A Queer Bachelorette Mansion Is Happening. Is Australia Ready?
The next season of 'The Bachelorette Australia' features a queer Bachelorette and mixed-gender casting!!! The gay agenda flourishes!
It has just been announced that the next season of The Bachelorette Australia will not only feature a queer Bachelorette, but will also include mixed-gender casting as a consequence. Both of these are a world first for the Bachelor franchise, and means amongst other things that the gay agenda is absolutely thriving.
Our 2021 Bachelorette is 26-year-old youth worker Brooke Blurton, a proud Noongar-Yamatji woman. She is also the first Indigenous woman cast as The Bachelorette. She has appeared on previous seasons of both The Bachelor and Bachelor In Paradise, where she talked openly about being attracted to both men and women (and failed to find love with walking slab of broiled ham The Honey Badger). She has been labelled as both bisexual and pansexual, but says that she doesn’t particularly have a preference with how she refers to her sexuality.
Australia, say hello to your 2021 Bachelorette, Brooke Blurton. 🌹 #BacheloretteAU pic.twitter.com/cw5m02YGE2
— #BacheloretteAU (@BacheloretteAU) May 19, 2021
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph Brooke said she wouldn’t have it “any other way” when it came to having diverse casting. “If it makes people feel uncomfortable in any way, I really challenge them to think about why it does,” Brooke stated. “Times are more progressive and sexuality and gender expression are just so fluid these days. I am not too sure if Australia is ready for it. I hope they are. I certainly am.”
Honestly, you have to colour me both shocked and genuinely pleased. I didn’t think Australia was ready for this, and I think it’s going to be both very funny and very depressing watching straight Australia lose their minds. Already the comment sections of various publications are filling up with the most baffling hetero nonsense as a response. I think the feedback will be horrific in some sections of our society, but will ultimately do a lot to normalise queer relationships in the mainstream.
So the contestants will be male & female as she is Bi or once called herself a Lesb?? Am confused. #BacheloretteAU
— Speaking truth ONLY 👱♀️🇦🇺 😩🤧😷🤢 (@BestRecipes14) May 19, 2021
The fact that we are leading the way FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD via Bachelor franchises is also very daunting. Australia is the dogshit little brother of the globe, always trailing behind the bigger kids, snotty nosed, shit-panted, and useless. What happened that means we’re leading? Some kind of queer rights lord of the flies situation?
The call for a queer Bachelor show is not new — in fact it almost seemed to be an annual talking point. Only last year, our Bachelor recapper Rebecca Shaw published a very modest and clear argument about why it was time for Australia to have a queer Bachelor or Bachelorette. The main argument against a queer Bachelor seems to be around commercial viability — as if the straights simply could not condone any queerness on their screens. I have no evidence, but I believe that Bec’s article single-handedly changed the minds of Network 10.
But the other arguments are slightly weirder. There’s often a perceived “scarcity” of queers, as if we are a rare metal, an unviable proposition for reality TV strip mining. I think that’s weird — according to various studies there are more queers every year, and Gen Z are the queerest generation yet. Besides, as with Brooke, there’s the option for both straight and queer inclusions in the casting — which actually opens up the field for more contestants.
But the funniest reason that people think the show won’t work is that the addition of queer contestants will turn the mansion into a giant fuck fest. There is something mildly problematic about this idea, as it plays into both perceptions of queer people being based entirely around the act of sex (ignoring the hefty brunch component entirely) and of bisexual people in particular being horny and untrustworthy.
But on the OTHER hand, this is reality TV, so the people they cast for it have to inherently have a deep streak of chaos in them. You don’t go on a Bachelor show if you aren’t an agent for pandemonium in some way.
So sure, maybe some of the contestants will fuck each other. Maybe some will fall in love with each other instead of with Brooke. Maybe we’ll get a season which is just a giant chaos orgy, with only Osher left out, standing dejectedly on the lawn with his little challenges and games, plaintively saying “now come on guys, this is prime time TV”. Maybe that will happen — but wouldn’t that be the most amazing viewing? I don’t see why people are worried about this. It sounds like must watch TV.
In an interview with Punkee, Brooke dropped that apparently the girls and the boys will live separately — perhaps in an ill-conceived attempt to make sure this hypothetical situation described above doesn’t happen. But the girls would be all queer, and potentially some of the guys, so… they would still be able to fuck each other? I don’t think they thought this through AT ALL lol.
But it might just be so women don’t have to live in the same house as a bunch of gross men, which makes sense.
Brooke Blurton seems unfazed by the potential for two or more of her potential contestants to fall in love in the house before she even gets the chance to choose one.
“I can’t control that situation,” she said. “I would be really supportive if that is what they want but I would also be a bit disheartened if I didn’t get the chance to develop that relationship with them as well. It is what it is, you have to roll with it. This is all such a new thing, if something good comes out of it, then that is it.”
Some other “good” that will come from this season is queer representation. On the one hand, I’m genuinely pleased by this type of representation– when I was young, I had to search hard for a single gay person on television, and even then depictions were often reductive or harmful or stereotyped. Don’t even talk about bisexual representation — we aren’t all hot deceitful villains with great legs (constantly apologising to the community for adhering to this stereotype). Seeing depictions of myself, normalising bisexual relationships, de-stigmatising queer people — these are all genuinely good things to come from representation, and I’m happy for the young people who get to grow up seeing queers on Bachelor shows.
But also, representation is also about just normalising real queer people on TV. And I’m so excited to not only see IMPORTANT examples of my community, to see our serious stories, our struggles, the beauty of our community, blah blah blah — I want to see our trashbags, our messy bitches, our queer agents of chaos.
Yes, there’s more important issues in the queer community, there’s more pressing battles to be fought, there’s a whole lot of serious shit that we have to fight for. But that’s also the next step of queer representation — it doesn’t always have to be virtuous, it can and should be stupid as hell. I believe The Bachelorette can give us this.
As Rebecca Shaw told me: “By choosing Brooke they have automatically improved the show by advancing it from the very straight and very white position it has been stuck in. As a recapper this is very good news as it will make our job easier, and as a viewer I cannot wait for some hot mess queer reality show drama. That’s equality baby.”
Bring on the queer chaos, Australia. I hope you’re ready.
Patrick Lenton is the Editor of Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.