As a capital-G Gay Man, I feel comfortable asserting that, yes, we can be difficult. In the words of another iconic gay, the one and only Joanne Prada, we are “messy bitches who live for drama.”
That being said, I feel slightly less comfortable with the idea that queer people are so challenging that we can’t be handled normally, or that we require special care in a way that makes it all but impossible to include us. Which is why, perhaps, I’m struggling with the report that queer people are supposedly posing, ahem, “logistical difficulties” for the producers of the mega-hit British reality dating show Love Island.
Speaking to Radio Times earlier this week, Amanda Stavri, commissioner of Independent Television, which produces Love Island, said that the team behind the dating show “want[s] to encourage greater inclusivity and diversity” but added that “gay Islanders” pose a unique challenge.
“There’s a sort of logistical difficulty,” she said, “because although Islanders don’t have to be 100% straight, the format must sort of give [the] Islanders an equal choice when coupling up.”
This statement follows reports from earlier this year that Love Island producers purportedly were making an effort to incorporate LGBTQ+ contestants (or “Islanders” for the superfans) into future seasons.
I’m sorry, but I have to laugh at the “logistical difficulty” line — and at the fact that, instead of confirming the casting of LGBTQ+ Islanders, Stavri said that they “want” to have a more diverse cast.
As we all know, a “want” does not necessarily a direct “action” make, which means it’s quite possible that the excitement we originally had about Love Island’s forthcoming seventh season will be promptly quelled after we see the latest lineup. Indeed, Stavri tellingly referred to the earlier reports of LGBTQ+ contestants as “rumors” in her Radio Times interview.
That said, Stavri’s “logistical difficulty” reasoning makes some sense. In a normal season of Love Island, the delineations between who is a possibility for any given contestant is clear: every woman has her choice of every man and vice versa. By adding contestants whose attraction may be directed towards members of the same sex (either exclusively or partially), things will naturally get complicated. With LGBTQ+ Islanders at the villa, some men would only be available to other men, some women would only available to other women, and other contestants would have their choice of anyone, regardless of gender.
But on the other hand, such is life. If you’re going to throw queer Islanders into the mix, people will just have to “get used to it,” as the saying goes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to use my seventh and eighth senses to figure out whether or not another guy in a non-exclusively queer space was a member of the Alphabet Community. The mixing of queer and straight people is part of normal life; keeping these communities separate, as if adding a drop of queerness into a bowl of straight stock would fundamentally damage the purity of the soup, feels like new-age segregation.
(Also, I’m sure a show as popular and widely-watched as Love Island has already encountered its fair share of “logistical difficulties” with its straight contestants. And as is the case with any other reality show, I’m sure they did the only thing they could do: dealt with it accordingly.)
To Stavri’s credit, she isn’t claiming that it’s completely impossible to put straight and non-straight contestants on the same reality dating show. In her interview, she noted that ITV already has shows with LGBTQ+ representation.
