Once upon a time there was no World Wide Web. There was an Internet, but it was a tiny web; among its users the incredibly smart, the incredibly geeky, and the incredibly rich. Like most new technologies, early accessibility always for the smart (who invent it), the geeky (who can build it) and the rich (who needn't be smart nor creative, just wealthy enough to purchase the tools to convince people they are both. See for example: Family, Kardashian). So when young Natty was around age 14, the Internet was something spoken of but not yet seen in my household. Since I did not have the Interwebs, I did not have the pleasure of knowing much beyond the media of my time. And since I lived in the Bible Belt, my exposure to some aspects of the world were a bit lacking. For example? The first time I saw two men kiss was on MTV.
Even though we joke about MTV not showing music videos, the channel has been slowly weeding out the music for the past 20 years, and large chunks of time in the '90s were devoted to marathons of every season of The Real World.
The Real World is the original reality show; MTV could not afford to hire actors but wanted a soap opera. So they filmed a soap opera-ish show with camera-willing volunteers. The volunteers are called cast members, and use their real names. It's now a formulaic relic of reality television: seven strangers live together and are filmed. That's the hook. No surviving islands or eating bugs or being from Jersey Shore. Just the hi-jinks of seven people wanting to be on television.
For some, myself included, those early seasons were my first look into the strange world of twenty-something-hood. Reality TV provided one of my first encounters with beautiful men kissing on The Real World: Miami. It dispelled some myths I had of what gay men could look like (Village People clones) and caused a bit of perplexing thought as to what body part went where in the love making. (I had long since pieced together the hows of heterosexual intercourse, thanks to a copy of The Joy of Sex studied at a friend's sleepover and 6th grade gossip.) Both of these things were beneficial: I had not yet shaken my Bible Belt upbringing in regard to homosexuality, and following the storyline of a beautiful gay man, cast member Dan, dating in Miami during marathon MTV viewings added to the start of that shaking.
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| Dan looks a bit bored with all this. (Dan from RW: Miami, official MTV.com photo.) |
Fast forward some 15 odd years later, and we have The Real World: Las Vegas. While inexplicably pretending RW: Las Vegas didn't already happen back in 2002, the new RW kids stay at posh Hard Rock hotel and dine at such elegant establishments as the Pink Taco.
