Host Mel Woods talks to Eve Ng about her book Mainstreaming Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television; Wes Culwell discusses his journey from one side of reality TV to the other.
Overview
This episode of Get Queer explores the influence of reality television on queer identity, beginning with an overview of Bravo’s inaugural same-sex marriage reality show, Boy Meets Boy, which debuted in 2003. The episode discusses the network’s strategic shift toward queer-centric programming, leading to iconic shows like Queer Eye and the emergence of the Logo network. The episode critiques stereotypical portrayals of queer individuals in reality TV, debating the nuances of implied versus explicit queerness. The discussion evolves to highlight the growing acceptance of casual queerness in media, referencing Henry Jenkins' theory of convergence culture. The host also interviews Wes Culwell, a former reality TV participant turned producer, to reflect on the evolving landscape of queer representation in reality TV and the significant role of queer producers in shaping future narratives.
Notes
️Introduction to Get Queer (00:00 - 02:08)
Gay Streaming and Bravo Network (02:08 - 07:04)
️ Reality TV Representation (07:04 - 12:42)
Queer Convergence in Media (12:42 - 17:25)
Queer Producers in Reality TV (17:25 - 22:50)
Guests
Eve Ng (she/her) teaches media arts and is the author of Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis and Mainstreaming Gays: Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television. She’s a participant in and critic of queer women fandoms and is co-editing a forthcoming special for Popular Communication on that subject.
Wes Culwell (he/him) is the founder and executive producer at Studiio Box Creative a Washington D.C. based full-service creative agency specializing in video production and experiential marketing. After getting his start as a participant in reality TV, Wes worked for nearly a decade as a story producer and director in TV and film prior to launching Studio Box in 2012.
00:00
Mel Woods
It’s the summer of 2003 and Michael Stark and Michael Leshner have just become the first same-sex marriage in Canada. Sexual orientation is being introduced into non-discrimination policies for major American corporations and audience-challenged television network Bravo has recently decided to venture into reality TV. It was the summer of Boy Meets Boy.
00:27
Voiceover
Previously on Boy Meets Boy. James, our gay leading man, has been living a life of romantic adventure, searching for that one special someone amongst 15 handsome suitors.
00:42
Mel Woods
Now James is actor-handsome and he has his best friend Andrew with him to suss out the suitors and offer James advice and a shoulder to cry on if needed. Boy Meets Boy was pretty much The Bachelor, but gay and with a bff. James had been opening champagne and handing out roses all summer, and now he was down to the final three. British presenter Dani Behr sits James down to tell him the final twist.
01:09
Voiceover
So here it is, the final, and I promise you, final, twist. Are you ready for it?
01:15
Voiceover
Yes.
01:15
Voiceover
Are you sure? Because fasten your seatbelt, James. It’s going to be the bumpiest ride of all. Okay?
01:23
Voiceover
Yes.
01:23
Voiceover
Okay. Of all the three final mates, Wes, Brian and Franklin, one of them is straight.
01:42
Voiceover
Wow.
01:45
Mel Woods
Wow indeed. Spoiler alert. Wes was gay.
01:50
Wes Culwell
When I came on the show, my main objective was that I wanted America to see the truth about gay men, not the stereotypes. Real gay men.
01:58
Mel Woods
This is Get Queer and I’m Mel Woods. This season we’re looking at reality TV and its effect on queer identity in the community, in the world and in the mirror. This episode: “Gaystreaming.” This is Wes Culwell.
02:14
Wes Culwell
It’s crazy because you do these shows and you know, you’re not prepared. I think people are a little more savvy to the media game now. But at 23 years old, when you did this shoot for 11 days in Palm Springs and all of a sudden you’re being whisked around. I was on the Today Show, doing covers of magazines. There was a billboard of us on Sunset. It was just so fast and so overwhelming. We were doing a press tour, I think somewhere in Florida, and we had been out being crazy 23-year-old kids, and, you know, all hungover in the morning. And one of my castmates came running to the door, pounding on the door, and I didn’t know what had happened. I thought someone got lost the night before, who knows?
