Ten years ago, for gays in most parts of the United States, marriage was more an emotional and spiritual proposition than a legal agreement. Queer people routinely made lasting commitments to one another, but in 38 states, in the eyes of society and the law, these unions might as well have been imaginary. But over the course of a single decade, the national landscape for gay marriage has radically changed. Two-thirds of same-gender cohabiting partners are now married (up from about one-third in 2015), and marriage equality is now law in all 50 states.
It is well past time, then, for gays to publicly defile the institution, as the straights have before them, with a trashy reality show. Enter The Ultimatum: Queer Love, a new Netflix offering that asks five couples—all queer women and nonbinary people—to work out, on camera, their conflicting feelings about marriage while simultaneously assessing the other participants for romantic potential.
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The premise of the show, which debuted last year, with a heterosexual cast, as The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, is highly convoluted—even within the already-gimmicky universe of reality romance shows. Each couple comprises one person who doesn’t want to get married yet, or ever, and one person who has issued—wait for it!—an ultimatum: If we don’t leave this show engaged, we’re over. In the first week of filming, the partners “break up” and go on dates with all eight of the other participants. (Date may be too strong a word for what they do, which is dutifully rotate around various pool chaises and firepits on the grounds of a San Diego hotel.) At the end of the week, they pair off in new configurations to live for three weeks in “trial marriages” before reuniting with their original partners for another three weeks and, finally, deciding whether to leave engaged, split up, or newly coupled with their trial spouse.
On the surface, there is not a lot that makes sense about this show. What can living with a stranger tell you about your readiness to marry your existing partner of several years, or your willingness to give them up? What person who so desperately desires marriage would agree to put this kind of unnecessary strain on their relationship? Why do the participants freak out over host JoAnna García Swisher, best known (?) for her supporting role on the early-2000s sitcom Reba, as if she’s a bona fide celebrity?
And yet. The Ultimatum: Queer Love is riveting love-to-hate television, a showcase of some of the worst and weirdest impulses of queers in our extended community that nonetheless manages to make some incisive points about how challenging, maddening, and thrilling it can be to try to overcome our human differences in pursuit of a life lived in partnership.
There have been a handful of queer dating shows in the recent past: Finding Prince Charming on Logo in 2016, and MTV’s all-bi-and-pansexual season of Are You the One? in 2019. Before all that, in 2007, there was A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, a blisteringly offensive exploitation of bisexual stereotypes whose central persona later emerged as a white nationalist and claimed she was straight all along. But this may be the first queer reality show that explicitly revolves around marriage, as well as the first to focus on queer women. The first four episodes drop on Wednesday; in them, cast members fret over their partners’ shortcomings, cry when they are forced to separate, and chug hundreds of cocktails out of stainless steel martini glasses—an unusual prop, presumably chosen to help editors establish continuity between shots, that amplifies the uncanniness of the endeavor.
Mal and Yoly, the most stylish and seemingly levelheaded duo, are split on whether they should have money saved up for a home and fertility treatments before getting married, as Mal wants, or whether they should jump in now and figure the rest out later, as Yoly would prefer. Aussie wants to date someone for at least five years before getting married; Aussie’s partner, Sam, worries that Aussie will never be ready. Several ultimatum-givers (the ultimatum tops, as one member jokes) describe wanting to see a “hell yes” attitude from their partners on marriage and begin looking for that attitude among the other cast members, lightly implying that their desire for a solid commitment trumps their desire for any particular person.
The participants demonstrate a slightly greater humdrum-to-drama ratio than the typical reality show cast, I’d wager, though I’d like to think that this owes less to a disappointing performance by the casting team than it does to the above-average emotional maturity of queer women and trans people. A few members are practiced in therapy-speak, leading them to soberly analyze fellow participants’ behavior in terms of traumas and triggers—a taste of true gay life within the make-believe setting of the show.
But there are a few rabble-rousers in the cast. Vanessa, a reality producer’s dream villain, has an initial strident charm that quickly turns demented, as in every shot she maniacally laughs and makes aggressive pronouncements about her own desirability. As is common with people who behave like this, Vanessa arrives with a truly boring partner, Xander, a soggy morsel of white bread so dull that I laughed out loud when they declared, in a monotone, “I’m a pretty sexual person.” Xander also lets slip that Vanessa envisions any future children she might birth to be “hers,” while any that Xander births will be “Xander’s,” with each of them ultimately responsible for their own offspring within the family unit. Truly, it takes all kinds.
