Wedding bells, hot lesbian kisses and frat boys… this is what we have on your screen this week.

Wedding Bells

With the California Supreme Court striking down the ban on same-sex marriages as unconstitutional, our favourite celebrity lesbian couple, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi have announced their intention to get married.

Spoilers after the break! Read at your own risk.

Grey’s Anatomy

Oh man… where do I start?

This episode, firstly, Erica and Callie make a crack about them being lovers, to Mark, and start trying to test his turn-over-a-new-leaf thing by teasing him about a threesome. Callie is trying to get Mark to go back to his whore-days and sleep with him, but he, uncharacteristically, points out that she is trying to use the sex to make up for some other thing, and then proceeds to tantalise her by building an image of making mad passionate love to Erica. This clearly disquiets Callie, and she asks him to stop talking about her.

Then after Erica saves the life of the cardio god and is going home at the end of the day, and in the traditional elevator scene of Grey’s, Callie and Erica further tease Mark about a threesome and tell him he would not be able to handle it.

 

Erica then kisses Callie, on the lips, and tells Mark it is too much for him… Mark, visibly turned on, finally caves in and tells Callie to meet him in the on-call room. Callie walks out the elevator with a dazed look on her face, but makes a turn, presumably to the on-call room.

And I still have no idea where this is going, but at least this show is looking up for me. Not just because of the lesbian “romance”, but also because Meredith is finally facing her demons in therapy and healing herself. Thank you, Shonda. Hopefully, by the end of the season, Callie and Erica will not be the only ones who have worked their issues out and gotten together.

A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila

This week was a week of gender equality, surprising twists, and explosive testosterone.

The episode started out with a rodeo-riding competition, after the guys and girls nearly came to near blows over gay marriage. Okay, wait, let me rephrase that – after the girls and Chad came to near blows. For the rodeo competition, for a change, they stopped pitting the guys against girls, something I have been complaining about for some time. Instead, they just split them into two teams. Thank you, MTV.

There is only one word to describe the subsequent pool party – HOT. You gotta see it to believe it, oh wait, I’ll just post a sample screencap here.

 

That is only a sampling, ladies!

The later dunking derby was unremarkable except that the girls and guys were partnered with each other for it, and Lisa and Kyle won. Now, you must remember that on Tila, getting alone time with Tila is not always a good thing. Dominic got alone time with Tila last time, and look how well that turned out – for the jerks, it is a prime opportunity to for Tila to discover exactly why they should be eliminated. Kyle has been stalkery and weird for the past three episodes, and once he started asking Tila questions about her sexual escapades, Tila knew it was time to boot his ass.

Elimination was a surprise twist, because instead of keeping to the one-girl, one-guy ratio, Tila eliminated George, the really sweet, nice guy that everyone loved. A lot of people cried when George was eliminated (okay I cried too) Even Tila tearfully acknowledged it was a tough thing to do, as she told the contestants not to make her regret eliminating George. Uh… I can think of two people who are going to do that, Tila. Their names start with J and C, and are hereby christened The Redneck and The Punk, because I am starting to doubt their right to have real names that would indicate they are worthy of any basic respect.

And of course, within minutes of Tila making that mistake, it is proven how wrong her choice was, when Jay and Chad literally butt heads with Bo. The episode ends on a cliffhanger, where the fate of Bo is unknown. I am foreseeing another ambulance being called. Maybe they should keep an ambulance on standby near the house whenever they are shooting – Tila’s suitors have a very high casualty rate.

Image Copyright of Sayoni

This is a new segment on our blog, where we will be covering bits and pieces of visibility of queer community, especially queer women, in the media – books, TV shows, movies, theater, celebrities, you name it.

Grey’s Anatomy

So the last we spoke about this, Callie and Erica were hanging out every single day, sipping wine and being Best Friends Forever, or rather in Addison’s words, “a very happy couple”. Two episodes have passed since then, and the storyline has been taken to a new dimension. Addison came back on the previous episode “S4E13 – Pieces of My Heart”, with a new and improved Gaydar, and asks Callie whether she was “speaking the Vagina Monologues”, making her blush and stammer and laugh and explain how much she loves penis (that never stopped anyone from loving pussy, okay?). In an effort to prove her heterosexuality, she starts having marathon sex with Dr Sloan, who, as of this week, is officially known as The Whore.

This week, on “S4E14 – The Becoming”, after avoiding Erica the entire day, Callie finally admits to her what is going on, and tell her what Addison said. The two laugh at first as if it is completely ridiculous, but then it turns into a grimace, when they realise that maybe there is a grain of truth to it. Where is this going? No idea.

ABC also gave us a great gay goodie this week, completely blowing family-friendly into the water. They addressed the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell problem, by having a gay soldier who was in the hospital for a tumour, trying to keep his relationship with his fellow soldier a secret. The great thing about it? They actually KISSED on screen – a full-on, on-the-lips-with-tongue-and-passion-kiss that lasted for more than 10 seconds, probably making their own mark on network television history. The soldier died from the tumour anyway (or rather, the experimental surgery that was part of the clinical trial he was in), but that gave us the opportunity to see the father and boyfriend find some sort of brief unity over a person they both loved.

