When the new season of ABC’s “The Bachelor” starts on Monday, the leading heartthrob-heartbreaker will be Grant Ellis, a 31-year-old day trader from Newark.
Ellis didn’t make much of an impression as one of the contestants who came up short in the most recent edition of “The Bachelorette,” which made headlines last year when Jenn Tran became the show’s first Asian American lead.
But a man who doesn’t make waves is the ideal “Bachelor” bachelor. In a recent promotional trailer for the coming season, the drama didn’t come from anything Ellis did but rather from the predictably skinny female contestants in predictably beaded gowns who cried, predictably.
Ellis will most likely stick to his invisible script and be a stand-up guy looking for a wife “who shares his values of loyalty, humor and a deep appreciation for life’s simple pleasures,” as his cliché-buffet bio states. To put it in Bachelor Nation terms: Grant Ellis is no Juan Pablo Galavis.
Ellis will also be straight — non-negotiably, necessarily straight. So has every other lead on “The Bachelor” and its spinoffs and specials, including “Bachelor Pad,” “Bachelor in Paradise” and the recent “Golden Bachelor.” The sole known exception is Colton Underwood, who came out on “Good Morning America” in 2021 after his season aired, a decision that made him either a hero or a villain, depending on the “Bachelor” nerd you ask.
As a longtime “Bachelor” watcher and lifetime gay, I really want a gay season of “The Bachelor.” (“The Bachelorette,” too, but here I’m sticking with what I know best: gay men.) I first started watching “The Bachelor” 15 years ago, when Jake Pavelka proposed to Vienna Girardi. Since then, I’ve waited in vain for ABC to tear down its walls — or to be vulnerable, to use another “Bachelor” banality — and let two men slow dance in an empty theater to a country singer I’ve never heard of.
ABC may be skittish because in the United States, dating series dedicated to gay men haven’t fared particularly well. MTV’s “Next” dipped a toe into the water with a gay guy episode almost 20 years ago. “Boy Meets Boy” (2003) and “Finding Prince Charming” (2016) lasted only a season. Fox’s “Playing It Straight” (2004), in which a woman used gaydar to pick a straight guy out of a group of men, was canceled after three episodes.
My guess is that viewers, especially gay ones, generally find the idea absurd that gay men would go on TV to get a man. Attention, yes. Forever love? Girl, please. (Not that the “Bachelor” franchise has a winning track record of couples staying hitched.)
Looking back, those early attempts at gay reality romance feel as artificial and as awkward as when I asked a girl to prom. When “The Bachelor” debuted in 2002, it did so in a desert of gay male romance-reality competitions. In reality-reality, “The Bachelor” first aired in a darker era for queer people, when legal gay marriage was a chimera, daily pills to prevent H.I.V. were the stuff of science fiction and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was still on the books, as were sodomy laws.
In 2025, our vast streaming landscape offers dating shows for many queer identities, including “The Ultimatum: Queer Love” (Netflix) and “Are You the One?” (Paramount+). Internationally, more options abound. With reality and scripted TV queerness so pervasive, a gay “Bachelor” seems like an idea whose time has not only come but is also past due. (ABC declined to comment for this article.)
We’ve had an Asian Bachelorette, a Latino Bachelor (that Juan Pablo) and Black Bachelors and Bachelorettes — when do we get a gay one?
After months of asking experts and my Bachelor Nation neighbors, including the many gay men I know who are fans, I got my answer: A gay “Bachelor” is a terrific idea whose time is now, and it’s probably never going to happen. But as an optimist, I’m going to do as Crowded House timelessly urged us in 1986: Don’t dream it’s over.
FOR YEARS, “THE BACHELOR” franchise has been criticized for its lack of diverse casting. Its slowness to evolve on matters of race has been particularly visible. In 29 seasons of “The Bachelor,” Ellis is only the second Black lead, after Matt James broke through that ceiling in 2021. It wasn’t until 2017 that “The Bachelorette,” in its 13th season, cast Rachel Lindsay as its first Black leading lady. (Since then, there have been three more.) In 2021, the franchise’s longtime host, Chris Harrison, left the show after a much-criticized exchange about race with Lindsay.
But if the franchise has made some progress on race, it continues to be diversity-averse in other ways. Bodies are trim or fit, and able-bodied; in Tran’s season, Brett Harris, a beefy 28-year-old who would kill at Bear Week in Provincetown, was sent home on the first night.
The producers almost always smooth over class distinctions, focusing more on things like whether a contestant is close with family. It isn’t always clear that the contestants and bachelor/ettes share those priorities. “The Golden Bachelor,” led by a 72-year-old widower, was a hit. But “The Golden Bachelorette” flopped by comparison, suggesting that the days of spinoffs with senior leads — or at least senior women as leads — may be numbered.
