Former star of The Bachelor turned gay speaks it all on Netflix reality show

The New York Times

​​​Just spend 10 seconds in the company of Colton Underwood and you can see why The Bachelor considered it a guaranteed success. He has a boy-next-door smile and a modest way. It’s stout. Makes tracks.

But in April, in an emotional interview on Good Morning America, Underwood, the former defensive-line NFL player who set women’s hearts fluttering two years ago as the virginal protagonist of The Bachelor, a highly successful and successful dating television show. blatantly heterosexual, he made a statement from which there is no turning back: “I’m gay.”

Underwood, 29, struggles with his contradictions all the time. He is a Christian but refuses to believe the version of God he learned about as an altar boy. He loves football, but the locker room was where he was most afraid of revealing his true identity.

Now he shops at Kohl’s and Rodeo Drive. She has a boyfriend, is still attracted to women, but he is not bisexual. His tribes on Grindr would probably be “Clean-Cut” and “Rugged”.

All this blurring of identity — that’s what’s bringing him back to reality shows in Coming Out of the Closet with Colton Underwood, a new six-episode documentary series that’s available on Netflix.

The series began filming before its interview with Good Morning America, and is a candid but carefully packaged diary in which Underwood reveals his sexual orientation to relatives, friends and others, and takes an accelerated course on how to be gay.

Underwood hopes the series will help others see that coming out of the closet can be a gift. But he also wants to apologize for his role in The Bachelor, which he calls a failed attempt to “bury the fact that I’m gay.”

And he also wants to deal with the problems that have arisen as a result of that participation, for example a restraining injunction that an ex-girlfriend obtained against him, and the criticisms that he is taking financial advantage of something that should not be exploited.

“I’ve lived my public life as a heterosexual, and I’ve fled my entire life from the community I belong to,” he said, over breakfast at Hugo’s, a restaurant he chose in Santa Monica. “I knew a lot of people wouldn’t understand. Maybe, at the end of these six episodes, people still don’t understand. But at least I’ll have tried to fix my mistakes.”

Underwood has, in the series, the help of his friend Gus Kenworthy, an Olympic skier who came out to be gay in 2015. Compared to Underwood, Kenworthy is a gay guru: he teaches his friend what cisgender means (“cisgender means that the The gender you identify with is the one that was assigned to you at birth,” he explains in one scene), and gives Underwood a history lesson on the Stonewall Inn.

Underwood is one of the series’ executive producers and knows he has privileges and a platform, which explains why he sought the advice of non-white, gay, and cisgender men, including Nicole Garcia, who is Latina, transgender, and shepherdess.

Garcia said Underwood can set an example, especially so that young athletes know they can be “men, athletic, gay and find success, love and respect.”

Because we’re talking about a reality show, Underwood has not previously informed people to whom he would reveal on camera that he is gay — what we see, he said, is their genuine reaction to the news.

Initially, this did not please his mother, Donna Burkard, the first person to whom he reveals his orientation on the show. (Underwood’s parents are divorced, but their relationship is friendly.)

Burkard said his son’s revelation came as a surprise, and that he was not comfortable with the camera’s presence but resigned himself to accepting it. And then her protective motherly side emerged.

“We’ve decided that if we can help even one family, and hopefully multiple families, by showing the love and support I believe we exhibit, other gay men and women who live in hiding may perhaps have a glimmer of hope that their parents will react with open arms,” ​​she said in a telephone interview.

Underwood’s biggest protector on the series is his father, Scott Underwood, who says he loves his son — “a strong person,” he called him, for coming out in a national TV interview. But would the best time to be informed about it really be a fishing trip with the son?

“I’m not saying it pissed me off, but my preference would be for it to have been done differently,” he said over the phone. But his son “works in the entertainment world, let’s face it,” he continued. “That’s what he chose to do as a career.”

“Do I believe he acted like that for fame?” he added, referring to his son’s decision to star in the series. “No. He decided to come out of the closet on TV for money? Certainly. But who in the reality TV business doesn’t take advantage of their life and expose it for money?”

