How on Earth Did 'Are You The One' Get Queer Love So Right?
It doesn’t matter how you identify. ‘The One’ could be anyone.”
So claims the introduction of Are You the One?, an MTV dating show now in its eighth season. The premise is simple: Sixteen single strangers are picked to live in a house. Among them are eight perfect matches secretly predetermined by expert matchmakers. If contestants can figure out who belongs with whom—resisting the allure of imperfect matches—the entire house wins $1M, split between them. For the first time in the show’s history, this summer’s cast is entirely made up of people who identify as bisexual, pansexual, and/or sexually fluid. “Everyone’s a possibility,” as cast member Justin put it. “This is just wild.”
A sexually fluid cast that includes trans and non-binary folks certainly creates more permutations of perfect matches than a cisgender, heterosexual (“cishet”) one. But the idea that the one could be anyone might also lead an audience—especially a straight audience—to believe that queers pair off in a utopian bubble where personal hang ups, preferred physical types and latent family dynamics don't exist, where every hookup is a meeting of the souls. As a femme lesbian, I knew going in that nothing could be further from the truth. But I was surprised to discover how much this season of Are You the One? gets right. It’s an all-too-real representation of queer relationships, the work that goes into them, and how they can be just as toxic as anything you’d see on The Bachelor.
Take Kai and Jenna. Kai, a nonbinary transmasculine person, and Jenna, a cis, femme-presenting bi woman, were attracted to each other immediately. In the first episode, Kai asked Jenna to sit with him while he gave himself a testosterone injection because, he said, “Moral support is awesome.” “Do you want me to hold your hand?” Jenna asked.
I was watching AYTO with a group of femme queer friends. We were deeply struck by this scene. Here was a trans guy, taking T on cable television. And here was a femme person, supporting a masc person through a vulnerable moment. In Kai, my friends and I saw the people we love and have loved. In Jenna, we saw ourselves. When Jenna and Kai took all that intimacy to the Boom Boom Room, as it is called, and had sex, we cheered.
Then Jenna went to sleep, and Kai promptly had sex with someone else. And the room exploded. Kai now seemed like every fuckboi we’d fallen for. We wanted to hurtle ourselves through the screen and into the tacky group house in Kona, Hawaii. We wanted to wake Jenna up and swaddle her in emotional bubble wrap, like a femme energy force field. Yes, AYTO is a reality show, with heavily edited character arcs. But the experience we were shown felt viscerally familiar. Was this what relating to a reality dating show was like?
Over the course of the season, Jenna and Kai’s storyline remained of particular interest to us, a group of femmes who have noticed that we tend to take on a disproportionate amount of emotional labor in our relationships, in our friendships, and, sometimes, with our exes. Like our cishet friends with their bad boyfriends and Brene Brown books, we spend a lot of time thinking about the ways other people—queer and not—feel entitled to our space, our time, our attention, our emotional support. Our gender presentation is linked to an expectation, however unconscious, that we will take care of everyone around us.
In an early episode, Kai wonders: How often are exclusively queer folks in an enclosed space where everyone is potentially into everyone else? I’ve had the good luck to be in such spaces—most prominently, A-Camp, a queer adult summer camp put on by LGBTQ+ site Autostraddle. As freeing as those environments can be, the expectation that femmes will take care of everyone shows up there, too. There are masc friends who only talk to me when they need a favor. There are queers who make out with me on the dance floor, and then someone else, and then try to come back at me like I’m just there, an interchangeable femme body. At a recent A-Camp, I ended up bonding over these experiences with other 30-something femmes on what we jokingly termed “femme protest walks.” While other people were dancing or hooking up or singing karaoke late into the night, we walked around camp, drinking boxed wine, talking and laughing and processing encounters that might have otherwise left me alone, in tears.
“What [we] did was fucking,” Kai told Jenna of his second hookup, “what you and I did was intimate.” Jenna forgave him and heard him out, even as they continued to be on different pages. He wanted to “explore” other connections; she remained focused on him. Both seemed genuinely surprised when the Truth Booth, where contestants go to find out whether they’ve found their Perfect Match, declared they weren’t meant to be. But feelings are hard to turn off. “Usually what I would do in this situation,” Jenna said, “is I would cut someone off cold turkey.” In the world of AYTO, Kai was literally sleeping in the same room, and her cell phone had been quarantined. Eventually, Jenna drew a boundary, even as Kai continued to seek validation from her. “I’m madly in love with you,” he told her.
“But I don’t want this, because this isn’t healthy,” she replied. “I need to put me first. I need to love myself first right now.”
Reader, I cried. Open conversations about emotional labor, boundaries, attraction and expectations in queer relationships are playing out on an MTV reality show in the year of our Lord 2019! What’s more, the dynamics are being explored in platonic relationships, too. Fan-favorite Basit—a gender-fluid, femme-presenting person who does drag—is essentially the house therapist, holding deep one-on-one conversations with fellow castmates processing trauma. You can spot femmes Kari and Kylie in the corner of the frame, chasing after a crying person, helping to break up Nour and Jasmine’s knock-down fight in episode seven. The femmes are on the emotional front lines. (Remy, an internet-famous, self-declared “hookup king,” is an exception to the rule, routinely seen tenderly comforting housemates after their altercations with partners.)
As the season has progressed, holding a mirror up to toxic behavior in the house has become a group effort. In the latest episode, Jenna invited a group of housemates—femme and non-femme alike—to join in a poolside conversation with Kai about how he treats people in relationships. “No one here has no faults, Kai,” Basit said. “We believe you can change,” Justin said. There was empathy for Kai, alongside a conscious reckoning with patterns that need to be excised for the health of the house.
This is where AYTO diverges from your average reality dating show: There is a rich and real no person left behind mentality, which is so distinctive to the queer community. Even as the femmes rally around each other, the entire cast is unwilling to let bad behavior go unchecked. Femmes like me, who date butch and masc folks, often get accused of thoughtlessly repeating heteronormative patterns. It’s true that our relationships (like any relationship) require a lot of mindful processing to make sure that we don’t default to an ingrained auto-pilot. Personally, I’m increasingly aware of how porous my boundaries have been in past relationships, how willing I’ve been to take care of anyone who came along. What makes this season of AYTO relatable—so unmistakably queer and hopeful—is the group’s untangling and reimagining of masculinity and femininity, which are anything but binary. Here, the drama affirms how much intentional work there is to be done when it comes to building relationships and examining attraction—but also how much joy and especially self-love can be found along the way.
Can 16 queer singles unpack their trauma, challenge their beliefs about attraction and relationships, and find their perfect matches? It remains to be seen. MTV has not released a season 8 finale date, but my community and I will be watching in real time over the next few weeks, and rooting for the entire cast—in all their gorgeous, complex, sometimes messy, always human glory—as we await the answer.
You Might Also Like
Solve the daily Crossword