02:50
Wes Culwell
But it was page six of the USA TODAY Kisses of the Year, and it was the front page of the paper. It was Michael Jackson and Lisa-Marie Presley; Al and Tipper Gore; Madonna and Britney; and James, The Bachelor and myself were our final kiss from the show. And I—my brain just short-circuited. I didn’t know what to even do with that because here’s our little show that we shot in Palm Springs in a week and a half. And it really was this moment, like, oh, wow, this is going to be bigger than I thought it was. Back in the day, my background was actually not-for-profit. I was working at the Gay and Lesbian Center in San Diego, and my focus was on really getting a new generation of donors. We were doing small donors, we were doing bar outreach …
03:32,
Wes Culwell
And that’s where the producers, the casting producers of Boy Meets Boy found me. And every night, they’d asked me to come in for an interview, and I refused. I was like, “I’m not interested in doing a reality TV show. Thank you so much.” I mean, this is a time where reality was kind of starting to shift, where it was getting a little more exploitative, and it was getting a little bit meaner, but it wasn’t quite there yet. So I was interested, but I turned them down a few nights in a row. And finally, just so I could do my job, I said, “I’ll come in on Monday. Just stop talking to me. I’ve got to be out here fundraising.” So, yeah, I went on a Monday, I did an interview, and we were in Palm Springs like a month later. It was fast, very fast.
04:08
Wes Culwell
How much do I dish? How much do I gossip here? So, it’s funny, you know, I think at that time, this is, what, 21, 22 years ago? People weren’t quite … we knew reality was kind of schlocky, and there was kind of this, you know, manipulation. It’s not real. It’s not reality. But we all went into it, and again, we didn’t know the twist. I mean, none of us had any idea. We thought it was the gay Bachelor. I mean, Bravo at the time hadn’t even put on Queer Eye. It was like Boston Pops and Columbo reruns. I mean, Bravo was a channel that you happened to have in your package that you didn’t want.
04:38
Mel Woods
Poor old Bravo. At this time, 2002, Bravo was aware that there was an audience for queer content, and so they chased it, you know, as networks will do. They’ve been experimenting with queer programming since 1999. First with Fire Island, about two couples, one gay, one lesbian, vacationing on Fire Island. Then, in 2002, they had some success with their show Gay Weddings, which was about, you guessed it, gay weddings. And today it would probably be considered more documentary than reality. It got some attention, and it brought some attention to its producer, Douglas Ross, who was approached by the network’s owner, NBC, to do something in that vein. But more reality. Which brought us Boy Meets Boy. Here’s writer and scholar Dr. Eve Ng:
05:19
Eve Ng
Boy Meets Boy was a moderate success for Bravo. It definitely garnered viewership. The earlier, smaller shows like Fire Island didn’t. The convergence of gay leads and the reality genre, which, as we know, was attractive to networks at that time, and it still is now because it’s cheaper to produce and it gets lots of viewership. That’s what helped usher in Queer Eye. In fact, Queer Eye supplanted what would have been a second season of Boy Meets Boy. So, you see Queer Eye premiering in 2004, and then Logo is established in 2005, so, very close together.
05:59
Mel Woods
So, very close together. Logo was already becoming identified as Bravo’s gayer younger brother. Well, maybe not brother.
06:12
Voiceover
I’d like to call to order this secret conclave of America’s media empires. We’re here to come up with the next phony-baloney crisis to put Americans back where they belong: in dark rooms, glued to their televisions, too terrified to skip the commercials.
06:23
Mel Woods
Early in her book Mainstreaming Gays, Eve describes this opening of The Simpsons episode “The Fool Monty” from 2010.
06:30
Voiceover
Well, I think—
06:31
NBC, you are here to listen and not speak.
06:34
Mel Woods
As we pan around the table of TV execs sitting behind their network nameplates, the two male-presenting Logo and Bravo execs are making out. And as a sidebar, this is also known by the keener Simpsons fans as the episode where The Simpsons potentially predicted the 2020 pandemic.
06:49
Voiceover
I think we should go with a good old-fashioned public health scare.
06:52
Eve Ng
Logo initially wasn’t doing the same thing. It started off with a bunch of documentaries and more kind of high-brow films, indie films, films that had queer stars. But when it turned to gaystreaming and was like, “How can we”—as one of the execs said—“scale up and improve our ratings?” It looked to Bravo because Bravo was so well known for these queer-themed programs that were successful. And so Logo then started producing its own kind of Bravo-esque reality shows. So, the gay equivalent of the Housewives shows: The A-List shows. Logo produced one season of The A-List: New York, and then another one, The A-List: Dallas. And the tagline was “Housewives with Balls.”
