As much as we try to fight it, it’s hard to avoid, everyone watches Big Brother now and again. Even if you didn’t watch the show, if you watched TV at all in the last 100 days, you would have caught the promos and you’d know from them what went on in the house.
Usually I don’t mind – I feel somewhat immune to bad reality TV shows. At the very least, they make good fodder for comedians. I don’t like to let anything in particular get under my skin – if I did I would be feverishly writing critiques about patriarchal power plays (how many women have won Big Brother? after this year, 2 from 7 series). I just don’t want to waste my time with it any more. I guess this is just one soft spot, one continual niggle which has been with me since the very beginning – all years except 2004 have had a representative from the GBLTQ community – all white gay men, barring one bisexual woman who seemed to be there to titillate the audience and reinforce the stereotype of promiscuity amongst bisexuals.
The question that niggles is simple; why are there never any credible lesbians in the house?
This time, there were actually two white gay males. Don’t get me wrong, I love Zach (and even got sucked into voting because of him), but why can’t the producers of Big Brother put a lesbian in the house?
I believe that Zach hit the nail on the head when he was asked whom he wanted to win. He replied that he wanted Aleisha (the only remaining girl in the house) to win because Australia had already celebrated the big, blokey type enough, and the other two housemates are exactly that – big, blokey macho types.
This is the social equation that is Big Brother. They have their macho types, and then the type of guy they are typically threatened or challenged by – the gay male. The straight women in the house often play second fiddle and the majority this time were universally nominated by their male counterparts and evicted very early on. Lesbians just don’t fit into the calculations.
This is beginning to sound like a whinge-fest, but representations of gay & lesbian people in the media are important. A lot of the housemates stated that they wouldn’t usually ‘hang out with someone like Zach’, but they liked him. Some of that comes from members of our community by choice staying in places where they feel safe – their own communities, so apart from meeting in a workplace or in passing on the street, people like Joel and Zach might never even cross paths in life. Zach also showed that even though he was a very pretty boy he was tougher than the blokey Zoran when it came to catching huntsman spiders. Zach earned the watching public’s respect. I don’t think it was only the gay vote that carried him through to the runner up position. I don’t think it was sympathetic editing from the producers either. The public accepted him as a housemate and potential winner, and the run to the finish was so close the finale ran an hour overtime while the votes were being collated. The close finish and the public support for Zach led him to state at the end of the series that he was happy that it would help his parents see how OK it was to be gay.
The problem is that while the white gay male has been well represented in Big Brother, and well accepted by the viewing audience (in the main) as just another housemate) – the producers really haven’t done the same favour for lesbians. I’m sure there were plenty of credible candidates to go into the house. I’d just like to see viewers accept a lesbian as they have some of the gay men who lived in the house over the years.
