Netflix’s ‘The Ultimatum: Queer Love’ is nothing but gay trash, but it’s also progress

I would never label myself as a reality television fan, but people, I ate up every episode of The Ultimatum: Queer Love.

I also quite enjoy the messy drama of Love is Blind, to be fair, but through each of the Netflix show’s four seasons, I wondered the same thing: why are all these couples straight? Sure, there’s plenty of cis love to be celebrated out there, but I really thought we’d left such consistently heteronormative narratives behind. Yet, with each fresh season, men and women are paired off with one another like clockwork, to re-live the same hetero drama we’ve come to expect from the show.

Then, after I polished off that final, wrought episode of Love is Blind season four, Netflix delivered a teaser for the show I’d been waiting for: The Ultimatum: Queer Love. To be fair, this show’s premise is much more chaotic than that in Love is Blind (okay, maybe “much” is an exaggeration) and it felt a bit like trying to hit a target audience, but I didn’t care. Finally, media is catching up and acknowledging what we queer folk have known all along: that we’re just as chaotic and sloppy as the straights.

As such, I queued up Queer Love immediately after it dropped on Netflix, and proceeded to watch its first few episodes a total of three(!) times, once with my newly-minted sister-in-law, once with my sister (and newly minted wifey), and once with my fiancee. I only recently binged the first season’s final, dramatic episodes, and got my thoughts in order to write this article.

Because I knew, mid-way through a week of chatting about the “gay trash” we’d all become obsessed with, that I had to write about this show. Not due to my disappointment over Tiff taking Mildred back (for a spell), or my continued hope that Xander learns to love Xander, but because this, finally, feels like real, concrete progress.

We’ve started to see a real uptick in representation in recent years, as more and more shows orient themselves around various LGBTQ+ experiences. We’ve got a slew of stellar queer icons littering our streaming services, with more yet to come, but many of these are portrayed in a similar light. In hopes of avoiding pushback or offense, filmmakers and television creators make sure to treat us in the LGBTQ+ community with a gentle, positive hand. Almost all of our characters are wholesome, kind, and inspiring. And, while I love these stories too, that’s not exactly accurate to the gay experience.

That’s because — spoiler alert — gay people are just as erratic and turbulent as straight people. We’re human and flawed, and — while some of us do navigate relationships better than our straight counterparts — we fall apart in all the same ways as anyone else. And that’s exactly what Queer Love demonstrates. The show’s largely lesbian participants are better communicators than those straight couples I’ve watched on Love is Blind — a fact that is inarguably helped along by their far lengthier relationships — and they tend to have more nuanced and emotional conversations, but apart from that they’re exactly the same as any other reality television pairings: Messy as all hell, and just as entertaining.