My guest this week was present for some of the earliest days of what we now recognize as reality TV — he helped produce Gay Riviera, a 2001 Bravo series about queer dating. Kevin Haddad never expected to find himself behind the scenes of a series that helped developed the rules of reality television — a few months earlier, he was a waiter at a family restaurant in Connecticut, and before he knew it he was staying out all night at New York’s hottest nightclubs and possibly getting picked up by a mobster.
We’ll have that conversation in a minute. First — hey, are you interested in the history of gay characters on sitcoms, from Bewitched to The Golden Girls to Modern Family? And how, hidden in those characters, is the real-life story of queer liberation? Well I’ve got a book coming out on exactly that topic next year! I’ll be revealing the title and cover later this month in my newsletter — head over to gaysitcoms.com to subscribe to the newsletter and be the first to get all the details.
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