In matters of queer representation, the “Bachelor” universe hasn’t done much better, though to its credit, it hasn’t entirely eschewed gay men. The “RuPaul’s Drag Race” queens Alyssa Edwards and Alaska hosted a Speedo pageant on “The Bachelorette.” Joey Graziadei, the most recent bachelor, has talked about his gay father. And duh: A house of beefcake is basically a Fire Island share minus sex.
Jason Tartick made the biggest gay splash of the entire franchise in 2018, when he invited his brother, Steven, and Steven’s husband, Billy Rosen, to meet his Bachelorette, Becca Kufrin, during the “Hometowns” episode. (Full disclosure: Steven and Billy are friends of mine.)
Jason told me in an email that it was “one of the most meaningful moments” of his season.
“It wasn’t just about representation; it was about showing the beauty of a relationship built on love, understanding and shared experiences,” he wrote.
But elsewhere, several new gay dating shows make “The Bachelor” look like that tired queen who’s still wearing last summer’s espadrille. “For the Love of DILFs” (OutTV), a daddies-meet-himbos competition hosted by the porn star Stormy Daniels, is in its third season. “I Kissed a Boy” (Hulu), a British show hosted by the singer Dannii Minogue, pairs couples at the start to see who will last.
On Netflix, Japan’s first same-sex dating series, “The Boyfriend,” was renewed last month for a second season. Season 1 went back to basics: It put nine men in one house and let them work it out.
So what’s the holdup at ABC? On one hand, it makes sense. Most Americans are straight, and polls have shown that a majority of Bachelor Nation are women. A mainstream broadcaster like ABC is going to go where the demographics and the ad dollars are. And if Hollywood and Washington are about to get more conservative under a second Trump presidency, as seems likely, a gay “Bachelor” probably has as much chance of happening as sex between Luke Parker and Hannah Brown in a windmill. (Am I right, Bachelor Nation?)
In a video interview in August, Underwood said he was certain that the lack of a gay “Bachelor” had nothing to do with homophobia — and that it was “really unfair” to put pressure on “The Bachelor” to do so.
“They try their best, but it’s a tough industry,” he said shortly before he and his husband, Jordan C. Brown, became fathers. The producers, he added, “get caught in a rut of: They know what works; they know who they are; they know their format; they know they’re a machine.”
On the other hand, people are complex, and taste evolves. Arden Myrin, the host of the “Bachelor”-related podcast “Will You Accept This Rose?,” said that she and someone she knows would be “first in line” to watch a gay “Bachelor.”
“My brother is a straight dude and he would be all over it,” she said.
SO IF THERE WERE to be a gay “Bachelor,” what would it look like? A gay can dream.
Justin Cole Adams, a gay man who runs a “Bachelor” fan page on Instagram, said it could slay, possibly with new viewers, if it focused on humor and what he called “trauma dumping.”
“Ingrained into the show’s genetics is that you go on a one-on-one” — a type of date — “and say what horrible thing happened to you, and you connect with the lead that way,” he said. “There are always lots of stories like that from queer people.” In the “Bachelor” emotional algorithm, this is a good thing.
Underwood, surprisingly, said he thought a gay “Bachelor” season might do well if it tackled issues of monogamy and open relationships seriously.
“That’s more realistic instead of throwing everyone in a house and saying you’re going to be engaged by the end of this,” he said.
Still, it’s one thing for women to enjoy the romance of “The Bachelor” and suspend their disbelief toward the ludicrous premise. It’s another when the men are lusting for one another in a world with no women. “The Bachelor” is already a sanitized version of straight dating. But gay “pathways of desire,” as Ron Becker, a professor of media and communication at Miami University in Ohio, put it elegantly, would be doubly sanitized.
Do the producers really want to get into what makes gay men compatible? One of my “Bachelor” guilty pleasures is watching the horror wash over female contestants when a Bachelor talks about an ex-girlfriend — or even better, a date with another contestant. Bachelor Nation’s more conservative corners would need to buy more fainting couches if a gay Bachelor talked about the ex-boyfriends he was still friends with, or still hooking up with, and the other men on the show were like: Can we join?
It could be that despite the popularity of series like “English Teacher,” “Heartstopper” and other fictional gays-next-door series, Americans don’t really want to see — or at least, don’t care enough about seeing — a hot real man falling for a hot real man and sealing it with a wet kiss and a long-stemmed rose. At the very least, the country might still need more time. Becker, who wrote the book “Gay TV and Straight America,” argued that ABC was simply reflecting America’s long shared cultural history of romanticizing heterosexual courtship and marriage.
“There is evidence that the pleasure people get out of the show is this mixture of ironic camp humor and sincere investment in myths about the power of heterosexual romantic love and finding the person who will complete you,” Becker said.
America just doesn’t have a long enough history with gay dating and marriage to have created lasting myths about it. It may never. But I’m patient, even if my dream of gay men in the fantasy suite is, for now, a sweet fantasy.
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