For a queer text to be narratively useful to queer people—to be indulgent, excessive, leaky—perhaps it needs to be discarded by someone else first.
Popular dating shows are brutal factories of narrative, designed to make their contestants narratively useful through a mixture of incentive, isolation, coercion and selective editing. The Bachelor is perhaps most (in)famous for this—the show UnREAL, written by a former Bachelor producer, is based on real incidents of female contestants being berated and deprived of sleep. The restrictiveness of romance stories is foundational to dating shows: the need to build ‘authentic’ stories of coupling, and to punish or exile those who cannot, or will not, slot into those stories.
This is why the idea of the queer dating show is so compelling: queer and trans people are already occupying a condition of narrative exile, particularly when it comes to romance and family. The prospect of making queer people narratively useful has, historically, been a threat—queer people are conceived and cast as boogeymen, shadow-selves, an outside against which the inside defines itself. And the history of the dating show began by understanding queer folks as enemies of straight romance, rather than as the subjects of their own. Early queer dating shows like Playing it Straight (2004) and There’s Something about Miriam (2004) found it easiest to characterize gay people as deceivers, sabotaging a love that they cannot possess.
Even now, kinder and more invested queer dating shows—like I Kissed a Boy/Girl, or The Boyfriend—thrum with the tension between queerness and “romance” itself, often serving as apologia or as reparative: queer people can love like normal people, we promise! And we can, I suppose. But I’m more interested in queer people’s capacity to reshape and overwhelm these shows’ attempts at narrativization, which have always been destructive even for straight participants, and to make the show’s logics collapse under their own weight. Could there be a show that attests both to queer people’s capacity to have romance, and their capacity to threaten it?
The conditions for such a show to get made may seem highly improbable. But it has happened, at least once: in 2019, with season eight of MTV’s Are You the One?.
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During its time on the air, Are You the One? (2014-2023) superficially resembled any other MTV dating show: hot and messy young singles in a gorgeous villa, professing their desire to find love. But the show’s eerily perfect indistinctness in the MTV roster, its never-quite-that-bigness, its placid efficacy as a feeder show for other MTV programs like The Challenge and Ex on the Beach, belies its fundamental strangeness as a format.
For one, Are You the One? is a competitive dating show with an eyebrow-raising $1 million prize, but the contestants are not competing with each other and nobody gets eliminated. Instead, the contestants must collaborate to win as a group and split the pot. At its heart, it is a strategy game that must be solved through logic and process of elimination.
The premise: the cast has been secretly paired up into so-called “Perfect Matches” by “experts” before they enter the villa. If they can all find and pair up with their matches within the allotted number of episodes, they win the money. Each episode involves a tenuous relationship-themed group challenge (whose winners can take a date of their choice out on an excursion), an opportunity to test a potential couple in a “Truth Booth” to reveal if they’re a Perfect Match or not, and a Matching Ceremony, where the cast splits up into pairs of their choosing and are informed how many pairs are correct—but, crucially, not which pairs are correct.
The format is clever, economical, and fascinatingly self-undermining in a way dating shows rarely wear so playfully. Finding your Perfect Match is the ostensible goal (and a supposedly-self evident good), but the Perfect Matches end up feeling lightly punitive: the contestants are “bad at relationships” (in a way that usually boils down to “being 22”), and the Perfect Match is usually designed to be a “healthy” partner, a stolid cure for your deliciously self-sabotaging tendencies and toxic traits. If you confirm your Perfect Match, you leave the villa with them, losing access to other friends and flirtations and your ability to influence the wider group’s strategy. Organic couples who spring up during filming—particularly those whose chemistry relies on a liberal dose of toxicity—feel like underdogs, fighting against, and usually losing to, the steely power of probability. As viewers, we root for these couples against the show, and yet this too works in the show’s favour: if the show’s logic hadn’t made their one-week romance doomed, would we have cared about it? Would they?