07:39
Eve Ng
So, the implication was you’re going to see the same kind of bad behaviour and the same kind of drama, but it’s going to be gay men. And Logo also introduced a bunch of other reality shows that had gay participants as the contestants or the leads or the judges. And so you see a kind of convergence. Logo started to look like Bravo in terms of reality programming.
08:03
Mel Woods
And much of that sameness is a result of what Eve calls “gaystreaming.” And, to be fair, she first heard the term from a logo executive in a meeting. She calls it a, quote, “Explicit strategy on the network’s part.” Gaystreaming has two connotations: gaystreaming as in a TV product for target audience, gay stuff for gays and for urban, upmarket liberal straights looking for a bit of sophistication from their TV. But gaystreaming was also referring to the mainstreaming of gay culture. Here’s Wes:
08:32
Wes Culwell
When I went in for my interview, I spent the entire time, the casting interview, spewing gay politics. Because my idea was it was so important to be out, so important to vote, marriage equality was important, all the gay [unintelligible]. And so I just spewed all this, you know, political firebrand in my interview. And they didn’t temper that down. I was that way on set. Did I see that on the show? No.
08:54
Mel Woods
No. And of course, there’s a reason for that, which Wes went on to explain. There was a twist, and they couldn’t give it away. That would ruin the game and the show. Who was gay and who was straight? A guy talking about Harvey Milk at brunch would have been considered a tell in 2002; maybe also today. It certainly was in that context. Brian Hay was the first suitor to be evicted from the house. Here’s his exit interview.
09:20
Voiceover
I guess I was trying to, for once in my life, fly within the gaydar. But I guarantee you, a lot of people that are watching the show would have thought I was gay based on either what I was wearing or just who I was sitting next to. I was trying my best to be a gay man.
09:46
Mel Woods
“To be a gay man.” So, our formal introduction to the mainstream, via gaystreaming, indicates that there is a way to be gay, which has something to do with the way that you dress and who you sit next to, and maybe Harvey Milk?
09:57
Eve Ng
A lot of reality TV representations of queer people fit a particular mould. If we go back to Bravo, its original Queer Eye was very focused on consumption, fashion, food, style, in some ways, stereotypical representations of what gay men are interested in and are good at. So, arguably, it’s great that for the first time, it’s gay men who are the experts and straight men who were clueless. But on the other hand, and, you know, nothing against Queer Eye and its great success, but those gay men were pretty desexualized. Whereas on a show like Boy Meets Boy, there was more of a sense of gay men’s sexual agency.
10:43
Mel Woods
So not sexual, not political. And dresses like Brian Hay in a tank top and board shorts. That’s what reality TV is selling as a gay man. And even seven years later in 2010, things weren’t looking that much better.
11:01
Voiceover
Previously on season one of The A-List: New York …
11:04
Voiceover
Do I look really masculine? I didn’t know I was a top until I saw that. Just drop the hat because the hat looks weird. There is not a market for fat, pasty models. How was the longest you’ve been single?
11:13
Voiceover
Maybe two months in the past eight years of my life.
11:16
Voiceover
You’re kidding me. How are you? I do want to apologize for my behaviour. It was crazy madness.
11:25
Mel Woods
The A-List was an attempt by Logo to get into the gaystreaming market. Logo had started airing RuPaul’s Drag Race the year before in 2009. But Drag Race still had a pretty low-budget, shot-through-wax paper-look, and had yet to begin its rise to phenomenon or RU-nomenon? Sorry, more bad puns coming in episode five. The A-List was an attempt to glam things up a bit with swish locations and cosmo-throwing cocktail fights.
11:54
Mel Woods
But in the end, it was derided by the press, both gay and straight, as disappointing and stereotypical, and by entertainment blog of the moment, Gawker, as a platform for the worst kind of quote, “fame-hungry, attractive, horrible people you could have imagined.” Even that opening for season two, the final season, thankfully, makes it hard not to agree. And if that’s gay streaming, I’m not sure it’s the queer mirror anybody is looking for.
12:27
Mel Woods
This is Get Queer and I’m Mel Woods. And this season, we’re talking about queer reality TV, where it came from, how it got here, and what it’s doing for us. This episode: “Gaystreaming.”
12:42
This is Get Queer and I’m Mel Woods.
