Lesbians at Sea: Queerness and The Bachelor Franchise

When asked in a 2014 The New York Times Magazine interview if there should be a gay Bachelor, Chris Harrison, the franchise's former host, responded: "The question is: Is it a good business decision? I just spoke at USC the other night, and I explained it like this: Look, if you've been making pizzas for 12 years and you've made millions of dollars and everybody loves your pizzas and someone comes and says, 'Hey, you should make hamburgers.' Why? I have a great business model, and I don't know if hamburgers are going to sell." The interviewer pushed Harrison, asserting that "people are asking because they would like to see themselves represented." Harrison responded in the affirmative, stating that, while the former might be true, "that, to me, is a different topic. Is our job to break barriers, or is it a business? That's not for me to answer. If you want to talk about that with me on a philosophical level, I'm happy to: I am 100 percent for equality and gay marriage."1

Is it the ABC Network's job to break barriers, or is it simply a business? This question cuts to the heart of the queer "representational question." As lesbian hate-watch fans, we wholeheartedly agree with Chris Harrison's pizzeria model of the behemoth Bachelor franchise. We watch this show precisely because it serves up the perfect slice of American-flavored heteronormative, heteropatriarchal ideology. As the saying goes, we revel in seeing how the sausage (pizza) is made. As millennial lesbians, we occupy that uncertain post-post-Stonewall space of oppression and "progress" that queers in twenty-first-century America contend with every day. We find that the staying power of The Bachelor franchise lies in its role as a gentle nightmarish reminder that this is still our America. In other words, we find The Bachelor franchise to be the most succinct and most distilled — like a shot of Bachelor in Paradise tequila — ideological snapshot of heteronormativity available on primetime. There are plenty of others, but there is something just so spectacular about Chris Harrison's pizza that keeps us coming back.

Returning again and again despite ourselves, we muse on the recent gay glimmers within The Bachelor franchise — Demi Burnett's Paradise engagement to Kristian Haggerty and Colton Underwood's metamorphosis from virgin-hunk Bachelor into gay "advocate" — in order to analyze the franchise's abrupt embrace of queer representation. In particular, we dwell on the formal and generic implications of Chris Harrison's sudden embrace of making gay hamburgers. The franchise's recent brush with the non-heterosexual world is simply not the business-busting model that Chris refuses in the above interview. Queer representation makes The Bachelor franchise straighter than ever, it turns out. Its enduring power is its stretchy ability to assimilate and neutralize queer narratives in the service of selling a flaccid postwar American vision of Love and Family and, above all, Beauty.

In the summer of 2019, the sixth season of Bachelor in Paradise made history for hosting the first same-sex engagement in the franchise's history. Midway through the season, Demi Burnett — who was previously dumped from Colton's season — voices apprehension about coming to "Paradise" in the first place. In a shaky-voiced confession to Chris Harrison, Demi explains that she had been dating a woman in Los Angeles named Kristian who she "can't imagine not having in her life." Harrison immediately counters, asking if she can also imagine not having Derek Peth — the male contestant she was beginning to form a relationship with — in her life. Demi's conversation with Harrison is interrupted by shots of Derek shedding silent tears and bemoaning the love triangle he finds himself in, while also blandly affirming that Demi "is probably going through so much more" than he is. What would ordinarily be a flashpoint in any Bachelor narrative arc — "so-and-so is dating someone back home!" — is tempered by an implicit compulsion to not equate questioning one's sexuality with the scandalous whispers of "being here for the wrong reasons." More surprisingly still, Demi's confession eventually leads to Harrison's announcement that she will be allowed to bring Kristian onto the show in order to date her alongside Derek and, ostensibly, any of the show's other contestants. For Demi, the arrival of Kristian means that she will not have to "choose" which "road" to go down, as co-star Katie Morton frames it.2 Rather than risk Demi (a contestant with an especially strong propensity for drama) leaving the show, Paradise cashes in by drawing out the duration of Demi's choice. By bringing Kristian to the beaches of Sayulita, Mexico, Paradise enforces the paradigmatic cliché for bisexuality: Kristian embodies liberation from the closet while Derek offers the ease of a hetero-passing life.