A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila II

On the third episode of Tila, they combined Survivor and Fear Factor into one show, and the girls won both challenges, AGAIN, landing a crushing blow to the collective egos of malekind. Lisa is on a winning streak after being told to step it up and open up, and she did just that… I am starting to like her too.

The boys on Tila are annoying me so badly, I can’t even root for any of them. This assessment is not biased in any way, being bisexual myself – even Kristy, the resident bisexual contestant was much more annoyed than the rest, almost getting into a fight with Jay.

The maturity level of the boys are about the level of 15-year old boys (whom I am generally allergic to). Even Kyle, the only boy on the cast for whom I would throw down, decided to participate in the big panty raid that Chad, The World’s Most Immature Man, initiated. Jay and Chad, the dynamic duo, even annoy the other guys by heckling and making inappropriate remarks. I really want to meet whoever did the auditions – either they were drunk at the time, or so few men showed up, that the cream of the crop is so un-creamy that it is just water.

This week, Dominic, V, Ryan and Lauryn got eliminated. Dominic, for a very good reason, that he doesn’t believe bisexuality or lesbianism is real. The rest are just not connecting with Tila. I don’t understand why Jay and Chad are not going home yet – it will kill me if either of them make it all the way to the Top Five. I doubt it though – Tila likes nice, sensitive men, not testosterone-laden, homophobic idiots like Chad.

If you wish to contribute to this column, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with your commentary/news piece in less than 300 words. Please note the criteria is that it has to be current media. For overseas TV shows, it has to be quite soon after it has been aired in their home country, and not when they air locally.

Season 4 of Grey’s Anatomy returned with Episode 12 right before Lost did. I thought they ended the season with episode 11 due to the writer’s strike, but turns out they are just carrying on.

Warning: If you have not watched the first three seasons, there will be major spoilers ahead!

Season 3 precipitated the downhill-slide of Grey’s Anatomy, and broke viewers’ hearts by spinning off Addison into Private Practice, which meant she left the show. Season 4 completed the degeneration with the campiness, bad bad writing, stretched cliches and metaphors, and most of all, puzzling romances (think O’Mizzie, aka George and Izzie).

So, the return meant there was some fair amount of salvaging to be done, and even from my critical point of view, Episode 12 was a good baby-step in the right direction. Meredith FINALLY got a therapist (which should have happened 2 seasons go), Meredith and Derek are staying broken, and she is being an adult about it for a change. Izzie and George are also staying broken (thank god) but Izzie is being a McMoron. Cristina is being… Cristina.

I would not have blogged about it, except for a small inkling that I picked up, between Hahn and Callie, who are doing a “we are great friends and hanging out every single night”. But what else am I supposed to take them lounging around in Callie’s apartment (or rather the one Cristina and her share), dressed in their little black dresses and sipping wine, and having a really good time?

I was hoping for four seasons that there would be a queer romance on the show between two main characters (besides Joe and Walter, fringe characters), and I hope this is where it is going. In case you think I am dreaming things up, a popular Grey’s Anatomy podcast, the McPodcast said exactly the same thing when I listened to them later with this idea in mind. Part of it was accentuated by the fact that Brooke Smith, the actress who plays Dr. Erika Hahn has said that she is open to the idea if her character is queer. No comment from Sara Remirez, who plays Dr. Callie Torres so far.

If that’s where it is headed, I hope they do a good job of it, and not pull a fly-by lesbian romance for the sake of ratings. Like that other show, The OC. Or Ally McBeal. Or One Tree Hill.

I have a little more faith in Shonda in this respect of this, though, because of the way gay characters have been handled so far on Grey’s Anatomy, with respect and tolerance. In fact, they won a GLAAD award for S3E07 “Where The Boys Are”, for a simultaneous portrayal of Joe and Walter as a stable loving gay couple (compared to all the straight couples in shambles), and a lesbian MTF with her wife, who was coping with the fact that her husband was going to turn into a girl. Not to mention the way they took a clear stance against Isaiah Washington’s “faggot” slur. There have been other gay and lesbian couples portrayed positively/neutrally as well, and this combined with the fact that Grey’s has had the most racially diverse cast (they cast people by talent, not physical characteristics or race), raises my respect level for them quite a bit.

If this goes where I think it is going, watch out for updates!

A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila is a MTV reality dating show, with a twist: the bachelorette is a bisexual woman, and 16 guys and 16 girls will be competing for her heart. Now, normally, I don’t watch reality TV trash. And I watch dating show trash even less, and MTV trash takes the place at the bottom of the ladder. But I was introduced to it by a friend, and in a couple of episodes, I was hooked already. How could I miss a program like this, a pioneer in the visibility of lesbian, and more importantly, bisexual women?

Tila Tequila, the bachelorette of Vietnamese descent, whose real name is Tila Nguyen [now you see why she changed her name to something so much more porny], is an undeniably beautiful, sexy woman. Her beauty can be fully appreciated in all the various outfits she appears in the show, all of which she does justice [except that awful dress made of metal sheets she wore in the first episode]. She is a very picky, often unforgiving person with regards to her suitors, complete with a free-spirited, sometimes child-like personality.

