Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Let's face it, Netflix has carved out a pretty decent lane for itself in the realm of reality dating shows. Hits like Love is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, and The Ultimatum rest comfortably in the streamer's top 10 rankings weeks after initial release.

Speaker 1: I initiated the conversation with Hunter about an ultimatum. I'm ready to make the next step, and I basically told Hunter, we either get engaged or we break up.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Not leaving straight folks to have all the fun, The Ultimatum is sent to launch countless group chats when it returns later this month with the added descriptor, Queer love.

Speaker 2: I don't even want to say her name anymore. She's like Baltimore to me.

Speaker 3: The experience was 10 people coming here, meeting other people who you could find something with. What did you come here for?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, as mindlessly entertaining as reality TV can be, it also reflects back to us, our social ideals about relationships, love, and gender. With me now is Tuck Woodstock, host of Gender Reveal, and co-founder of Sivan Consulting, a trans-led organization that provides trainings and consulting services with an emphasis on trans and queer equity. A lot of this work is done for media and entertainment companies. Tuck, welcome to The Takeaway.

Tuck Woodstock: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad you snuck me in here. It's such a treat.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, I'm thrilled to give you a chance to talk with you about this. In this case, we get to talk about trash TV. [laughs] Let's talk about the pop culture space that is The Ultimatum. What is this show?

Tuck Woodstock: The premise is so convoluted that it's difficult to explain. There are a number of couples who apply to be on the show, and each couple has one member who has issued an ultimatum that says, "I need you to propose or accept my proposal right away." The other person is like, "I love you, I want to be with you, but I'm just not ready to get married right now." We know that this can't possibly be the best way to do this because at the beginning of the first season, the hosts, Nick and Vanessa Lachey, say "Therapists don't really recommend ultimatums, but we're just going to do it." I'm paraphrasing, but it's more or less exactly what they say. Maybe not the best intention, but it sure produces interesting results for the TV viewers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Listen. First of all, a shout-out to therapists. I can very much remember being 24 years old and telling my therapist at the time I was going to issue an ultimatum to my partner that he must propose. I can remember her looking at me quizzically and saying, "So, either you're going to spend the rest of your life with this person, or you're out of here and never want to speak to them again. Really no room in between those two things. That doesn't make a lot of sense." [laughs]

Tuck Woodstock: I think you being 24 is a key part of this puzzle because the first season- there's currently only one season out, and the first season, the age range was, I believe 23 to 30, with most people being 23, 24, 25. They would have these conversations where one person would be like, "I don't understand why you haven't proposed to me already." The other person would say, "Well, I'm still in college."

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm still on my parent's health insurance.

Tuck Woodstock: Exactly. It's wild. Also, none of them had been dating for that terribly long. It was like all people who had been dating from 1.5 to 2.5 years, which I understand maybe that feels like a long time for some people, but to be 23 and having dated someone for a year and a half and being like, "I don't understand why this hasn't happened already," I'm sure it's normal for some people, but it's certainly not the world that I live in.

When I was watching the first season of The Ultimatum, I thought of it very much as having a peak at the straight people zoo, [laughter] like, what's going on, [laughs] who are these people, and what are their lives like? They have almost nothing to do with what my life is like, which is one of the reasons why it's such a joy to watch these shows.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I hear that your phone blew up with texts when this most recent trailer for The Ultimatum came out, because this season, it's The Ultimatum: Queer Love. What is happening now?

Tuck Woodstock: This second season, they have couples of "women and non-binary people." I say quote because I don't have any information about any of the genders of the people on this show other than what's in the caption of the YouTube video of the trailer. They're saying that women and non-binary people are participating on this Queer Love season. It's clearly going for a lesbian vibe. I think that they, perhaps in the casting, realized that they didn't want to just cast cis women because some of these cisgender women had partners who did describe themselves as non-binary and are non-binary. Now we have this mix of cis women and non-binary people. This is called Queer Love, but I think it's more giving lesbian love, which would be a fun alliteration, but I think was considered not inclusive enough, which we understand we want to be inclusive here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Help us to understand a bit though about why that matters.