Of course, there is a substantially more reparative reading of what transpires on this season of Paradise, one that we were made acutely aware of as Demi's dilemma aired that summer. Queers on the internet echoed the same notes of enthusiasm as the other lesbians in our living room who we invited over for a Paradise watch party. Demi the trailblazer, Demi the brave, Demi our "queer queen." What a boon for queer representation! What an exciting new era! The sticky issue of "representation," it seemed, carried much more weight than any tropes the franchise was reifying. The very fact that Demi was permitted to choose-her-own-adventure live on TV was enough to unsettle The Bachelor franchise's manifest obsession with heteronormativity; by all appearances, Harrison could, in one quick decision, pardon all previous talk of hamburgers and pizza by graciously inviting one Kristian Haggerty to the B-list Hunger Games of love.

Yet the franchise assimilates queer narratives without having to deal earnestly with queer bodies. There is something insidiously self-undermining about the way The Bachelor franchise can "represent" queerness without having to change what kinds of bodies appear amidst the roses. The Bachelor, like so much other popular media, need not suffer a real representational burden. Despite Demi's queer curveball, the form of Paradise's season six remains intact as the same cookie-cutter bodies are merely shuffled around in orientation for the rose ceremony — simply a question of reframing the shot. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote of Showtime's The L Word soon after its release, "The elasticity of The L Word's Dickensian genre conventions allows a viewer to defer certain representational needs ... No doubt everyone will have a wish list. I would like to order up some characters with body hair, ungleaming teeth, subcutaneous fat, or shorter-than-chin-length haircuts. Oh, and maybe with some politics."3 True trust in The Bachelor franchise's Dickensian genre conventions fosters the kind of queer love-watching that we have seen blossom among other queer viewers. If Demi is not our queer queen, she certainly is queenly enough for some.

If one believes in the sanctity of the show's ability to procure feelings of true love from deep within the shaved chests and shapely bosoms of the franchise's contestants, why wouldn't the show be interested in love for all? Demi herself, agonizing over her choice between Derek and Kristian, professes in a weepy episode six confessional: "Like, love is the one positive thing and the best feeling that we get on earth as humans. It's the only thing that makes you really really feel good."4 Perhaps only a hard-hearted cynic cannot understand the genuine faith in The Bachelor needed to understand Demi's dilemma as anything other than rainbow washing. Perhaps. As we heckled and eye-rolled through Demi's melodrama, the other lesbian couple in attendance at our watch party called back at our cynical jeers with increasingly emphatic exclamations of "aww" and "go girl" in support of Demi.

It bears repeating that none of this queer content appeared on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. Bachelor in Paradise, the summertime spin-off series, is structured less as a competition for one eligible contestant's heart and more as a Spring Breaky free-for-all for any contestant who wants to remain within the franchise's orbit (and purse strings). Paradise is therefore a more "natural" fit for Demi's dilemma. While Kristian's presence required slight amendments to the usual Rose Ceremony protocol, she was otherwise able to blend in relatively well with the mixed-gender cast. Amid the Bacchanalian chaos of Paradise — this season also featured Tahzjuan Hawkins continuing to date John Paul Jones even after the latter actually ate and threw up the date food, a strange jellylike mass of chicken or something close to it — queers were no real threat or disruptor to the genre contract of the show. As an annex for the naughty behavior not quite permitted on the regular series, Paradise was an ideal kiddie pool for the franchise's foray into gay permissibility, if not outright acceptance. The season revealed a few glitches that emerged from Kristian's arrival: the disruption of the perfectly-honed see-saw of strategic gender imbalances (contestants of one gender outnumber those of the other every week, which drives eliminations); the unavoidable fact that Kristian was only present to "get to know" one contestant; and, of course, Kristian's conspicuously modest sarongs that implied that she was "not like the other girls."

