In the Flesh: The Ultimatum: Queer Love

Ten people, treated uniformly as women by the show, sit in anonymous locations, discussing nothing, drinking from silver glasses which obscure both their beverage of choice and how much remains, enabling the show’s editors to stitch its parts together more easily without violating continuity. Instead, like virtually all reality shows, they violate reality, unpicking the flow of events, the rhythm of human connection, to reassemble disconnected parts into a story more coherent and engaging than life can provide. Or at least that’s the idea, because there’s an incredible tedium to Queer Love, a nothingness pervading every heated discussion and vicious insult. “You’re, like, really mysterious. I can’t figure you out,” says Vanessa to three consecutive conversation partners. “I’m usually really good at that.” When everyone’s a cipher, code itself becomes meaningless.

This essential emptiness is liberally seasoned with cruelty. Lexi’s tirades at Rae, the group’s savage mass-bullying of the embarrassing and overenthusiastic Vanessa, Tiff and Mildred’s deep dysfunction and hair-trigger tempers — the atmosphere Queer Love’s showrunners cultivate for us is one of constant stress and suspicion, doublethink and resentment. Interviews, even taken with a healthy dose of understanding that much of what these people say both on and off-camera is kayfabe, suggest that this brittle hostility reflects reality reasonably well. These ten people — dumb, insecure, shameless, or fame-hungry enough to consign their relationships to the wasteland of reality television — seem incapable of understanding the experiment they’ve willingly joined. They fail to express even the most basic thoughts and needs to one another, then sulk, explode, or wither when things go wrong. They shame each other for participating in the fiction, then for not participating. They spend hour after hour doing and saying almost nothing, then fret about their own inaction.

We don’t learn much about the show’s contestants. What do they do for a living? What drives them? Beyond banal platitudes there’s an almost pathological lack of substance at play, as though the showrunners and editors have meticulously excised anything that might make their subjects seem human. Four contestants use neopronouns, but the show simply ignores this. It forces trans people into a mold of lesbianism sanded down and made palatable to a straight audience that just wants to gawk at hot women fighting and crying and fingerbanging in an eerie resort complex. There’s nothing recognizably “queer” at all about these people, all of whom are varying shades of conventional and assimilationist. It’s just heterosexuality with more tits. Polyamory never comes up. Neither does gender, or topping/bottoming aside from a few fleeting, jokey mentions. It’s a profoundly ugly product, a condensed nugget of human stupidity and cruelty dunked in a diluted sauce of gay American life. Its architects should be exiled to a remote island and sterilized.