How queer people shaped reality TV

From RuPaul's Drag Race to The Real World, what would reality TV be without queer people? That's one of the questions that journalist Mel Woods gets into in their new podcast, Get Queer, which explores reality TV's queer history.

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud sits down with Woods to talk about how queer people helped make reality TV the powerhouse that it is and how the genre has also shaped the queer community. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Since the birth of reality TV, queer and trans people have been fixtures in the genre as characters, but also as fans. And I think there is something going on about this consistently here. Why do you think queer and trans people have historically been so drawn to this genre? 

Mel: We've been there from the beginning. You look at what a lot of people say as being the first reality TV show, An American Family, way back in the '70s, and there was the gay son, Lance Loud, right there. Or on The Real World, we had Pedro Zamora, who was kind of disclosing his HIV status. 

And when you think about modern reality TV, I think there's a natural overlap between the camp, the performativity, the excess, the extra with queer culture. There's a reason gay people like housewives flipping tables and spilling their wine on each other because that's very fun. And I think that plays to a lot of the cultural history associated with performance and camp and excess that queer and trans communities have for ourselves.

Elamin: You've been working on the show [Get Queer] for some time. Why did you want to talk about queer people and trans people in reality TV right now, in this specific moment?  

Mel: Yeah, I was born in 1995. I turned 30 last week. I like to say that I've grown up alongside reality TV as a genre. It is a very distinctly 21st century medium. I think we forget about that because it's so pervasive in our lives today. And it's really interesting when I thought back on my life over the last three decades and seeing these wins in progress in the public perception of queer and trans people over that same period of time. 

I grew up just outside Red Deer, Alberta, so for a lot people in middle Canada, middle America, who maybe think that they don't know a queer or trans person in their real life, reality TV might be the first place that they had been seeing a real person — not a character written by somebody — but a real queer or trans person on TV. And that can be really impactful, both for allies who don't know their allies yet or people who are building empathy for the real life queer and trans people in their lives. But also, of course, for young people coming up and seeing themselves or seeing possibility models for themselves reflected on there. 

So the show [Get Queer], it's a contained, six-episode thing…. It looks at that history and traces those parallel paths that we see between some of these movements of representation and visibility, and how these different shows and properties open those doors, or close some doors, or whatnot, along the way. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Mel Woods produced by Amelia Eqbal.