The incentive offered by the prize money, and the relative ease of attaining it (spoiler: the casts win every season except for one), covertly reveals that the Perfect Match isn’t really the point. Most dating shows are deeply invested in capturing and branding the figure of the couple from the love declaration to the marriage, but AYTO is not really a show about couples. It is a show about dating shows. The show exists to celebrate its own talent for creating satisfying relationship drama, solely within the season-length bounds of the villa. AYTO is accordingly less beholden to typical visions of ideal coupledom and somewhat less punitive about sex and uncommitted infidelity than most dating shows—which may go a small way towards explaining the existence of its eighth season, which, by all established logics of dating shows, should not exist.
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AYTO season eight (2019) is the show’s bisexual season, or the “sexually fluid” season, to use the show’s own sweetly bewildering nomenclature. (I suspect someone on production read a few too many Tumblr posts and panicked.) All its cast members are attracted to all genders and can be Perfect Matched with anyone, making the game harder and more unpredictable than any previous season. Two contestants (Kai and Basit) are trans, and Kai does his testosterone shot on camera (more specifically, he gets a beautiful woman to do it for him). It is a bright, sexy, fascinating piece of queer television that has gained cult status among a coterie of TV Gays, including, like me, non-American gays who never had legal access to Are You the One? and had never heard of the show before season eight came out. It is also a show deeply colored by different kinds of failure: the season’s failure to pull in enough viewers, its failure to legitimize a certain unthreatening construct of “sexual fluidity,” its queers’ inability to be romantically stabilised or repaired. But those failures are, to my mind, what actually make the season great.
AYTO8’s contestants are, from the outset, not doing bisexuality the way the show intended. The show casts four straight and four gay Perfect Matches (both trans contestants are paired with men in ways that read as culturally gay), in line with the show’s understanding of bisexuality as an intermediate or “happy with everyone” sexuality. But most of the cast is obviously more interested in getting assigned a gay match than a straight one. All the gay pairs are found mid-season, and the last few episodes center on a visibly deflated group of leftovers—including the most committed gay couple of the season, Justin/Max, who have been confirmed as a No Match—shuffling themselves into the remaining straight pairs. But the season can’t be simplified into a “gay > straight” narrative either, as “straightness” itself breaks down under the force of the group’s queerness. Women contestants dance between the Justin/Max duo; almost every woman is interested in “androgynous” Kai; and Remy is near-singular in his pursuit of an ambivalent Paige, who he describes as “like a sexy boy who’s a girl.”
Bisexuality can sometimes feel strangely ungraspable, displaced by airy utopian visions of inclusivity and defensive declarations of being “valid,” without a defined culture or history to draw on. AYTO8 presents a vision of bisexuality that is visually distinct and powerful, that presents material alternatives to the fictions of straight/gay and of picking a “side,” and which also shows bi people’s flaws. Take Basit, the Black gender-fluid drag queen. Basit is framed as a sympathetic figure who deserves to be loved, to be appreciated for their beauty and their art, but they are also a sacrificial lamb who has been given to the cast—and to their Match, in particular—to educate and edify them. The cast is mostly quietly withdrawn from Basit as a flirtatious prospect, thinking of them as ‘fabulous’ rather than fuckable. Jonathan and Danny (the cis men in the house who dabble in drag) get a similarly muted reception in the edit. Even when the cast has been selected for youth, beauty, and inclusivity, desirability politics are still at work, creating a quiet but robust hierarchy of androgynies—a sense that those who lack approved kinds of femininity and virility exist primarily to broaden others’ minds.
The show also has a mixed attitude to monogamy, conflicted between its delight at its own success—there are so many couples in play! There are so many shots of hot people kissing!—and the core moral code of dating shows, in which love and connection is the priority and lust is either a vice, an indulgence to overcome (e.g. Too Hot to Handle), or ultimately less relevant than love (e.g. Love is Blind). Accordingly, the show prioritizes gentle intimacy that furthers couple storylines, mostly avoiding the allegedly large amount of gay and/or group sex that was occurring (particularly between the men), and scapegoating a specific cast member as a figure of excess. Kai is the contestant judged most openly for his actions by the edit, in part because he is the only guy on the cast primarily involved with women. Both the show and the contestants have a far more established moral/social code for “boy who keeps making girls cry” than for some of the arguably worse behavior exhibited by other cast members. For instance, Nour gets drunk and belligerent at various points (though I would note that the cast are clearly being encouraged to drink heavily), insults Paige and tries to fight with Jasmine, but because Nour is trying to fight Jasmine over Kai, the group ultimately places the blame more on Kai than on Nour. Kai even gets an intervention from other contestants.
