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    ‘The Ultimatum: Queer Love’ Is a TV Rarity With Familiar Drama

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    Netflix’s latest dating reality show hit, which wrapped up on Wednesday, broke ground by focusing exclusively on queer and nonbinary couples.The finale of Netflix’s latest dating show hit, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love,” arrived on Wednesday after weeks of partner swapping that amounted to a milestone in romantic reality television: The first of the genre’s marriage contests that focused exclusively on queer couples.Like its predecessor, “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On,” from last year, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love,” which premiered in May, follows couples who don’t agree about their future together (one wants to get engaged; the other is not ready). So they agree to split up and live with new partners for a few weeks in front of the cameras. After meeting, dating and committing to a “trial wife,” the original couples reunite to live together as married, also for a few weeks. Then, after eight episodes worth of soul-searching, they must decide whether to get engaged, end the relationship or leave with their “trial wife” — the “ultimatum” of the title.“I feel like we’re at a lesbian club, and all our exes are here,” a castmate named Tiff Der joked in the first episode, sitting by the compound’s firepit surrounded by Der’s partner-turned-ex (for the purposes of the show), Mildred Woody, and the eight other contestants they each went on short dates with that day.In the same scene, another contestant, Vanessa Papa, suggests the cast all have a “polyamorous orgy,” drawing head shakes and nervous laughter from the others. By that point, Papa was interested in both Lexi Goldberg and Rae Cheung-Sutton while her ex, Xander Boger, was hitting it off with someone else’s former partner nearby.Same-sex marriage became federally recognized eight years ago, and it’s taken that long for L.G.B.T.Q. people to get their own dating show focused on love and commitment — though a number of queer-inclusive reality shows have demonstrated an appetite for such series. In earlier such shows, like the bisexual-themed competition “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila” (2007) and the all-pansexual season of MTV’s “Are You The One?” (2019), the focus was on the competition, not on lifelong commitment. In “Queer Love,” which wrapped up Wednesday with a final episode and reunion special, the only prize is the clarity gained from such an experiment, the first in which men are not potential partners.“The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On” hadn’t aired yet when the cast of the spinoff began filming, so the five couples who appeared in “Queer Love” had little sense of how the show would unfold. All they had to go on was the track record of the show’s production company, Kinetic Content, which is also behind the Netflix reality hit “Love is Blind,” as well as the long-running “Married at First Sight,” on Lifetime in recent years.In many ways, “Queer Love” is reminiscent of any other marriage reality show — their struggles and triumphs with their partners (trial and otherwise) are not unlike those experienced by “Love Is Blind” competitors after they emerge from their pods and pair off. Commitment angst and the allure of potential new partners are reliable generators of the interpersonal drama that reality producers crave, no matter the makeup of the couples involved.“It was a real accurate representation of who I am and how I navigate the world,” said Mal Wright, left, with Yoly Rojas in “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.”Netflix
    Der and Woody had been in a breakup-makeup-breakup cycle for almost two years, Der said, when they were approached by a casting producer about participating in “Queer Love.”“I actually said no at first because I’m like, ‘Actually, we’re in a really bad spot right now, so I don’t think so, I’m sorry,’” Der said in an interview. “And then she goes, ‘No, actually that’s what we’re looking for.’”Goldberg said she was approached at just the right time in her relationship with her partner, Cheung-Sutton. “It was kind of this question of, do you have a relationship where one person is questioning or dragging their feet?” she said.As universal as relationship frustrations can be, “Queer Love” also captures the specific ways queer women and nonbinary people relate to one another — for example, spending time with one another’s exes, whether intentional or not, is common in such a small community. For straight viewers, the show serves as a kind of voyeuristic microcosm; for queer ones, it provides a more relatable analog to the messy behavior of heterosexual dating shows like “The Bachelor” or “Love Is Blind.”Cast members, who ranged in age from 25 to 42 when they filmed, said they were encouraged by the production’s general queer competency — several crew members on set were L.G.B.T.Q., including the director of photography — but some noted blind spots. Yoly Rojas, a first-generation Venezuelan immigrant, said she was excited to be “a brown Latina femme on television,” but she was disappointed that her partner, Mal Wright, was the only Black person in the cast.