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TV's Gay "Bachelor"
Tuesday May 27 4:40 PM ET
By Julie Keller
Call it equal-opportunity humiliation potential.
The Bravo network has taken a pinch of The Bachelor, a dabble of Joe Millionaire-esque fibbing and a few lovelorn homosexuals to produce Boy Meets Boy, a new reality dating series featuring a hot single gay man looking for love.
The new show, which will bow this July, centers on one man who must find his love match from a pool of 15 fellow singletons. And to make things more interesting than, say, a Trista-Ryan cheese-fest, the network is throwing in a few straight men pretending to be gay to trip up their bachelor.
"I think this will be truly groundbreaking television," executive producer and cocreator Douglas Ross told the Hollywood Reporter. "One of the reasons we decided to take the basic dating format and throw in this twist is that we wanted the show to appeal to a broader audience."
Boy is made up of a six-episode season of one-on-one dates and contestant elimination until the pack of hunks is whittled down to one. Extra correspondent Dani Behr hosts.
So far, complete details are sketchy, but producers have let a few tidbits out of the bag. For one, the Boy in question is a 32-year-old HR exec from Southern California who recently spent nine days in Palm Springs on a whirlwind dating bonanza.
Like The Bachelor, Boy Meets Boy features group meetings and one-on-one dates designed to help its star narrow down his choices.
Bravo has not revealed the number of straight versus gay bachelors who participated (though viewers will know their orientation at the outset). Ross said he is sure viewers, both gay and straight, will be surprised by the results.
"Several of the straight men have very intense experiences," he told the trade paper. "We anticipate a lot of both gay and straight viewers will have their assumptions challenged about what it means to be gay and what it means to be straight."
One thing the network is revealing is its strict TV-intimacy credo: any sexual interaction beyond a lip lock is a strict no-no.
Though producers call Boy Meets Boy "groundbreaking" and the first prime-time dating series that is exclusively gay in scope, this isn't Bravo's first foray into gay-themed programming.
Ross earlier produced a documentary called Gay Weddings for the cable net. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a new series teaming fashion-conscious gay men with fashion-disaster heterosexuals, will bow in July, as well.
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