The first phase of the show, in which participants attempt to flirt and find trial-marriage material among the others, is ripe for armchair psychoanalysis. For instance: Vanessa, always the main character in her relationships, swaps Xander for Rae, an inscrutable vacuum with no detectable personality—one low-energy bump on a log for another. Most of the couples that enter the show are masc/femme, save for the pairing of Rae and Lexi (a marriage-driven 24-year-old who approaches the show with the solemnity of a major surgery, and whose gigantic breasts are a recurring gag in Episode 1), both of whom I’d describe as femme-presenting with sporty energy. When the participants choose their trial marriages, almost all end up in masc/femme partnerships again.
This predictable outcome neutralizes what I imagine would be, from a production and marketing perspective, the primary selling point of a gay romance reality show: the possibility that a participant could end up with any of the others. But this makes The Ultimatum: Queer Love a refreshing departure from certain fictional shows that, for reasons of narrative intrigue, depict lesbians as indiscriminate partner swappers who are down to sleep with every other lesbian who crosses their path. In the real world, lots of people have types; the queer woman who can get it up for the entire gender spectrum, from Mildred (bodycon dress, full contouring) to Xander (skin fade, suspenders), is rarer than The L Word writers would have you believe.
The question of whether the new pairings will consummate their “marriages” hangs over the second stage of the series, driving home the disjointedness of the premise. If it’s a real trial marriage, shouldn’t they have sex? At the same time, how is having sex with a new person—without any of the discussions or boundary-setting an actual polyamorous couple might undertake—supposed to productively inform the relationships in which they’ve arrived? It isn’t clear that any of the original couples arrived on the show with a clear agreement about what might happen while spending three weeks in a tiny bed with an attractive stranger. The inevitable discomfort and anger that arise don’t seem to have much to do with marriage at all.
For more on The Ultimatum: Queer Love, listen to the Outward podcast!
However, watching a group of unevenly charismatic, low-chemistry couples fumble their way into or awkwardly avoid sexual activity is fantastic entertainment. Watching them process it with one another is even better. Poor Lexi, unaware that it will only make her feel worse to receive a detailed briefing on her longtime partner’s new hookup, repeatedly asks Vanessa to explain how, exactly, “you wound up being inside of the person I came here with and that I love.”
By the third episode, The Ultimatum: Queer Love began to grate on me in the classic reality-TV kind of way, as all the interesting character development gave way to participants reciting platitudes and pretending to have developed deep feelings for one another within 10 days of meeting. But just when I thought the fun parts were over, the conflicts deepened. One participant sees the communication issues that troubled their original relationship resurface in their trial marriage, prompting them to face up to their own shortcomings. The cast members get to ask their trial spouses’ ex-partners for advice on living with them—a bizarre but rather sweet scenario few cohabitating couples (though, to be fair, a disproportionate number of lesbian ones) initiate in real life.
It all adds up to a fascinating picture of the ways people try and often fail to mesh their lives together, and how seemingly minor differences can torpedo a relationship that’s already survived many seemingly major ones. As the show progresses, the distance between what the cast members say they want and what they really seem to want snaps into focus. One ultimatum bottom expresses renewed excitement about marriage while getting to know a new partner—until they hang out with their best friend, which appears to shock them back into the person they are outside the show, commitment-phobia and all. Vanessa clearly wants out of a lackluster relationship, and also maybe wants a career as an influencer. “This is Step 1 of redefining who I am,” she says while getting both nipples pierced several days into her trial marriage. (Did the piercer forget to tell her that fresh nipple piercings could make sex complicated, if not painful, for weeks?)
Like many reality shows about marriage, The Ultimatum presents a highly conservative outlook on the institution. But that conception of marriage—as the only true measure of commitment to a partner, as the definitive end to other romantic and sexual possibilities, as a necessity for child-rearing, and as a decision that will purportedly transform every aspect of one’s life—doesn’t just feel outdated. It feels heterosexual.
If I sat with my thoughts too long after each episode, I was saddened by how heavily the prospect of marriage seemed to weigh on the show’s queer women and nonbinary people. Reality shows aren’t meant to be taken this seriously, I know. But gay marriage is still so young—I couldn’t shake the feeling that these participants were hung up on the same one-size-fits-all relationship structure that has disappointed straight people for generations, when they could be trying something new. Marriage can mean whatever they’d like it to mean. Shouldn’t at least a few of the couples be able to find some mutually agreed-upon definition that suits them both? “I would love to just start living our happy life,” Lexi says of her yearslong relationship with Rae. What’s stopping them?
At the very least, shouldn’t the whole exercise—dating, love, marriage—be fun? In a discussion about sexual attraction in Episode 4, Lexi encourages her trial spouse to think bigger, to treat their three weeks together as a real marriage. “This trial marriage isn’t just about, like, flirting or fun or banter,” she says. Not to brag, but after this line played on our TV, my own wife turned to me and asked, “Isn’t that at least half of what marriage is?” That’s the one thing almost every reality show romance is good for: making you glad you’re not in one.