Tuck Woodstock: Sure. They did not send me screeners, so I cannot tell you how anyone describes themselves or describes their relationship. I want there to be space for everyone to describe their relationships and the words that feel right for them. I will say that if you are going to use a broad label like Queer Love, and then you're only casting cisgender women, and what I am guessing are non-binary people assigned female at birth who have not necessarily transitioned in any medical way, which of course, just to be so clear, being non-binary, you do not have to transition medically, being trans, you don't have to transition medically.

All I'm saying is it's a very specific identity. It's a very specific type of being non-binary. Being non-binary and being trans at large is this huge umbrella that really includes all sorts of other people. If we're going to say queer love, or even if we are going to say, lesbian love, what we could have done was also cast trans women, also cast trans-feminine people, cast trans masculine people who also identify as lesbians, or other words that I maybe can't say on the radio, but that are in the lesbian world.

All of these people, if you think of really anyone who is not a cisgender man, there is someone of that type of gender who does identify as a lesbian.

There's certainly people of all genders who identify as queer. We're talking again, cis men, trans men, non-binary people, cis women, trans women, and all sorts of other identities in there too. Having something called queer love and then only including this one really small subset of that identity, and when there's just so much else out there that you could have included.

Melissa Harris-Perry: More with gender reveal podcast host Tuck Woodstock in just a moment. It's The Takeaway.

[pause 00:07:23]

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're still talking about season two of the Netflix reality dating show, The Ultimatum: Queer Love. I'm talking with Tuck Woodstock, host of Gender Reveal, and co-founder of Sylveon Consulting.

I'm wondering if taking a thing that is the straight people zoo and then just superimposing on that queer love, in whatever narrow or broad sense, is really doing justice to the possibilities of what a queer love dating show, even based on something like this could be.

Tuck Woodstock: I actually keep in my back pocket at least three absolute bangers of queer reality television show ideas that I have never gotten to use and probably will never get to use because what I have found trying to make this happen is that major production companies still in 2023 do not want to give money or creative control to queer and trans people. They want to take straight cis people and then say, "Hey you, a heterosexual, cisgender person, what do you think queer people want for TV? All right, let's just do that." Often, it ends up being just queer or gay versions of existing straight IPs, existing straight television shows.

In this case, I can see ways that it would really work and even be more interesting, but I can also see ways that it doesn't work maybe as well. The ways that it actually I think does work and is really interesting, one lesbians are known, and I can say this culturally, lesbians are known for a lot of processing and also a lot of getting together really fast. We call it U-hauling. These are both things that you can do on The Ultimatum. In some ways, that's beautiful.

Another way, the way that the show works is everyone gets to date everyone else. Everyone is ostensibly interested in everyone else on the show because you're all in the same general queer lesbian world, and that is also really interesting. However, queer culture generally is much more interested in non-monogamy than straight culture. That's not to say that there can't be non-monogamous straight people. That's not to say that there aren't monogamous queer people because there are, but by and large, we see non-monogamy as a very normal way of life. So much of the stakes and the dynamics of straight-created reality dating shows are saying, we're going to take these monogamous people. We're going to put them in a non-monogamous situation like Love Is Blind or The Bachelor or this show, The Ultimatum, then the goal is to come out monogamous on the other side. So much of the tension is like, "Will you be with her or will you be with me?"

If you think about non-monogamy as a valid way of life, that tension doesn't exist in the same way because you can just date both of them. I think new and interesting and different tensions arise, but I don't think that straight reality television producers know how to handle those tensions. I am really interested to see the way that they cast this show and the way that they handled that because it's possible that they screened people to be only focusing not on monogamous queer people, but it's also possible that they did it. I will be pleasantly surprised if we see any conversations about non-monogamy on this television show because it's really been lacking in dating shows thus far, I feel.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right, because rather than non-monogamy as a valid choice, it's really just about reluctance around timing or mismatch around timing. Bring the U-haul on the fifth date, not the second date.