12:45
Voiceover
American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert tells Rolling Stone magazine he’s gay. He’s quoted as saying, “I don’t think it would be a surprise for anyone to hear I’m gay.” Lambert says he wanted to share details now in order to be in control of the situation.
13:00
Voiceover
I actually was a little bit surprised about the level of support that I got. I thought that me being a little more “alternative,” or whatever you want to call it, would turn a lot of people off. And it was surprising to me how much support I got for being different.
13:13
Mel Woods
So this is 2009, and a couple of weeks after Adam Lambert came second to Kris Allen on season eight of American Idol, Adam has an album coming out. Rolling Stone gives him the cover. He’s a featured story and doing sit-down on 20/20, you know, a popular in-depth news program. It’s a big deal. People will be listening, people will be talking. But Idol’s done. Adam’s not on TV anymore, not really. Once in a while he’s a guest star on Glee, but not every week. It’s not the same thing. Like Clay Aiken before him, while they were on our TVs and in our living room, it seemed like these guys were purposefully avoiding being named as queer. It wasn’t like they were constructing straight lives and going on paparazzi dates with teen scream queens or the new Brandy.
13:56
Mel Woods
But there was something held back. And even though they hadn’t come out in some official way, you know, on the cover of Rolling Stone or in a TV-news-magazine sit-down with a journalist, we queers all knew what they were. Even middle America suspected Adam was right when he said no one would be surprised because no one was surprised. It was implied queerness. But is that actually representation if it’s only implied? If we don’t know it’s representation, I don’t think it is. We are who we say we are because we name it as such, you know, thanks to Judith Butler. Emily Nussbaum, the Pulitzer Prize[–winning] television critic, calls reality TV “a genre conceived in an orgy of soap opera, documentary, game show and vaudeville.” She goes on to say, “It upended the industry’s economic model and rewrote the nature of fame.”
14:47
Mel Woods
That’s a lot of people who are watching this. Queer reality TV participants need to be mindful that for a lot of folks who are being exposed to queerness for the first time as a result of queer reality TV, they are constructing what queerness is for those people in what they do and don’t do, in what they say and don’t say, again, to bring up Judith Butler. It’s how they perform. Here’s Wes again:
15:13
Wes Culwell
When you were a queer character on reality [TV] 20 years ago, you had to be queer, and that was your identity. Boy Meets Boy was a bit different because there was a lot of queer people, which I thought was amazing. And the twist of the straight-male twist. But I think back then, you decided as a queer person to do a show like that, to make a statement, to be present, to get visibility to. To the movement. I think nowadays, because there is so much saturation of reality, I think that shifted a bit. I think there are still tons of people out there that want to do a show for the political visibility. But I think some people are just queer and they want to be on TV, and that’s okay too, right? I think it shifted dramatically in terms of what the needs are and what returns are for people appearing on these shows.
15:56
Mel Woods
Queer people who want to be on TV. Not even that. People who want to be on TV who happen to be queer. It sounds a bit like casual queerness, which is in some ways not entirely dissimilar from implied queerness, except that casual queerness has a bit more sex, a bit more point of view and a few more fun shirts. And that shift that Wes talks about, Eve talks about that shift as well. In her book, she relates it to the Henry Jenkins theory of convergence culture. Here’s Eve to take the academic sting out of that phrase:
16:26
Eve Ng
One of the key ideas is that there used to be a stronger barrier between producers, on the one hand: people who make the content, and viewers and audiences on the other. So, the people that make it and the people that watch it. And changes in media production have made that barrier more permeable. At one really obvious level, you know, via social media, we can actually communicate with producers directly so we can make our voices known.
16:53
Mel Woods
On another, perhaps less obvious level, that convergence is happening queerly too. Queer fans and participants start making queer work in production offices, on sets, in writers’ rooms. It’s 2012, season four of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Kathy Wakile—whose main role has been as a pot-stirrer for cousin Teresa Guidice’s storyline—has a sister, Rosie, a beloved aunt of Kathy’s teenage kids. Now Rosie has become a sleeper fan fave at this point. There’s some implied queerness. A lot of “is she or isn’t she?” And then, after some build-up, Rosie takes her niece and nephew out to lunch to have this conversation:
17:35
Voiceover
So, you maybe have an idea, but just let me just tell you a story. After Papa died, right? You know, it hit me really bad. Yeah. One night he said to me, “You know, I’m really worried.” And I said, “What are you worried about?” He goes, “Because, you know, you’re never gonna get married, right?”
