I find “reality shows” such as The Bachelor and Married By America to be incredibly stupid, insipid, and annoying.
So, will I be watching the new gay “reality” dating show, Boy Meets Boy on Bravo? Maybe, just to live vicariously through the dating experiences of the leading man. From Lisa de Moraes in the Post:
Imagine a TV dating show in which a gay guy has the hots for another gay guy, only the producers have fooled him and it turns out the other guy is straight.
No, it’s not the never-aired episode of “The Jenny Jones Show,” it’s “Boy Meets Boy,” a dating reality series coming to Bravo cable network this summer.
The six-episode series, shot over eight days in Palm Springs, Calif., features a gay man who thinks he’s getting the chance to pick a mate from among 15 gay contestants. Only when he has winnowed the pool considerably does he learn that some of the guys are heterosexual.
… Gay contestants on the show, which has already been shot, were all cast under the pretense of it being a gay dating series. Straight contestants were told that it was a reality game show and that they would be given more information later.
The producers sought hetero men who were “interested in exploring the same issues we were,” Ross said, including “pushing the boundaries of what is normally considered straight and gay, to tear down stereotypes and blur the lines of commonly held beliefs.” They ended up casting straight men with important people in their lives — a relative, a college roommate, etc. — who happened to be gay, Ross said. They were guys who were “willing to take this challenge and do it on television but who also wanted to walk a mile in a gay man’s shoes.
“The overarching goal of the series is to examine what it is like in a gay world where the straight guys are the ones in the closet,” said Ross, who also produced the well-received documentary series “Gay Wedding” that ran on Bravo last summer.
… Adding the straight guys to the dating pool, Ross speculated, will bring straight viewers to a show that might otherwise have attracted only a gay audience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Among those additional viewers are sure to be members of the Traditional Values Coalition, whose executive director was already alerting its 43,000 member churches about the series so that they could protest it, the Associated Press reported.
“What’s next,” Andrea Lafferty asked, ” ‘Boy Meets Sheep’?”
If it weren’t for the fact that the “Traditional Values Coalition” was spouting hateful rhetoric because this show includes gay people, I’d laugh at that quote – don’t worry, Fox will be producing that show soon enough.
Good morning! What a coincidence! I was just reading this story on the net and thought, “I should email this to Gene. He would eat this alive.” I click on your website and there it is. Way to keep on top of things! Don’t you just LOVE the TVC?
Phil
Wow. Thanks for the heads up, Gene! Yet another show to justify (let’s hope) my recent signing-up for cable (finally).
I guess it’s really true… the increased presence of gay Republicans, gay pro-lifers, and now gay reality tv shows seem to add credence to the claim that gay men really are just like everyone else.
More’s the pity.
I feel like I’m living life backward… when I came out at 18, I was completely comfortable and joyous about my homosexuality. The older I get, though, the more disillusioned I seem to become with the most visible models for queer identity, and able to identify less and less positively as a gay man. Maybe this is just part of the same crisis confronting me as I shudder about what it seems to mean to be “American” these days, too, much less a gay man in America.
Or, more likely, the unending gray rainy days are contributing to my taking this piece of information about a mere television show (and on Bravo, of all places, so it’s not like it even could be very influential)–and myself–/way/ too seriously.