Kai’s crime is still somewhat unclear to me, though he is blamed both for triggering Jenna, the self-admittedly jealous castmate who forms an intense bond with Kai from the first episode, and for trying to form multiple connections at the same time. He is not shown to lie or promise monogamy—he openly tells Nour and Jasmine that he’s pursuing them both. But the show’s edit encourages us to side with the women, giving us lengthy close-ups on Jenna as she cries and as she counsels other women about Kai, while documenting Kai’s sexual tally far more closely than anyone else in the cast. The effect is to encourage us to see Kai as manipulative and attention-seeking. Maybe so, but the show’s framing speaks to how normative gender and monogamy codes render Kai a target of punishment: women being jealous and territorial is ultimately an encouraged heterosexual behaviour (within limits), while Kai’s desire to pursue multiple simultaneous emotional connections with women is seen as incoherent and predatory.
AYTO8 is most ambivalently powerful as a queer text, most unnerving, when it comes to the conclusion of Kai’s storyline. Kai is presented as a mild threat to the group’s cohesion (and their chance at the cash) that everyone is “saved” from by Kai Perfect Matching with Danny, a sweet and stable nerd who is wildly ill-served by this being the endpoint of his narrative. Not because the pair is bad—they have chemistry and Kai could gain something from interrogating his discomfort with his attraction to men—but because the Perfect Match mechanic cannot accommodate queer people who are currently transitioning and/or recently out. It promises an end to a story that has, explicitly, barely started. “He gives me affection and validation, without all the jealousy and drama and triggers, and I think that’s exactly what I need,” Kai recites about Danny at one of the last matching ceremonies, in the tone of someone thanking a judge who has sentenced them to community service. The system, after all, promises a match who will “fix” your “toxic” traits—and any young queer will have a troubled relationship (at best) to getting “fixed.”
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It is almost unprecedented for a straight dating show to go queer in a regular season. That’s what spinoffs like The Ultimatum: Queer Love and carefully siloed, standalone experiments like The Bi Life are for. It is a huge risk to change the formula of a straight dating show, potentially alienating viewers who do not find queer contestants relatable or likeable, and who do not want to learn new visual and relational codes. AYTO8 is an endlessly compelling bisexual text, displaying how a dating show can crack and fracture, willingly, in real time: how it can allow its most unquestioned good—healthy, monogamous relationships—to be found wanting, to be replaced by something more inchoate and interesting. It is sexy, heartfelt, dramatic, and surprising.
And it bombed. The show was cancelled immediately afterwards.
But for a queer text to be narratively useful to queer people—to be indulgent, excessive, leaky —-perhaps it needs to be discarded by someone else first. By all accounts, AYTO8 was barely promoted by MTV to viewers queer or otherwise. If a TV network believes that making any content about you is a form of self-abnegation, a diversity project indulged by the owners of a dying franchise, then how marketable you could be is irrelevant. AYTO8 has plenty of feelgood visibility and representation content, but it ultimately did not work as a vehicle for a pre-scripted, palatable narrative about queerness or “sexual fluidity,” because the story that happened in the house far exceeded the bounds of the predetermined endgame. The show is still disciplinary, and still exploitative, but the conditions of failure allowed a looseness into its structure: for periods, bisexuality gets to happen, rather than to be choreographed by the strictures of the dating show.
The only production narrative that spans from beginning to end is one of queers overcoming adversity by beating the game, despite their task being harder than the straight seasons. “We have showed the world that despite the odds, the queer community rises up once again!” cheers a contestant as the credits roll. It is a stupid message to apply to some hookups and a logic puzzle, but it is also a little touching. All the individual dramas of the production fall away for a moment, and we just have a group of queers who have—for once—been allowed to win.
Eli Cugini is a PhD student in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester, where he researches contemporary autofiction’s relationship to the family and to interpersonal violence. He has recently discovered a perfect sandwich and is trying to calculate how often he can reasonably eat it.
Thumbnail photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash