Dear Television Executives,
It is time to make a lesbian season of Love Is Blind.
Let me be clear: It is my sincere belief that Love Is Blind—in which contestants date each other through a wall, get engaged through said wall, and only see each other once they’ve said yes—is the best reality show ever made. I hope there are one thousand seasons and that I’m watching it on my deathbed. I want the last voice I ever hear to belong to Tammy, a twenty-two-year-old sales associate / model / DJ from Kentucky on her fifth tequila soda, saying, “I just feel like I found my best friend.”
But by having people fall in love without ever seeing each other, you have appropriated lesbian culture, and it’s only fair that you give us something back. After all, if it wasn’t for lesbians, we wouldn’t even have the concept of forcing all of your friends and family to meet the new love of your life, only to break up with her a few days later.
I understand that you think the queer season of The Ultimatum has scratched this itch, but it hasn’t. The queer Ultimatum is about wife-swapping your way to happiness; it’s for people who want to be poly but are afraid to be cringe. Lesbian Love Is Blind will be for gays who worship at the altar of monogamy. Love is love, or so you’ve told us, and lesbians deserve the chance to commit the rest of their lives to someone they barely know while being filmed by a production company that’s been sued by former contestants for mistreatment. It’s called equality.
The problem, of course, with turning Love Is Blind into a show about lesbians is the way you’ve set up the gendered living quarters. See, when the contestants of your show aren’t yearning through the wall, they’re stashed away like it’s the Victorian era with other people of the same gender. This encourages competition, which drives the plot. I think we can all agree that it’s unclear if anyone would commit to anyone else if they weren’t afraid that Tammy from Kentucky would swoop in first.
But don’t worry, on lesbian Love Is Blind we can still separate people into living quarters so there are two different groups of people dating each other.
You, the simple-minded TV executives, will probably be tempted to divide our lesbian contestants into categories that feel familiar to you, like mascs and femmes, or tops and bottoms, or cat lesbians versus lesbians whose houses smell good. These dichotomies would work according to the binary rules of the Love Is Blind universe in which manly men pursue feminine women, but wouldn’t work based on what it actually means to be a gay person. We simply can’t be separated into two groups based on gender roles that are legible to you. That’s why they call us queer.
Plus, if we do tops and bottoms, we risk alienating the underrepresented yet highly vocal switch community. And according to my own field research, 75 percent of people who say they are tops secretly want nothing more than to be flat on their backs.
I understand that this complex feedback might tempt you to try to separate the contestants into three categories; tops, bottoms, and switches; or mascs, femmes, and in-betweenies. Or why not do twelve, and separate people out based on the entire zodiac?
Or you can arbitrarily divide them into two groups, A and B, and embrace the fact no matter how you slice it, the lesbians will be fucking people from their same group. After all, you’re making them wait around all day together with nothing to do but drink alcohol from golden goblets and glare at each other from different Wayfair couches. Of course they are going to scissor each other between dates with people from the other group. This would happen even if they were in groups of all femmes, all fake tops, or all people who have an ex feeding their cat during filming, so we might as well just mix it up.
Picture it: While Leslie from group A is on a date-through-a-wall with Jan from group B, Nina and Tina from group A have snuck off into the pilates area to make out. Meanwhile, a fight breaks out in B because Lauren is going to propose to Jan, but only if Megan stops being so mean to Leslie, who, as it turns out, is Lauren’s emotional support ex.
Chaos will ensue throughout the season, including when the contestants get engaged and go on a hellish group honeymoon to Dinah Shore, and even after when we make them live together and meet each other’s families. So far nothing about this will seem unusual to the families, who by now are used to relationships that move at alarming speed. What they won’t be used to is Jan and Leslie’s wedding being interrupted by Megan, who is actually in love with Leslie and was just bullying her because she didn’t know how to otherwise express her adoration for a fellow “femme/switch/Cancer,” which will be revealed with a montage of glances.
We don’t even need multiple seasons. I am imploring you for just one. After all, if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s doing the bare minimum for us and having us talk about it for the next five years.
Thank you for your time,
Gabrielle Korn