The suitors are a good-looking bunch, that is to be expected, with the producers only picking people who look fairly good on camera. Some of the men seriously did look like male models. But what was pleasantly surprising was that the women were absolutely gorgeous too, and these were real lesbian women, not the fake ones in porn or on The L Word. Even the butch/andro women were good-looking, in my opinion. So, anyone who claims that The L Word is unrealistic because “the women are all thin and pretty”… please look at the line-up in Tila.

The show itself is as dramatic as you can get. Maybe more dramatic than The L Word. The men push each other into the water, the women try to tear each other’s hair apart, one lesbian tries to use her sex appeal to get rid of the men, people threaten to leave… you name it. More than once, I’ve had to wonder how scripted it is, because it seems so unrealistic, that all the drama that does not happen on camera on straight dating shows happen on this show. Or maybe the producers deliberately threw in some unstable personalities. Or maybe they were “encouraged” to do so. Who knows – what I do know that it makes for a lot of entertainment for me, in front of the computer screen.

One major problem I had with the show is how they chose to approach bisexuality. They pitted girls against guys, and it was fairly obvious from the elimination each week that the producers instructed Tila to keep an equal 1:1 ratio of girls and guys as far as possible. Which really isn’t how it should work… this is a game of love after all, and the girls and guys are equal competitors. Most of the “challenges” in the show, which they had to win in order to win “alone time” with Tila, were organised along girl-guy lines, which did really make me want to hit the stop button.¹ Bisexuality isn’t about whether it is a girl or a guy, but whether the person is right for you. Tila herself made a lot of “I like girls for this, but I like guys for that” remarks, which made me roll my very bisexual eyes, and kept saying she had to figure out whether she really liked girls or guys. The suitors made similar remarks too. And the very next moment, she would justify herself saying she was bisexual, and was attracted to both guys and girls, and that no one understood her.

Only in the end, I think, she finally understood it wasn’t about choosing between the sexes. At least one person has gained enlightenment. One down, rest of the world to go.

Rating:

A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila – Full Episodes
A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila – MTV Homepage

From this part onwards, I’ll be talking about what actually did happen on the show, including the ending, so if you do not want spoilers, do not read ahead.

In the end, Tila chose Bobby over Dani. Surprise surprise. I actually did see it coming 5 episodes ago, when Tila started being so affectionate of Bobby.

I thought Brandi actually stood a pretty good chance of making it to the final three, but the final three happened to be Amanda, Dani and Bobby. Amanda got eliminated in the second last round, even though “she had really beautiful blonde hair, and it would be just crazy to eliminate [her]” [in Amanda's words]. I don’t even know why Amanda made it that far. Ryan got eliminated before Amanda – I don’t know why he made it that far either. After all, this is A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila, not A Shot at Love with Pleinelune Perry.

Brandi (left) and Vanessa (right)

The reason Brandi did not make it was entirely her own fault, as she got in a fight with Vanessa the Queen of the Bitches, or rather Vanessa attacked her when Tila did not choose her, and then Brandi freaked out and ran away. She tried to come back, but Tila did not allow her – and you wonder why I say Tila is unforgiving. Vanessa also tried to flirt with Bobby and make him violate the “No hookups” rule, made up lies about Brandi, and pretty much proved she did not deserve to be on the show.

Domenico

Domenico, everyone’s favourite Italian boy, got eliminated before Ryan. Domenico is, by far, my favorite character, for more reasons than his absolutely endearing Italian accent. He says the best things ever – “Homophobia, it is like when men are afraid of each other! It is like a disease!” and “There is this girl with so much love to give that she chooses to give it to girls and guys”. The contestants actually cried when Domenico left the show, which should tell you something.

The most scandalous things happen on Tila – in the early episodes, after they all moved in together on the same bed, Steven and Rebecca were rumoured to have hooked up under the sheets. But even with the grainy camera footage, no one knows for sure. Rebecca got the boot, Steven didn’t. But he did eventually, much later, for being a typical man, and groping and trying to kiss Tila disrespectfully.

Coming back to the final episode, the moment when Tila chose Bobby, I felt really sad for poor Dani, the sweetest and cutest person in the world. It was actually very surprising that Dani made it to the final two, because Tila typically dates lipstick lesbians, and in the beginning, it just didn’t seem like Dani had much quality time with Tila. But once she started stepping up her game, it was clear what a sweetie she was, and Tila did really like her. Dani shouldn’t worry though, because now that she is famous, girls are lining up outside the door for her.

As for Bobby, he is really cute, and I can see why Tila finds his rural youthful innocence, and his occasional clumsiness endearing. And I guess it does help he got into accidents more than once, and was beaten up by Ashley. So, note to all the boys out there (I doubt any are reading this blog): you want to win a girl’s heart, make sure you are cute, and get into accidents. Nothing too major though, and make sure you don’t injure any vital organs you are going to need, when you do win her heart.

Good luck to Tila and Bobby. Something tells me they are going to need it.

 

1. What did surprise me was that the girls consistently won most of the challenges, which were rather physical. [back]