I read with interest your ...
Question: I read with interest your comment that you long for the day when gay characters on TV are treated as completely unremarkable. It occurred to me that such an event has already occurred, earlier this year, on a little reality show called
Survivor. In last fall's
Cook Islands edition, the same edition that initially divided the tribes by ethnicity, two male contestants later revealed off camera that they were gay, but that topic did not even surface on air. It is hard to believe that the subject never came up on the island among the contestants, and that cameras did not capture it. So I found it refreshing that producer
Mark Burnett did not deem the sexuality of either contestant to be remarkable enough to fashion (through editing) a little story point about it. Certainly the homosexuality of previous
Survivor contestants (
Richard Hatch and many others) had been story points in previous editions. So in a way, I found that the granddaddy of TV's current reality craze broke ground once again: first when an openly gay man won the original
Survivor, and then, six years later, by choosing through the editing process to not make a story point of the sexuality of a couple of its gay contestants.
Answer: Don't ask, don't tell? In this case, I like it. I bet if these contestants' sexual orientation had had an effect on how they related to other tribe members (the way, say, Rudy reacted to Richard Hatch's being gay), it would have been shown. The fact that it apparently didn't make waves is worth noting. Reminds us all that being gay isn't of itself inherently dramatic, just a fact of life. Thanks for pointing that out.