Tuck Woodstock: Exactly. I think that it just would be so interesting if we saw in this new season of The Ultimatum, someone say, "I came into this season wanting to marry you, my girlfriend, and then I met Tina over there and I really had a connection with Tina. What we're going to do is I'm going to still marry you but I'm also going to date Tina." That wouldn't be something that we see on reality TV, but that is actually a very normal thing. I have dated many people with wives. That's just a thing that we do here in this culture. I would just love to see that on TV. I don't know if it'll happen or not because like I said, it changes the stakes of everything but I think it would be a true treat to see actual relationship dynamics on TV.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's so interesting to hear you say, "I love to see that on TV." I'm always of two minds around this. For example, as a Black Southerner, I actually really hate seeing Black church representations on TV or movies. I've just so rarely ever seen them done right. I'm like, "Could we just never go to church? Just, how about never, because like y'all are doing this weird performative thing with it. That's not what it is. I don't want to see that, thanks. Rather have a empty space than getting it wrong." I guess I'm interested in this feeling of like, "Oh, I'd love to see that." I wonder if you also are like, "Oh gosh, please let me never see that."

Tuck Woodstock: I think that that is also a really good point that you're making because when I was talking about this upcoming season of The Ultimatum with a lot of my friends, I did say to them, "Are we disappointed that there isn't a wider range of trans and queer identities on this show? At least as far as we can tell from the trailer, do we wish that there was trans-masculine representation or trans-feminine representation in the ways that we embody in our day-to-day lives, or are we so relieved to be left out of this mess because it's going to be a mess of a show?"

When we think about other shows that have had queer seasons, the one that everyone in my community always cites first is the queer season of Are You the One? That had trans representation in ways that were like, "Oh, here's an embarrassing trans-masculine boy. We all know that boy. Now he's on TV." Do we like that he's on TV? Do we feel seen? Are we like, "Oh no, that's our dirty laundry"?

Meanwhile, another trans character is being transphobic on the show. Do we like seeing that or do we actually hate seeing transphobia on TV because we see it enough already? I think we are all of two minds. That's why I come back to I want to see queer and trans reality television that is actually produced and created by queer and trans people because then we can be looking out for each other and we can be correcting the mistakes like the ones you're describing in your community where it's like, "Oh, this representation doesn't feel right. It's not hitting correctly."

I would love to see more queer and trans and non-monogamous representation on reality TV and in other parts of media. That's part of my whole job but I really want to ensure that it's done in a way where everyone is treated with respect. They don't have to be the heroes of the season. We can have more trans villains. We love trans villains and queer villains. Queer people historically have been the villain. They're great at it.

Look at Ursula, for example. We love it, but at the same time, we want to make sure everyone's treated with respect and dignity and that no one's gender or sexual orientation is a punchline, no one's being talked down to, no one's being othered in the way that it's so easy to do when a show is being run by people who don't understand that identity on a fundamental level. Again, I'll just be really interested in- to see how this goes moving forward. I really have no idea how they'll handle it.

No matter what they give us, we are all going to be watching this season of the show because it's so rare that queer reality TV pops up that it can be the trashiest trash that's ever trashed and we're just like, "Whoa, I guess I have to watch this train wreck every week." We'll all be watching whether it's good or not. It's like the L word.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tuck Woodstock is host of Gender Reveal and co-founder of Sylveon Consulting, a trans-literate organization providing trainings and consulting services with an emphasis on trans and queer equity for media and entertainment companies. Tuck, thank you so much for taking the time with us.

Tuck Woodstock: It was such a treat. I can't wait to watch The Ultimatum with you.

[music]

[00:16:00] [END OF AUDIO]

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