To return once again to the problem of queer representation in the franchise's history to date, there is something particularly salient about the timing and setting of the franchise's first queer relationship of any kind. If the structure of the show is little more than a heteronormative wet dream — an engagement pipeline outfitted with polyester gowns and teeth-bleaching sponsorships — what relationship does (or should) The Bachelor franchise have to queer life? And here, we mean life both inside the franchise (Demi's, Kristian's, Colton's) and outside of it — particularly the queer fans of the show, many of whom may have been cheering for Kristian in hopes that she might ratify Demi's burgeoning sexuality. Furthermore, how do we contend with the fact that the ostensibly watershed moment of a lesbian engagement occurred in Paradise, amidst its covertly racialized and exoticized Mexican setting, rather than within the conservative "bring the girl home" courtship structure of The Bachelor or (in the structure's telling non-inversion in) The Bachelorette? This season was not exempt from outrage and backlash, but these criticisms were mostly contained to standard-fare homophobic comments on social media and did not extend to the larger-scale questions we raise in this essay; namely, why here, why now? By cleaving to a very narrow middle ground, The Bachelor franchise was able to sustain minimal damage and remain, notably, minimally elastic in integrating new hamburger-flavored forms. Paradise, after all, is not too dissimilar from the podcasts, interviews, and tabloid stories that circulate around the franchise. As an accessory to the main event, Paradise is something viewers can opt out of without significantly diluting their experience of the headline acts (i.e. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette). In this context, Demi and Kristian's engagement functioned like clearing one's throat, as if the franchise was saying, "We gave in. Sure, it was in Paradise, but can't that be enough, at least for now?"

And, for a brief time, it was. Almost two years passed between the season finale of Bachelor in Paradise season six and Colton's televised coming-out on Good Morning America in April of 2021. While Colton's conversation with Robin Roberts was not officially associated with The Bachelor franchise, it is impossible to entirely disarticulate the two, especially because Colton's emergence from the closet occurred on the heels of the revelation of his harassment and stalking of ex-girlfriend (and former contestant) Cassie Randolph. Eight months later, a six-episode docuseries entitled Coming Out Colton was released on Netflix in December of 2021. The series, of which Colton himself was an executive producer, consists of Colton coming-out to friends, family members, and even a former football coach, while also containing alternately tear-jerking (we'll admit it) and banal meditations on living life in the closet, the mental health struggles faced by queer individuals, and the difficulties of defining forms of queer masculinity within professional sports. Coming Out Colton alsoexhaustively documents Colton's decision to come out publicly on GMA and the backlash Colton's experienced due to the timing of his televised appearance. A wave of internet commentary decried Colton's conversation with Robin Roberts as a well-timed media stunt to avoid criticism for his abuse of Cassie. Although Coming Out Colton is, by and large, a tedious and clumsy monetization of the paradigmatic task that inaugurates gay public life, we do not read the series as a neat sanitization of Colton and Cassie's ugly break-up. References to Cassie appear at meaningful intervals throughout the series as Colton reflects on his time as the twenty-third Bachelor, and on the emotionally tumultuous months immediately following filming.

Without using the word "beard," Colton speaks openly about The Bachelor's erstwhile potential to "save" him from his sexuality: in his GMA interview, he confessed, "I literally remember praying to God the morning I found out that I was the Bachelor and thanking him for making me straight."5 Using The Bachelor as something like a self-imposed gay conversion camp, Colton attempted to harness the franchise's machinery to change himself. As he states in Coming Out Colton, while presiding over his first Rose Ceremony, "I felt myself becoming more of a straight man."6 Colton succinctly summarizes the ideological power of The Bachelor. Like a ritual portal into the straight good life, the show provides an iterative and powerful form for performing straightness (one analogous to Judith Butler's classic model of gender's performative iterability). We can only imagine the hetero affirmations Colton recited in his head while handing out rose after rose to throngs of gown-bedecked women. The rose stands as an ultimate poetic symbol of society's reproductive mandate and, as Colton puts it, the public passing of the rose from male to female hands is the meat of the show's ability to produce the conditions (albeit fragile and finicky) for becoming-straight. The rose becomes such a powerful talisman for Colton that, even after their first public appearance as a couple on the season's live-taped finale, he must still give Cassie the "final rose" that he was unable to bestow during the season's regular taping.

