Answers to Your Questions About 'The Ultimatum: Queer Love'
A little bit of behind-the-scenes from my interviews with the cast of Netflix's queer reality dating and relationship show.
Chances are if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’re familiar with “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.” (Remember that whole thing about “extremely niche interests”?) If not, I have a handy explainer of sorts for you over at the New York Times, and some additional thoughts here from my interviews with most of the cast and the producer of the show.
Most of the time I pitch a story it’s because I want to work out how I feel about something, and this was one of those moments. But I was really in the weeds when I first started even thinking about writing something about an anomaly of a show like “Queer Love.” There are so many elements, from its concept to its casting to its positioning, that is worthy of examination because it’s one of few opportunities we have to examine ourselves, as queer and nonbinary people, at length on screen, much less several of us all together on a platform as international as Netflix with a premise so scandalously prepped for dyke and dyke-adjacent drama. Of course, reality TV has had semi-regular LGBTQ representation since “The Real World” (the hook-ups on MTV’s Challenges were some of the earliest queer content you could watch regulatory on TV), but the few dating shows that have incorporated Sapphic-leanings (“A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,” “A Double Shot at Love” (bisexual twins!), an entirely pansexual season of “Are You The One?”) have been hypersexual and more focused on YOLO-based fantasy fulfillment rather than a lifelong commitment. The few “Look, they’re lesbians!” reality shows — three seasons of “The Real L Word” on Showtime, eight episodes of Florida Girls Gone Wild “Tampa Baes” on Amazon — featured engagement and marriage storylines and certainly proved there was an audience, but it’s natural that, after years of watching “The Bachelor” franchise with the straight girlies, we’d want more of what they have.
Writing about a show about queer women and nonbinary people for a mainstream publication comes with caveats and some Queer Competency 101 in place of what might be considered insider baseball (softball?) but is, for me and most of the people I know, some of the more interesting aspects of the show. (For some wonderful and differing perspectives, read Carmen Maria Machado, Mad Dyke’s recaps at Medium and Emma Specter at Vogue.)
For the NYT story, I spoke with Lexi, Mal, Yoly, Xander, Vanessa, Aussie, and Tiff via Google Meet, with publicists present. I’d watched through the reunion for context a few weeks before the rest of the world, which meant having conversations while working around spoilers — a weird thing to consider when it’s something these individuals experienced almost two years ago. (When talking to Lexi, she referred to the experience as feeling “distant” to her now.)
Because I’ve been working on the story from right before it premiered up until the finale and reunion, I’ve noticed a lot of questions popping up from viewers that I could potentially help answer based on the clarifications and background I got while considering all angles of “Queer Love.” And so, in the interest of queer culture and history that both fortunately and unfortunately includes reality television, here’s a little bit of what was left over for your consuming pleasure.
Pronouns for some of the cast shifted over the two years of production and in post. The cast is not misgendering each other — the show was filmed long enough ago that Tiff, Mal, and Aussie all began using they/them (and in Aussie’s case, Aussie) after the show was already in progress. Everyone I spoke with felt very supported by the crew, who Xander said felt like family by the end of the show.
The cast continued to live their daily lives on camera. Xander said that she’d genuinely forget about the cameras while cooking, cleaning or working out. Lexi lamented being lazy and choosing to wear “the same white Lululemon shirt seven days in a row. “ Yoly didn’t love a shot the cameras got up her butt while getting a massage from Xander, who, she points out, is a licensed massage therapist and Yoly “has a hamstring thing.”
The cast shared zero mutuals. The world is officially large enough to contain enough queer people that we are no longer all 7 degrees of Ellen DeGeneres. Mal suggested they would have never met their trial wife, Lexi, in the real world because they go to different clubs and run in different “subsects of the community”: “Maybe we'd be at Pride together, but, like, in our subsects of the community, we just wouldn't have run into each other.”
The cast only got to see the first season of “The Ultimatum” after filming. Mal said they were the last one to watch “Marry or Move On” (aka the straight season, as the producer called it). “There was no heteronormativity in ours, so it was different,” Mal told me. “I dated the person that my partner did a trial marriage with and seriously considered like, ‘Huh, I could date them, too.’”
Yoly has a type — which made it hard in the beginning. “So when I got there, I mean no shade but, like, Tiff was the other masc presenting person, my height. I was like, ‘Immediately not,’” Yoly told me. “Xander at first glance I was like, ‘No, no! Oh my God, what am I gonna do on this show?’ I know some of the other people are open to more femme women, but then those femme women are into masc-presenting people, so it was a little bit difficult. I think maybe a larger pool of a cast would be beneficial just so we have a little bit more like pick and choose from.”
Vanessa had no queer community besides Xander before coming on the show. “The show was my first experience of what it's like to hang out with your ex and their new person and this person's ex,” Vanessa told me, saying she’s found the queer community to be “where you just kind of try your best to learn to get over whatever grievances you have with people and just maintain a kindness there because you know you're gonna see each other at all the events, all the gay bars.” Reader, I saw her at The Rubyfruit that same week.
The cast didn’t get a chance to mingle more than we saw on the show. In the dating phase, they could only communicate on camera, Yoly said, which is how she initiated a friendship with Mildred that developed largely after the show.
Vanessa was nervous about “the fallout.” We spoke before the show premiered, and Vanessa said she was curious about how people might perceive her: “I've got a very big personality and say things that are maybe like a little crazy and a little too sarcastic for people, and I think I'm just this natural fit to be on a reality show because people perceive me in different ways. Some people love me, some people hate me. And I don't think I ever really had to turn it up for the cameras. It's just kind of who I am naturally. I'm pretty wild and bold.”
The cast is not all friendly with one another. Per Vanessa, she’s only close with Tiff, Sam and Aussie. “It was surprising, I think, that people had so many negative things to say and we're so willing to say them to a camera,” Vanessa said. Aussie confirmed that the cast is split, but hopes that their bond from the experience will keep them close.
Aussie still hasn’t told Aussie’s family about the show. “I'm in my early 40s now, and I know there's a process for my parents to go through of, you know, grieving the person they thought I was gonna be,” Aussie said. “At the same time, I've given them a lot of time and the space to do that, and I haven't really hidden it — it's just that they just choose not to see it.” I had to ask, “Do they read the New York Times?”