Television’s newest reality show follows six gay men’s luxurious lives in West Hollywood, and people HATE it.
The show starring Todrick Hall, Curtis Hamilton, Brad Goreski, James Vaughan, Joey Zauzig, and Dorian Renaud sounds like it would be a good step for the queer community; let’s talk about why people don’t think so.
The show’s first sin: it cuts into RuPaul’s Drag Race, the show it plays after. Before “The Real Friends of WeHo” came out, “Drag Race” episodes were 90 minutes. Now they’re just an hour, and it’s not a coincidence. MTV is using Drag Race and its large queer audience to promote the new reality show.
A petition on change.org has over thirty thousand signatures to cancel the show and bring back the longer episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
A main problem people have with the show is that it doesn’t represent more of the LGBTQ+ community, and to some extent, they would be right. The show focuses mainly on cisgender gay men, a small percentage of the community as a whole. However, when you relate it to other reality shows, its queer representation is not falling behind.
Another reason the show is disliked is due to the casting of Todrick Hall. Todrick Hall is a singer, dancer, and choreographer. He got his start on YouTube and has been on other shows like “Celebrity Big Brother.” He recently received backlash for accusations that he did not pay his employees on numerous occasions. In 2019, his former assistant Tommy McKissock leaked documents and alleged that Hall had sexually harassed his employees.
The first episode introduced the cast and displayed signs of wealth in a very casual way. This isn’t new though: it’s done in several reality shows including “The Real Housewives” franchise and “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”
Overall, I think the bark around the show is bigger than its bite. It doesn’t feel like anything special and I don’t plan to keep watching. Although the show does display extreme wealth in a small part of the population, it’s doing more for queer culture than other reality shows. Sure, Todrick Hall probably shouldn’t have made the cut, but how many celebrities in similar positions are not receiving half the backlash?
At the end of the day, this show is nothing new. It’s the same style as many reality shows we’ve seen before that all mainly focus on straight cis white women. People think that this show is a bad representation of the LGBTQ+ community, but If you are using “The Real Friends of WeHo” to define how you perceive all gay people, then you’re doing it wrong.