In Episode Ten of the 2009 series of The Real World, the MTV reality show in which a group of young strangers from across the USA lived together in an unfamiliar city (this time Brooklyn, New York), the cast were tasked to organise a film screening to raise awareness about âsafe sexâ practices among young people. Whilst these kinds of tasks had, by 2009, become an unremarkable feature of The Real Worldâs format, functioning to incite stress and generate conflict amongst the roommates, and bolster the showâs claims to some kind of pedagogical address to youth viewers, what was notable about this episode of The Real World: Brooklyn was how it broke the showâs usual refusal to acknowledge its own status as a TV show. Obviously, the whole premise of the programme was that the cast had been brought together for the express purpose of creating a television programme. Yet, within the broadcast texts, the means of productionâcamera operators, sound technicians, producers, runners, lights, boom microphones and so onâusually remained scrupulously outside the frame. Cast-members were explicitly instructed to ignore the camera, to act like they were not on TV (Winick 2000). Episode Ten of the 2009 season inverted this logic as the film the roommates were asked to screen was Pedro, a biopic about Pedro Zamora, the openly gay, Cuban-American AIDS activist and star of The Real World: San Francisco in 1994. Zamoraâs presence in the 1994 season has been widely celebrated for advancing public awareness of AIDS, and worked to cement The Real Worldâs popular reputation for dealing with difficult social issues through progressive representations (Pullen 2007). In The Real World: Brooklyn, MTV executive Maggie Malina appeared in front of the camera with the roommates, telling them:
Itâs a story and a moment in MTVâs history that weâve always held very dear because having the first HIV positive gay man on television on our show, it was pretty remarkable, and he had an amazing impact upon all the people who saw the show.
Later, one of the 2009 roommates, a gay man named JD, was shown reflecting upon his own childhood experiences of watching Zamora, saying, âI remember being nine years old and watching Pedro on The Real World in San Francisco. I always thought he was a hero.â The sound of these lines bridged a textual juxtaposition of past and present, as shots of JD speaking to the camera/audience were intercut with footage of Pedro from the 1994 series, rendered in an exaggeratedly grainy quality, signifying its status as a historical or archival document from time-gone-by.
In a not dissimilar turn of events, in 2013 the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother was won by a television personality named Rylan Clarke, an openly gay 24-year-old, who was known to audiences at that time for having competed on another British reality show, The X Factor. As he exited the metallic compound of the Celebrity Big Brother âhouseâ after being announced as the seriesâ winner, Rylan was greeted by the showâs presenter, Brian Dowling, another gay man who had risen to televisual fame as the winner of Big Brother UK in 2001. âHow does it feel for me to actually tell you that you are the winner of Celebrity Big Brother?â Brian asked, to which Rylan responded:
Coming from you, this is a dream come true [âŠ] I have been the biggest fan of Big Brother [âŠ] I remember when Brian was in the house, and it [the Big Brother compound] was five minutes from my house, and I got on the train, I went down there [âŠ] and I screamed at the top of my voice, âBrian!â
Both of these moments, The Real World : Brooklyn in 2009 and Celebrity Big Brother 2013, brought into proximity, through mediated or embodied connections, two generations of queer people. In each show, a pioneer of millennial queer visibility was encountered by a younger queer person, one who had come of age in an era of comparative tolerance and (in some quarters) acceptance for sexual minority identities across the global West. In particular, the years between Pedro and JDâs appearances on The Real World, and Brian and Rylanâs respective participation in Big Brother, were characterised by unprecedented expansions in the visibility of LGBT people in popular culture. As JD watched the filmic incarnation of Pedro Zamora, and as Rylan poured out his own teenage fandom for Brian live on prime-time TV, audiences were presented with two iconic reality formats self-reflexively looking back upon their own roles in making queer identities visible to mainstream audiences throughout the first, and into the second, decades of the twenty-first century.
As moments like these attest, reality television has been one of the most prolific spaces of queer representation in Anglo-American popular media since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wikipedia has a page entitled âList of reality television programs with LGBT cast membersâ1 which, despite detailing hundreds of participants from over 140 shows, remains far from complete. The GLAAD Media Awards, which seek to ârecognize and honour media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ community and the issues that affect their lives,â2 have an award for Outstanding Reality Program, and run-downs of fondly (or not-so-fondly) remembered LGBT reality stars have become commonplace online, under headings like â13 LGBT Reality Series that Changed Queer Life,â âThe 50 Most Memorable LGBT Reality TV Stars of All Time,â â25 Reality Shows that Made LGBT Historyâ and â42 LGBTQ People Who Made Reality TV History.â3
Moreover, reflecting upon my own formative experiences as a lonely teenager with a burgeoning queer sexuality, growing up in a small town in West Midlands of England in the early years of the twenty-first century, it was through my encounters with reality television that I began to perceive life outside the heterosexual norm as viable, liveable, something that real people did (this was, after all, reality TV). Yet, just as I watched the loveable Brian Dowling triumph in Big Brother or The Salonâs flamboyant Ricardo weave his creative magic in a custom-built hair studio, thinking âmaybe that could be me,â reality TV was also the place where I learned how not to be queer. From the much-derided militant lesbian feminist Kitten in Big Brother 2004, to the gay âbunny boilerâ Craig the following year, whose romantic obsession with a heterosexual housemate was ridiculed across the tabloid press, my early interactions with reality television were contradictory and complex; laying out for my young self a future at once rich with queer possibility, yet strictly delimited within elusive parameters of mainstream acceptability.
