A gay icon from reality TV's early years makes a hesitant return
GRAFTON, VT. >> When you cross into Vermont from New York, the road opens up and the Green Mountains emerge. Make it to Grafton (population: 645), and your cell service largely evaporates. This was where, on a recent day, Danny Roberts was standing in the doorway of the tiny cabin in the woods where he lives with his 6-year-old daughter. His eyes are crinkly now; his sandy hair seems uncertain of its next move. He has grown a beard.
His daughter was out for the day, Roberts said. His mother, who was visiting for the week, was watching her.
“It's kind of the elephant in the room with my family,” he said. “We don't talk about the reality TV thing.”
When he first put himself out there, in the ninth season of “The Real World,” he was young and a bit naive. Now, at 44, he's doing it again, for reasons he can only half-explain.
The phrase “reality TV” was just becoming part of the everyday lexicon when he found himself jammed into a house in New Orleans with six other young people who — with the help of a few narrative contrivances — were taking their first stumbles into adulthood.
When he and his fellow players left “The Real World” for the real world, the stumbling continued, and Roberts learned that the TV version of himself had become a shadow that traveled with him. Danny Roberts meant something to people.
If you're not a member of the microgeneration able to bust out the chorus to the Spice Girls hit “Wannabe” from memory, there's a good chance you have no idea who Roberts is.
But for a swath of gay elder millennials whose formative years unfolded to an MTV soundtrack, his reappearance as a cast member on a streaming return to “The Real World” on Paramount+ is likely to spark that old zig-a-zig-ah.
In 2000, Roberts was something new in pop culture: a gay sex symbol zapped into the basement rec rooms of teenagers who had never encountered such a creature.
Gay people, at the time, were becoming more visible on TV — thanks, in large part, to earlier installments of “The Real World” — but none had the wholesomeness and confident sexuality that Roberts, then 22, exuded with every flash of his Mona Lisa-meets-Backstreet Boy smile.
The project of LGBTQ visibility was going through an awkward phase in that time. Ellen DeGeneres' coming out in 1997 created a sense that things were changing. But her sitcom, “Ellen,” was canceled one season after her revelation.
“Will & Grace,” another sitcom, broke some ground by chronicling the relationship between a gay man and his straight friend, but discerning viewers couldn't help but notice that it had about as much bite as “I Love Lucy.”
In 2000, “Survivor,” then in its first season, delivered an openly gay (and, often, openly nude) antihero in Richard Hatch, who schemed his way to milliondollar victory. But he was a rather dark, Machiavellian figure.
“The Real World” had featured LGBTQ people since its 1992 debut — most notably Pedro Zamora, a young activist from the third season, who died of AIDS-related illness a day after the finale — but Zamora's impact was complicated by deep sadness.
Roberts, born and raised in small-town Rockmart, Georgia, was something different from his TV predecessors. Rather than playing a jester, villain or deeroticized Ken doll, he was chill, joyful in his identity, and he seemed to glow with an unapologetic sex appeal.
For gay adolescents in a time before social media, who relied on television for glimpses of fellow travelers, the sight of him bopping around the “Real World” digs in his black boxer briefs was both an awakening and an indication of new possibilities.
Unlike Zamora, Roberts was, at the outset, not particularly motivated by activism. His boyfriend during the filming of “The Real World: New Orleans,” an Army officer named Paul Dill, appeared on the show using only his first name, and his face was hidden to conceal his identity.