“I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the community,” Rojas said. “It just felt still a little bit whiter than what I would’ve liked.”Wright initially was concerned about being portrayed as an aggressor — a common TV fate for butch and more masculine-of-center women or nonbinary people. “I didn’t want to be portrayed in a way that wasn’t true to me,” Wright said.But after watching the full season, Wright, who uses they/them pronouns, felt reassured: “There was no angry trope that got attached to me,” they said. “So it was a real accurate representation of who I am and how I navigate the world.”One of the show’s stranger moves — and probably its most controversial one — was its choice of host. Nick and Vanessa Lachey co-host both “Love is Blind” and “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On,” but for “Queer Love,” Netflix brought in the actress JoAnna Garcia Swisher, a star of its show “Sweet Magnolias.” When Garcia Swisher is revealed as the host in the first episode, the cast appears surprised. It is Papa who finally pops the question: “Are you queer?”“I just wanted to know,” Papa, a fan of Garcia Swisher’s recurring role on her favorite show, “Freaks and Geeks,” said in an interview. “But she’s not, which is also great because now you have this mix of a queer cast and then this religious married-to-a-man host, so it’s like two worlds converging.”Other cast members were confused by the choice.“It took me a minute to warm up with Joanna because I didn’t get it,” Rojas said. “There’s no correlation to anything gay or to anything queer — like, it made no sense. But she’s a really sweet person, as understanding as one can be as a straight woman. She did her best.”Chris Coelen, an executive producer of the show, said Garcia Swisher had the most important quality for a host: curiosity. “Is JoAnna queer?” he said. “No, she’s not. Does she need to be to do a good job on show? I don’t think so.”The show puzzled some cast members and viewers by hiring a straight host, JoAnna Garcia Swisher.NetflixViewers of the show called out the strangeness of the hosting choice on social media. But overall “Queer Love” has been well-received and highly memed — praised by writers and viewers for giving queer women and nonbinary people a chance to see their own relationships reflected on an enormous platform like Netflix.“It’s all pretty standard reality show stuff,” Emma Specter wrote in Vogue. “But I wonder what it would have meant for me to watch 10 queer people date, break up, cry, have fun and drink disgusting-looking cocktails out of weird chrome glasses on TV in high school, when there were approximately zero out queer people in my actual life.”For the “Queer Love” cast, their appearances on the show came with a feeling of responsibility to not embarrass communities that historically have been ignored or misrepresented on TV. Goldberg, the youngest castmate, said the weight of the contestants displaying themselves in such a public way was palpable from their first group gathering.“It was kind of this unspoken thing,” Goldberg said. “Not that the stakes were higher, but that the importance of being good representatives was something we should consider day in and day out.”“But it doesn’t mean we don’t get to have relationships and feel and cry and deal with problems the way they arise,” Goldberg continued. “It just meant we do have to remember that this is important, and that there will be a lot of people that watch this and that look to this as a sense of normalcy in queer relationships that maybe they just never knew before.”Coelen, the executive producer, hopes “Queer Love,” in both its relatability and specificity, “lowers barriers between people in some way.”“Because people are people,” he continued. “And, like the ‌cliché, love is love, you know?” More

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      At Long Last, Onscreen Portrayals of Lesbian Relationships Are Getting Complex

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      The shift comes after decades of stories that minimized romantic love between women as fruitless, or as some kind of phase.In most parts of the world, to be gay or transgender is to at some point realize that you’ve been taught, to varying degrees, to deny who you are and to feel shame about your desire to love and be loved — to be entitled to a full life. This is true, as well, of queer lives onscreen, where, until very recently, most narratives centered around death, whether it was the trans person too tragic to continue living — either as a result of murder (“Boys Don’t Cry,” 1999) or suicide, a trope that has existed since “Glen or Glenda” (1953), one of the earliest films to highlight transgender issues — or gay men felled by their own murderous impulses (“Cruising,” 1980) and, later on, complications from AIDS, representations of which have regularly treated the disease as a form of punishment.Then there were lesbian characters. They, too, were subjected to countless onscreen deaths, from Tara on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in 2002 to Poussey on “Orange Is the New Black” in 2016, but queer women have also been disappeared in a different way: For nearly a century, affection between two women has often been depicted as unrequited, predatory, transient or