Reality TV is thus an intricate and productive cultural form, one which has offered up a diverse range of potential subject positions from which to live out differences to the heterosexual and cisgender norms. At the same time, the formations of queer identity made legible in reality programming are shot through with judgements about their social, ethical and commercial value, their legitimacy and acceptability. This book interrogates the cultural work of these representations, exploring what reality TV has enabled socially, culturally and politically as one of the most consistent and profuse sites for the production and circulation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and otherwise queer subject positions in twenty-first-century British and American popular culture. I argue that reality televisionâs representations of queer people matter; that, taken together, they have been instrumental to the ways in which non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming identities have come to be understood within contemporary cultural life. This book asserts that these representations cannot be ignored if we are to understand how and why certain kinds of non-normative sexualities and gender identities have become relatively normalised, accepted or legitimised, whilst others remain abnormal, deviant and unknowable, within the popular cultural imaginary.
Centrally, this book is concerned with how queer visibility in reality programming is shaped by the generic conventions, commercial imperatives and audience pleasures of reality TV itself. It interrogates how this representational process has made intelligible a series of scripts, narratives and archetypes of queer identity and queer life that have become highly recognisable in twenty-first-century Anglo-American media. In particular, I explore how reality TVâs insistent valorisation of what I term compulsory authenticity âthe notion that each individual has an innate and essential âtrueâ self which it is their duty to discover, manifest and be faithful to, and that failing to âbe yourselfâ constitutes nothing short of an existential crisisâhas functioned as a profoundly generative force in relation to cultural perceptions of queer people. This generic trope, which unites all incarnations and sub-forms of reality programming, has brought into being a discursive field in which particular ways of being queer, of living and persisting in the world as a non-heterosexual and/or gender non-conforming subject, have been able to not only take shape, but become (relatively) normalised, even common-sense, within twenty-first-century cultural life. These include the idea that people are âborn gay,â that transgender identities constitute an authentic gender âtrappedâ within the âwrong body,â and that a âsuccessfulâ queer life involves branding and selling oneâs queerness in particular, normative ways.
Most emphatically, this book does not seek to make judgements about how âpositiveâ or ânegativeâ these representations might be, nor how âaccuratelyâ they have reflected any kind of pre-defined LGBTQ community. Rather, adopting the perspective, well established in queer and post-structuralist theory, that sex and gender categories (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or indeed cisgender and heterosexual) are culturally determined and constructed, this book interrogates critically how reality television, as one of the most prolific sites of queer pop-cultural visibility, has brought certain queer subjectivities into being. I explore why this visibility has taken the forms it has, and what these representations have done in terms of the increasing naturalisation and continuing marginalisation of queers and queerness in a heteronormative world.
What Is Reality TV and Where Did It Come From
As a genre of television, reality TV (if indeed it can be considered a genre at allâsee below) is one of the newest. Reality programming emerged in the 1990s in the form of shows like Cops , Airport , Driving School and The Cruise , and was a response to changing contexts of production, distribution and reception in the television industry at the close of the twentieth century. TV had traditionally operated as a âbroadcastingâ medium, that is, a small number of networks (the American âBig Threeâ: ABC, CBS and NCS, and the historical duopoly between the BBC and ITV in the UK) offering programming targeted towards a large-scale âmassâ or âmainstreamâ audience (often imagined as taking the form of heterosexual familiesâsee Chap. 2). The arrival of cable and satellite television in the 1980s and into the 1990s, however, created a multi-channel landscape in which an ever-growing number of channels had to compete for a swiftly diminishing share of the TV audience. As audience attention was now split between a multitude of different channels (many offering niche programming aimed at very specific demographics), costs of TV advertising fell and, as such, so did programme budgets. Reality television emerged as a solution to this problem, making use of (relatively) inexpensive, light-weight filming, sound recording and editing equipment to craft soap opera-like narratives out of the unscripted interactions of unpaid, amateur performers out in the ârealâ worlds of workplaces, roads, a...