I tried to ignore Season 2 of ” The Ultimatum: Queer Love.” Honestly, I just recovered from the heteronormativity of Season 1 (which I am still not shutting up about, YW). So I really wasn’t sure I could handle the emotional whiplash of another lesbian reality TV roller coaster. But then I watched one episode. Then another. Before I knew it, I was crying in my kitchen, shaking my fists at the screen.
It wasn’t just that I got unexpectedly attached to the couples (Britney and AJ, swoon). It was the haunting familiarity of the drama. Not because it was “queer chaos” (it wasn’t), but because the show flattened queer relationality into something legible. Palatable. Safe. These complex humans were being asked — or edited — to prove their love using the cis-het dictionary: marriage, monogamy, closure.
And I felt that. The confused frenzy of trying to translate yourself into legibility using a foreign vocabulary.
I’ve been gay married. I’ve also been gay divorced. I’ve tried to make my love legible in ways that could be mailed out as invitations or explained to skeptical relatives. But the real magic of queer life has never lived in that kind of legibility.
It lives in the mess, the reinvention, the chosen family group chat. That magic is almost entirely absent from ”The Ultimatum” — and from the representational choices it reflects. The show presents queer love with a caveat: play by the cis-het playbook or be rendered unintelligible.
In that way, ”The Ultimatum” mirrors the narrow terms queer people are so often offered in public life. Yes, it’s representation — but it’s a kind that smooths over decades of queer activism, activism that insists there are infinite ways to live and love. Gay rights was never just about marriage equality, or even simply the right to love who you love. At its root, queer liberation starts with the premise that all love is valid, full stop. Not just married love, not just committed love, not just love that plays by the rules. All love.
And yet — even within those narrow constraints — the cast brings tenderness, depth and emotional fluency that deserves its own kind of spotlight. The emotional intelligence on display is undeniable. Case in point: Bridget essentially set Pilar and Kyle up — and then had to watch that play out. That takes some serious emotional fortitude. Queers have long been experts at emotional labor — not because we’re inherently better at it, but because many of us had to learn how to maintain connections through conflict.
Some critics have astutely noted that some of the problems in the show could be solved by polyamory. I couldn’t agree more. But also, wanting marriage or monogamy is not the problem. Many of us do. We don’t need to take marriage or monogamy off the table and expect everyone to go poly. The problem is when these are the only forms of love presented as worth televising. “The Ultimatum” falters because it can’t imagine love as messy, unresolved and still chosen and whole.
“The Ultimatum,” this past season, felt like a game that punishes slowness, ambivalence and complexity. In other words, it punishes queerness. On the reunion show, multiple cast members admitted that they didn’t even get to talk about the real stuff until after the show ended.
Having a cis-het host, however warm and well-intentioned JoAnna Garcia Swisher may be, doesn’t help. It subtly reinforces the idea that queerness needs adult supervision, someone from the mainstream to translate, to narrate, to keep us from straying too far off-script. This isn’t a casting issue; it’s a structural one. The format asks queer people to contort ourselves into a mold never meant for us — and then edits the footage to reward compliance and erase divergence.
But the most telling absences are the parts of queer life that don’t fit the frame.
On the show, we don’t see the friendships that outlast breakups, the exes who co-parent a dog, the Sunday grocery runs with someone who once shattered your heart. The rules of the show are basically: Get married or never speak again.
But queers, barred from marriage for so long, built our own relational blueprints. An ex I once had a very public, very dramatic breakup with is now a dear friend who cuts my hair. Another reads and texts me about every single thing I publish. So many of my most enduring loves have changed shape over time — and survived.
Yes, it would be nearly impossible to capture that kind of nuance within the narrow arc of a reality show season. But it’s still disheartening to see false choices presented as the only ones that matter — both to the cast and to the audience.
Queer love stories that don’t end in marriage proposals matter. Platonic love matters. Messy complicated love matters. Polyamorous love matters. Love that changes shape matters. Love that isn’t sure what it is matters.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting love in a white dress. The problem isn’t desire — it’s the illusion of choice. That queer connection only counts if it resembles something straight, something sellable. You might say that that’s true for straight dating shows, too. But that’s exactly the point: queerness isn’t a genre of straightness. It’s a reimagining of what connection can look like — messy, fluid, chosen, sacred in its refusal to follow a script.
The cast of ”The Ultimatum” brought their whole hearts to a game rigged against them. They deserved better. So do we.