Getting Gay Wrong
On 'The Ultimatum: Queer Love' and reality TV's missed opportunities to actually cover queer realities
I watched the most recent Love Is Blind reunion like just about anyone else did: disgruntled from the live special’s hour-long delay, tipsy from a generous glass of white wine, and generally disappointed by the couples’ bickering about ungenerous broadcast cuts and who paid for their wedding rings. At the end, though, an awkward, rushed promo from Nick Lachey about Netflix’s newest “reality TV experiment” caught my eye — for the new, queer season of The Ultimatum, the first half of which is available to stream now.
I was skeptical from the onset. As the trailer panned over an assembly of mascs and femmes at a tropical villa, I turned to the friend who’d sat through the special with me and asked: “if they wanted to do a gay season, why does it have to be the show about breaking people up?”
Reality TV producers struggle to cover messy gays. They fall back on turning queerness into a spectacle for a straight audience—or else the all-too-easy butt of the joke. This is true of Love is Blind, which showcased the hard-to-watch fallout of Carlton’s attempt to come out as bi to his fiancée Diamond in the first season. But it’s also true of the sanitized Queer Eye for the Straight Guy remake Queer Eye, which often depicts its roving gay life coaches telling homophobic subjects that they’re really not so different after all. The after-school-special kick is reflected in Netflix’s dating reality roster through How to Build a Sex Room, which to its credit features a sexually-diverse range of relationships navigating intimacy. Still, its queer partners have to explain themselves to the camera, including one unintentionally-hilarious scene that slaps an inspirational music bed over a participant saying “my pronouns are they/them.”
The Ultimatum: Queer Love goes even further, granting that elusive sapphic “representation” even as it uses it to project an unhealthy and unstable view of queer relationships. Set up with a straight host, its couples enter into the arena and are promptly split up to cheat on each other, ostensibly to figure out whether they want to get married or break up. They do this like crazy, in gratuitous cuts that suggest a distinctly male gaze. “If you think this ends with you getting married, you’ve got your head in the sand,” one mom comments to a couple in the trailer.
Sure, queer couples are by no means universally healthy, and there’s an argument to be made that The Ultimatum: Queer Love will lead to new (and hopefully better) stories being told. But it’s telling to me that the only Netflix dating show to center queer relationships does so through a setup designed to destroy them. In the first episode of The Ultimatum: Queer Love, on the original couples’ last night together, a participant named Xander turns to their partner Vanessa and nervously laughs “I kind of don’t want to do this anymore.” Experiment done — but of course, they stick it out, and Xander spends the rest of the pilot watching Vanessa serially date everyone else in the group. Netflix believes gay people are a great way to get straight people to rubberneck, and possibly an audience to half-assedly court. But it doesn’t believe they’re worthy of the uncomplicated happily-ever-afters they advertise on their other properties.
I yearn for a queer reality dating show that doesn’t ogle at its participants’ gayness or design their downfall, but rather reflects the unique absurdities that queer love creates against the backdrop of heterosexual hegemony. Give me an all bi/pan Love Island, or a case study of literally any majority-queer friend group, a-la Prime’s Tampa Baes. Let the messiness unfurl in its own right, as it inevitably does in those layers of navigation and conversation. Things are hard enough already.
The all bi/pan season of “Are You The One?” is amazing and I’m still mad they made the show straight again after that