otherwise unserious. Just think of the menacing, lonely Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940), a famously queer-coded character; or, on a lighter note, Roseanne Barr and Mariel Hemingway on the former’s sitcom in 1994, or Calista Flockhart and Lucy Liu on “Ally McBeal” five years later. All these stories seemed to argue that the ultimate tragedy of lesbianism was that it was a choice, and that smart women, wanting marriage and children, chose otherwise. Such “lesbian kiss episodes,” as they’re derided today, were usually (and unsurprisingly) dreamed up by straight male Hollywood showrunners as a kind of titillation, according to Sarah Kate Ellis, 50, the chief executive officer of GLAAD, who says, “Lesbian storytelling has historically been told through the eyes of men and their experience of that, of their own desire.”Tara (Amber Benson), left, and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”© 20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy of Everett CollectionNow, some two decades later, lesbian portrayals onscreen are finally starting to become deeper, more varied and more inclusive, moving beyond the aspirational (mostly rich, mostly white) women who dominated programs like Showtime’s “The L Word,” which debuted in 2004, or Todd Haynes’s 2015 film, “Carol,” based on “The Price of Salt,” Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel of mannered glances, and starring Cate Blanchett as a housewife who must choose between her female love and her daughter.In the past two years, there have been “The Wilds” (2020), Sarah Streicher’s Amazon Prime video series about a group of teenage girls that doesn’t overly conflate coming out with conflict, as well as indie films like Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) and Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire” (2020), wherein love stories orbit around mutual desire rather than shared sexual frustration. In late 2019, when Showtime rebooted “The L Word,” the show was celebrated by fans for its more diverse cast — and more authentic writing, which didn’t shy away from the realities of menstruation, cunnilingus or seething jealousy. Gone was the tragic lesbian, forced to choose between love and a full life; instead, we got unpredictable, messy, complicated lesbian lives. “The ultimate privilege is being able to do anything we want,” says its 36-year-old showrunner, Marja-Lewis Ryan. “We’re getting closer to being able to have characters who are deeply [flawed] and not have them represent all of us.”The third season of “Master of None” focused on the marriage and relationship between Alicia (Naomi Ackie), left, and Denise (Lena Waithe).© Netflix/courtesy of Everett CollectionAnd what is the point of queer representation if not that? Not just that there’s less death and despair, or that there are happier endings, but that the misery and pathos of life is rendered with more complexity, because everyday life is sometimes miserable, too. “It’s so important to us to have characters [being] weird and crazy,” says the queer writer, producer and actor Lena Waithe, 37, when discussing the BBC thriller “Killing Eve,” soon to air its fourth season, which has thus far subverted the “will they, won’t they” clichés of the past — and, too, the murderous impulses — by layering each episode with chaotic, bizarre sexual tension.Waithe accomplished something similarly complex when, earlier this year, she co-wrote and starred in Season 3 of Netflix’s “Master of None,” a five-episode arc that centered on two women who are selfish, who step out on each other, who watch their dreams crumble but still manage to move forward. After their marriage eventually fractures, they bend, break and then start to heal themselves, offering a radical depiction of queerness that both references decades of downtrodden lesbian narratives and yet somehow still feels hopeful. Making the piece was, as Waithe says, a matter of “life and death,” as much for herself as for the other L.G.B.T.Q. creators it might someday inspire. “We spend our lives trying to fit into a world we don’t want to fit in,” she adds. “We don’t need to.” More

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      in Television

      As Life Slowed Down, They Got Creative

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      The actor and comedian Niecy Nash and her wife, Jessica Betts, a musician, reveal how crab legs, skinny dipping and therapy improved their life as newlyweds.The actor and comedian Niecy Nash and the musician Jessica Betts married Aug. 29, 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, in an intimate ceremony at their home in Ventura County, Calif.“We only had 24 guests,” noted Ms. Nash, 51, the Emmy winner who many fans may recognize from her longstanding role as Deputy Raineesha Williams on “Reno 911!” or as the enterprising Desna Simms on “Claws.”Since saying “I Do,” the creative pair, who met on Instagram in 2015, have been productive while forced to hunker down like the rest of the world.Ms. Betts, 41, who considers her music a blend of rock and soul and sings and plays the guitar, has been busy writing and producing music for a new album. Her first single from the project is tentatively scheduled for release this summer. Ms. Nash is involved in two highly anticipated Netflix projects, a biopic mini-series, “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and a rom-com film, “The Perfect Find,” also starring Gabrielle Union.The dynamic duo also had the opportunity to mix business and pleasure when they shared the stage for the 32nd Annual GLAAD Media Awards on April 8. Ms. Nash hosted the virtual ceremony and Ms. Betts performed her soulful single “Catch Me.”Home Is Where the Love IsWhile quarantined, the newlyweds got a chance to get to know each other better.