18:00
Voiceover
And I said, “You know what, Dad? Probably not.” You know? And he goes, “Well, I’m worried” because he didn’t want me to be alone.
18:08
Voiceover
Yeah.
18:09
Voiceover
Anyway, you know, when I think about him, I get emotional.
18:15
Voiceover
Yeah.
18:16
Voiceover
But … and after that, you know, I felt really guilty, and it was all built up, and finally just I was, like, yelling it, you know, yelling, and I finally just came out with it. I went through it all by myself, all through my 20s, into some of my 30s. It’s not something, I woke up and said, “I’m gonna do this because it’s cool.” No, it’s something that you’re born. Born with. God made me this way.
18:46
Voiceover
That’s it.
18:47
Mel Woods
Here’s Wes:
18:49
Wes Culwell
That’s one of the storylines I’m most proud of, to have worked on in terms of all the stories I’ve told over the last 20 years, from reality to what I do now. But it was, it was authentic, it was heartfelt and we got a lot of great feedback from that.
19:02
Mel Woods
Yes, that Wes, he worked on Housewives. Wes Culwell, the winner of Boy Meets Boy.
19:08
Wes Culwell
But I actually learned a lot about production while I was on the show Boy Meets Boy. And I found the behind the scenes way more interesting than what was happening on set and in front of the cameras. So, I became good friends with the producers, the camera folks, the casting associates, the casting producers and the executive producers as well. And it really kind of set my sights on, I think, a different trajectory of what I wanted to do. But Boy Meets Boy was a very interesting experience. It was, I would say, I don’t … I don’t want to say life-changing, but it was definitely a foundation where I think a lot of things were teed up for the rest of my last 20 years. You know, my first job was a PA.
19:44
Wes Culwell
I came off, out of that, you know, magazines, events, shows and I was a production assistant on the same company that produced Boy Meets Boy. It gave me my first PA job, and within two weeks, I was the second assistant director because they thought I was serious and I was taking the job seriously. Worked my butt off. So that was how I really launched that part of my career was, “Hey, I’ll do anything. I will sweep up, I will do coffee runs. I’ll do all that stuff because I need a job. But I really love this business. Let me show what I can do.” And that’s how it really launched me into being a producer for reality TV and now having my own production company.
20:18
Mel Woods
So Wes had gone from being a queer reality TV participant to a queer reality TV producer. That’s what we call queer convergence culture in reality TV. Maybe they didn’t let Wes talk about politics at brunch as a participant, but as a producer, he can be part of the team that brings the first coming out to the Housewives franchise. That’s Middle America visibility right there. That’s representation. It’s gone beyond TV. Queer reality is everywhere.
20:46
Eve Ng
It’s easier now for regular people to produce our own content. We can make our videos, whether they’re scripted series, whether it’s talking-head commentary, doing episode reviews, or reaction videos. You can upload to video sites like YouTube or Vimeo, in the old days. But now you don’t even need those. You just need a social media account and some followers, right? There’s now a blurring of legacy-produced reality programming on the one hand, and social media influencers on the other. What’s the difference between someone who has a YouTube channel putting out regular episodes and a network like Bravo or Logo also putting out episodes regularly? There’s a whole genre of reality, a whole new kind of domain of content that wouldn’t have been possible without what digital media and the internet has allowed.
21:50
Mel Woods
The success of gaystreaming, as Eve says in her book Mainstreaming Gays, is that it’s not just straight people making use of queer content and writing queer storylines for straight people and appropriating queer content anymore. More queer content means more queer fans, and that means more queer participants, which means more queer producers, which means more queer content from real queer people, real queer lives. And yeah, maybe it’s casual, but for real representation, it has to be more than implied—if we’re serious about getting queer. I’m Mel Woods and this has been Get Queer. Thanks to my guests Eve Ng and Wes Culwell. Eve’s book Mainstreaming Gays is available online and Wes is the founder and director of Studiio Box, a D.C.-based video production house. This episode was produced by Daniel MacIvor and edited by Jamie Foulds.
22:41
Mel Woods
Get Queer was mixed at Sound Park Studios in Nova Scotia and produced by Pink Triangle Press in Toronto. In Vancouver, I’m Mel Woods. Thanks for listening.