You the One? Truly blazed the trail, not many networks have followed behind. The season’s ratings were low, and there has not been a follow up since. No fault to MTV, as this was truly uncharted territory for television, and rarely does the first-of-its-kind perfectly hit the nail on the head. But what this show proved was that TV can get this right. It can put queer characters on screen together and create engaging drama. It can overcome “logistical difficulties” that seem to have made networks afraid of exploring this possibility for creating shows. It can use an existing format to sell hamburgers to pizza fanatics. And it can act as a way to provide queer representation outside of scripted TV and Film in the ever-popular sector of reality television. Perhaps the show began a domino effect in its legacy that we won’t see the benefits of until years later, but until now, I’ll be rewatching this show for my fourth time, waiting for the world to catch up.
Article by Scott Higgins, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Maelle Eugene, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
