Reality television is a cultural phenomenon, and though queer and trans folks are the faces of modern franchises like RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Traitors, we’ve been embedded in the medium since its start. This week, Xtra launched a podcast titled Get Queer, tracing the LGBTQ2S+ community’s roller-coaster history with reality television. Hosted by Mel Woods—Xtra’s senior editor, audience engagement—the podcast’s six episodes cover shows like Survivor, The Real Housewives and The Real World, and feature interviews with some of reality TV’s biggest stars. Xtra spoke with Woods about their love of reality TV, how it has helped shape popular opinion about queer people and the work that’s left to be done.
The podcast is all about reality television and the history of queer people in it. What’s your relationship with reality TV?
I am one of those kids of a very specific generation when reality competition TV was appointment viewing. I’m talking about American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Survivor, Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model. If you were going to be the next something in America or Canada, I probably watched it in my household growing up.
I was raised by a single mom. She indoctrinated my sister and I into watching these shows and building strong fan relationships to these various people. When I was in high school, I did a lot of weird fan art about people from So You Think You Can Dance. I think my early queer awakening was thinking those girlies were so pretty.
As we talk about in the podcast, I saw Zeke Smith on Survivor and that was a very formative experience to my own personal identity. We’re in a different era of reality TV now. I’ve watched every English-language season of The Traitors. Last fall, I rewatched every season of Top Chef. So I’m deep in it, I’m always experiencing it, I’m fascinated by it as a medium, as a way of both sharing real people’s stories and real people’s identities and experiences, but still a produced version of that, a performative version of that. And I think so much of this podcast is kind of grounded in that balance between the reality and the performance. And that’s something that queer and trans people experience in our day-to-day lives, that grounding between reality and performance. And so they felt like such a natural marriage of topics to dive into in this way.
What made you want to go with reality television as a subject, and not scripted TV or another medium?
When we were developing this podcast, something that stuck with me were these parallel timelines over the last few decades. Reality TV is a very new genre—it was born in the late ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and really came alive in the 2000s. And when we start to look at the public perception of queer and trans people, and we plot those two timelines together, it’s really fascinating to see the way that queer and trans people have been depicted in reality TV over that period of time paired with the civil rights wins that we’ve had. Reality TV reflects those changing societal perceptions of people.
Queer and trans people, we’ve been around forever. We predate reality TV, of course. But you can see from the very early infancy of reality TV, and we talk about this in the podcast with shows like The Real World and An American Family, queer people were there at the forefront. I think reality TV has served as a non-inconsequential vehicle for bringing queer and trans stories to everyday people over that time.
To actually see Adam Lambert on American Idol is like, “I’m seeing a real queer person, I’m experiencing a real queer person.” To see Zeke Smith on Survivor is seeing a real trans person. For a lot of people who maybe feel like they’ve never seen a real trans person before, even if they definitely have in their community, being able to see that and build that kind of empathy with a real human being is so different than scripted programming, because it’s actually a real human being rather than a constructed character.
The show gives reality TV its flowers, but it steers away from a clean, celebratory tone. It carries a lot of criticisms for the ways that our community has been depicted in reality television. What made you want to emphasize that element of our history within the medium?
I think that it would be disingenuous to portray the medium as being solely a space of celebration and representation. It’s got a dark history.
I think really heavily about the program There’s Something About Miriam, which was this reality TV show based on the idea of tricking a bunch of straight guys into trying to date a trans woman. And the fact that she is a trans woman was the big gotcha at the end of it.
We’re trying to paint a whole picture as to these last few decades of history in this medium, because it is a very complicated history, as all queer and trans history is.
Are you worried that people are going to have a negative reaction to the story that you’re telling here?
Everything has its fans. We have an episode of the podcast devoted to RuPaul’s Drag Race. The Drag Race fans are rabid, I say very complimentarily, but I think even the most fervent Drag Race fans are pretty aware of the criticisms of that franchise, though sometimes they willingly shove them under the rug.
We are not making this to be overly critical. This is not a call-out post of a podcast. It is a space to explore the really big nuances of the genre and hopefully come to some sort of place of determining not just what the impact has been on everyday people by having these queer stories told in this way through these mediums, but also how we can be better going forward.
There’s a lot of great guests in the series, which you’ve already shouted out a few times. I’m wondering if there were any revelations that you got out of an interview with a guest that surprised you or that listeners might be taken aback by.
I’m really happy with the conversation that I was able to have with Zeke Smith.
He was forcibly outed as trans on Survivor. I remember watching that before I was out as trans myself. Watching that happen, and watching the way that he handled it with such grace and empathy and maturity—way more grace, empathy and maturity than any person could be expected to have—was formative for me in figuring out my own identity. And so to talk to him several years removed from that experience about his marriage and buying a house and just being a normal guy after having gone through all of that was really kind of revelatory for me.
When we as trans people find ourselves at the centre of media stories or find our issues, our identities and our perspectives, at the centre of this barrage of media attention, sometimes it’s really hard to think about what comes after. Being trans is not just about transitioning, being trans is not just about coming out. It’s about just existing as a trans person, as a normal person. And so getting to talk to Zeke and have him reflect on that time in his life that was obviously incredibly formative and led to so much of the way that his life is now, but also see him as just a regular dude with a house and a husband and a job was really enlightening.
There was a comment in the sixth episode that really stuck with me: culture writer Brian Moylan credits queer reality stars with ushering in an era of LGBTQ2S+ acceptance. Do you think it’s true that we can hold queer and trans reality TV stars responsible, in part, for ushering in more acceptance for us?
I’m not going to sit here and say Clay Aiken got us gay marriage. I’m not going to go that far. I will agree that it’s possibility-modelling, and it’s representation. Representation is not going to save us. The existence of Emilia Pérez is not going to fix trans rights in the United States. But the central thesis of this project is that, again, these are not constructed characters. This is an actual human being. And for a lot of people in middle America, a lot of people in maybe unaccepting households, a lot of people who are kind of primed to be allies and don’t know it yet, being able to see those real people and then build those kinds of emotional connections with them can help them then understand how to support the queer and trans people in their real life.
Get Queer looks backward: it unfolds in a largely chronological manner, you’re looking back at the history of reality TV and examining it. But what do you think the future of reality TV for queer people, or for queer people on reality TV, looks like?
There’s the big giant elephant in the room of the current political climate. We can’t ignore the larger societal backlash against queer and trans, and particularly trans, people that is happening. And it’s why I often say representation can only take us so far because what good is having a trans person in the Traitors castle when, in the U.K., trans people can’t use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity? What good is talking about Zeke Smith on Survivor when he himself is probably going to have trouble getting a passport in the U.S. right now?
We’re in this current political moment where it can feel like those rights are rolling back down the hill. And so what role does queer and trans reality TV play in helping push those rights back up the hill?I think it’s by helping push public perception of queer and trans people as complex people deserving of empathy.
A term that comes up throughout the podcast is this idea of being casually queer. I hope that reality TV continues to be a vessel in the coming years and decades for sharing our reality and our real life stories. We are simply people. We’re people who enter singing competitions or get trapped in the woods in Africa for three weeks at a time or want to be the top chef or whatever it may be. We’re still just people. And that’s what this podcast is fundamentally about.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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