“Covid is terrible in terms of what it represents, but in terms of us being able to have more time to spend together? I’m really not complaining about that,” Ms. Betts said.Ms. Nash agreed, adding, “The other good thing for us is we got married in our backyard. We can walk around here and say, ‘Remember, we took that wedding picture there? Remember we got married right there? We cut the cake right there!’ The house is so full of memories and getting married here made it warmer.”The couple also created new memories with at-home date nights. “One night we might cook out late,” Ms. Nash said. “Or, we might have a tent outside and sleep in the yard. Or we’ll say, ‘Let’s go in the movie room and have a movie night and pop real popcorn with butter.’ We enjoy our space.”Quarantined ActivitiesBeing stuck at home together enabled the newlyweds to rediscover their love of water. One of the couple’s fun quarantine pastimes included nightly dips in their pool. When asked who the better swimmer is between the two, Ms. Nash immediately responded, “Jessica.” Then she jokingly added, “But I’m the better skinny dipper.” To this Ms. Betts responded with a chuckle, “Yeah. You got me on that one.”Homebound ValentinesFor the couple’s first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, Ms. Betts planned a private dinner in the couple’s home. “It was funny because I get in the car and I can’t see anything,” Ms. Nash said. “I have to keep my eyes closed. We drive somewhere. I have no idea where we are because I can’t open my eyes. So I get to the door, open it, and we were at our house.“She drove me right back to the house and had it transformed into this beautiful dining experience,” she continued. “There were balloons everywhere. It was absolutely gorgeous.”Ms. Betts also hired a private chef to prepare a custom menu that included Caesar salad, filet mignon and snow crab legs. “We both love snow crab legs,” Ms. Nash said. “That’s our favorite.” A loaded brownie with caramel and whipped cream dessert and Cristal Champagne completed the romantic meal.[Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email.]Dealing With LossesMs. Nash and Ms. Betts both lost relatives during the pandemic.“I lost my grandmother,” Ms. Betts said. “When you lose an older family member you’re filled with so many wonderful memories. But during Covid, it’s not easy to have gatherings or funerals. “It’s difficult because you want to be there for family members and make sure people are comforted. On the other hand, you have to be very careful and conscious of all the safety rules and regulations.”Ms. Nash, who lost a close great-aunt, echoed her wife’s sentiments. “Trying to manage everybody’s mind and heart and keep their spirits up during that time was important,” she said.Honeymoon Dreamin’There were no elaborate post-wedding vacations. While Covid travel restrictions played some part in this, Ms. Nash said there were other factors as well. “The first time we tried to leave, we got to the airport and my passport was expired,” she said. “I didn’t realize it because we were in quarantine. So, we just drove to Santa Barbara.” Right around the new year, the couple managed to take another “mini-moon” to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The couple see more travel in their future. “We were just talking about going to Aruba,” Ms. Betts said. “And Turks and Caicos,” Ms. Nash added.Talking it OutWhen asked how they avoid letting their challenges consume the relationship, Ms. Betts immediately answered, “Therapy.” To which Ms. Nash added, “I’m a firm believer that there’s two types of people in the world. People who are in therapy and people who need to be in therapy.”The couple were committed to keeping a consistent therapy schedule even during the pandemic. “We were doing our sessions over FaceTime in the beginning of the quarantine,” Ms. Nash said.Couples therapy was initially Ms. Nash’s idea, but now both she and Ms. Betts sing the praises of it. “We do individual and couples therapy and we started before we got married,” Ms. Nash said.A Desire to InspirePerusing through the couple’s social media accounts allows one to see how these two glow in each other’s presence. Both Ms. Betts and Ms. Nash recognize their powerful influence. “We definitely were not sitting together strategically coming up with a plan on how to inspire with our love, I can guarantee you that,” Ms. Betts said. “But yes, I take responsibility for that because I love to inspire and so does my wife.”Ms. Nash, who has three adult children and was previously married twice to men, said, “It’s funny because people always knew me to be in relationships with men.”When she and Ms. Betts married, she said, “People were like, Auntie Niecy?! Yep! Your favorite Auntie.”Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. More