Just read a recent Instagram post by Underwood about the series to realize that a lot of people think that the controversies he got involved in after playing The Bachelor would disqualify him from a contract with Netflix. (But many other people disagree.)

An online petition with more than 35,000 signatures, as of the end of November, called on Netflix to cancel the series over accusations of harassment and stalking brought by Underwood’s ex-girlfriend Cassie Randolph and outlined in her request for an injunction to forbid him from approaching her in September 2020.

Randolph is the woman Underwood chose to marry on The Bachelor, but their season, unlike most seasons on the show, didn’t end in engagement. In November 2020, Randolph accepted an agreement, the terms of which are confidential, to withdraw the injunction. Underwood apologized for his behavior.

“It’s sad, more than anything else, that I put myself in a position to say the things I said and do the things I did to her,” Underwood said. Randolph did not respond to requests for comment.

Jeff Jenkins, executive producer of Coming Out of the Closet, said an agent originally proposed to him a series about Underwood and Randolph’s life as a couple. When the relationship ended, he said, the direction of the show changed. Underwood met with him and explained that he was thinking about coming out of the closet.

“We saw the positive side of him telling his story,” said Jenkins, who is also executive producer of “I Am Cait,” a series about Caitlyn Jenner’s life as a transgender woman, with whom Getting Out of the Closet has streaks among the LGBTQIA+ reality shows.

Asked Underwood’s motives, Jenkins said that “he’s already famous and – I hope I’m not talking more than I should – this documentary isn’t going to enrich him.”

Damla Dogan, director of reality shows at Netflix, wrote in an email that the streaming service trusted the producers to handle “Underwood’s complicated story well, and that includes taking responsibility for his actions.”

Asked how the show fits with the company’s queer programming strategy, especially after accusations of transgender phobia spawned by “The Closer,” a recent David Chappelle comedy special, Dogan said it would be unfair for Colton to put on all the weight. of the LGBTQIA+ representation on their shoulders”

“One-person experiences won’t fill the void of queer stories on TV,” Dogan wrote in an email. “We have to improve as an industry in order to highlight new ways of living and loving.”

And there is the issue of timing. The series begins on November 6, 2020, five months before Underwood revealed his sexual orientation in a TV interview, meaning his production team knew he was gay before his family did. To some people, this seems more like a career move, in pursuit of profit, than honest emotional reckoning.

John Casey, editor of LGBTQIA+ magazine The Advocate, wrote in a column that Underwood “has failed women and the LGBTQIA+ community to ridicule our coming-out process, especially for those of us who took great risks in doing so” .

Attempts to contact Casey were unsuccessful. Activist organization Glaad, which champions LGBTQIA+ causes and receives a thank you in credit for the Underwood program, declined to comment.

Underwood said he was forced to act as he did because, as he stated in an interview with Variety magazine, he received an anonymous email last year from someone who claimed to have nude photos of him at a spa known for its gay clientele. He admits he was there, but the photos were never published. The first person he admitted to being gay was his press agent.

Underwood knew that the next step would necessarily be to tell his family. Having cameras present, he said, helped to capture the drama, but it also served as a way to force him to account. He said the thought that “today you’re going to have to come out to your father, and there’s no getting away” comforted him. (He also revealed his guidance to others in his life away from the camera.)

The only time Underwood seemed uncomfortable in our conversation was talking about her boyfriend, political strategist Jordan Brown, with whom he’s been in a relationship for a few months. Underwood simply said that he was “very happy and very much in love” with Brown, and that their families have already met.

“The easiest way to explain it is to say that, for me, the experience was like taking a girlfriend to meet the family,” said Underwood, blushing, and looking really inexperienced in his life as a gay man. “And no one was surprised.”

He said he’s not sure what he’s going to do next — perhaps another gay project of some sort, on TV. His priority, he said, is something he has never been very good at: “I need to take care of myself first of all,” he said. And that means social media, Christians, The Bachelor fans and everyone else will have to wait. “If it doesn’t make me happy, it doesn’t make me feel fulfilled, it’s something I won’t do,” he said.