There have been many legitimate complaints aimed at ITV’s brash yet brilliant blockbuster Love Island – too much lighting, too few people of colour – but one that has always seemed a bit, well, muggy is the idea that the UK’s most excessive example of straight culture should become a little … gayer. For myself and many other queer fans, there’s something far more exhilarating in watching the horny huns and hunks from afar without feeling like any of their exploits affect or represent us.
But away from the house, there does remain a maddening dearth of dating shows that revolve around LGBTQ contestants. In 2016, there was Finding Prince Charming, a vapid attempt to replicate The Bachelor with gay guys. But it was a one-season flop and since then, aside from a single season of MTV’s Are You the One? with bisexual contestants, it’s been an aggressively straight line from one dating show to the next. This year, though, after an all-too-long dry spell, we’re experiencing something of a flood. Stormy Daniels gave us cheapo age-gap competition For the Love of DILFS and later this month, Netflix’s The Ultimatum returns with an all-queer female cast. But arguably the most high-profile lands with the brag of being the UK’s first all-gay dating show, Love Island-aping summer series I Kissed a Boy.
The base ingredients are exactly as you would expect – a remote house in a sunny location populated by singletons as eager for love as for Instagram followers – but given a gay makeover and a relatively novel twist. Each potential couple has to kiss before they even introduce themselves, testing the longevity of lust at first sight. They are then matched with that partner until a “kiss-off” – a less compelling take on Love Island’s recoupling when they can choose to stick or twist with new guys entering the house throughout. Host Dannii Minogue is tasked with trying to legitimise straight-faced lines like “Anyone left un-kissed tomorrow night will be leaving the masseria!”, an unwinnable struggle, although the singer does make for a charming emcee, providing genuine warmth on the outskirts.
The guys are a little more “normal” than the regular Love Island fella, and a variety of body types provides a specific kind of diversity not often seen in this setting. They are mostly rather likable too, many arriving at the house a little war-wounded by life as a gay man. There is not a forced lingering on the sadness in their backstories – the unaccepting family or the judgment in the community for not conforming – but it adds texture and character that influences how they act and who they might end up with.
A lot of gay content tasks itself with highlighting the extreme differences between queer and straight people. Finding Prince Charming swung the pendulum too far, with gay men almost cosplaying as boring Bachelor contestants, but I Kissed a Boy finds a sweet spot in the middle. The men are relatable rather than robotic or radical and prone to the same kind of repetitive terminology as their Love Island counterparts (“A bit of me”, “Not gonna lie”, “Shitting myself” all on a loop). The formula is pleasingly, involvingly familiar and it is thrilling to see it played out with an all-male cast.
It’s in the show’s easy balance of the basic and the specific that it most succeeds, conversations over who is top or bottom casually mixed with inane flirting over cheap wine. At a cautious eight episodes, it’s unlikely to infect the nation in quite the same way as the woozy, all-consuming Love Island but it’s a fun and grounding reminder that we all deserve a chance to graft around the pool while a Dua Lipa song plays in the background. Luv is luv.