While bestowing the "final rose" normally marks the successful completion of the show's "process" (i.e. a marriage proposal), Cassie's abbreviated final rose "ceremony" is strikingly empty of conviction. Sitting in front of Chris Harrison as well as the entire Bachelor Nation, Colton awkwardly dodges Chris's questions about his and Cassie's relationship. Chris presses several different versions of a "what's holding you back" question — from consummating their relationship during Fantasy Suites, from engagement, even from living together — while Cassie and Colton offer vague platitudes about taking things slow and "growing" into their relationship. Eventually, Colton falls back on the now-comfortable ritual performance of the Rose Ceremony and pulls out a fresh rose. Meekly reciting a prepared speech, Colton attempts to give Chris the emblematic closure that the show's form relies on: "So I know we started this with thirty roses. Um. And this is my final rose. And I'm looking forward to a lifetime of happiness with you. So, Cassandra Ann Randolph, will you accept this rose?"7

After all of the gay dust has settled, we might read this season finale as a rich text in which Colton inadvertently undermines the promissory force of the traditional marriage proposal. Swapping a red rose for an engagement ring and swapping a tagline for a genuine proposal, Colton engages in a pantomime of the marriage ritual that Chris demands for his audience and his ratings. Despite the obvious and very real trauma of Colton's lived experience of a lifetime in the closet (now transmogrified into the primetime horror of a public closet), there is something symbolically potent in the bald fact that the "the first gay Bachelor" arrived through the back door. In his feverish attempt to avoid a reckoning with his sexuality, Colton unintentionally guaranteed that his queerness would infiltrate the show, and that the franchise's first gay lead would be an accident of history rather than a strategic marketing scheme. While Coming Out Colton serves as a record of the eponymous star's true identifications and desires, season twenty-three of The Bachelor nonetheless appears as a shrine to the ardent heterocompulsion of the franchise in general. While The Bachelor failed to "save" Colton from homosexuality, his belief that the show even could in the first place is a dark testament to the franchise's ideological machinery. For this reason, we contend that Colton's season is the "realest" one yet, attempting to preserve its bachelor within the public closet of his season like an insect in amber.

Twenty years in, The Bachelor franchise shows few signs of sputtering out, even as a slew of recent controversies seem to signal a newfound level of volatility (e.g. Chris Harrison's unceremonious, but costly, divorce from the franchise in 2021). But, as we have indicated, the franchise has a knack for snatching up opportune moments for bendability and flexibility. It remains to be seen whether the franchise — in any of its iterations — will continue to be bendy when it comes to queerness, or if it will continue to plumb the tired depths of its obsessively heteronormative playbook. We might hazard, though, that The Bachelor franchise's disposition toward queerness is likely to mirror the contestants' relationship to the piles of SHEIN swimsuits that they lug to Mexico year after year: ultimately and necessarily disposable.

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Lauren Nelson (@animalguilt) is a writer and labor organizer in Oregon. She received her PhD in English from the University of Texas Austin, where she specialized in Caribbean literature, postcolonial theory, and the environmental humanities. Her work has been published in Feminist Modernist Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Drift, and Representations.

Emma Train earned her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied contemporary queer ecopoetics. She is a graduate of the University of California Davis's MFA program in poetry. Her poetry has appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Colorado Review, Grist, Interim, and Matter. Her scholarship has been published in GLQ and the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Their first Bachelor was Colton.

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