October 27, 2022
Queering Television: Looking Back at '1 Girl 5 Gays'
READ TIME: 5 MIN.
Before podcasts became the cultural force that they are today and every celebrity had their own show, it was hard to find like-minded people talking about niche issues and interests. But in 2009, the talkshow "1 Girl 5 Gays" launched on MTV Canada before being picked up on the LGBT+ network Logo and airing in the U.S. a year later.
Airing from 2009 through 2014, the show worked much like a podcast (but with cameras!) and featured a host – the girl – and five gay men (and sometimes lesbian women) who discuss 20 questions about sex, love and life. The LGBTQ+ landscape was quite different than what it is today: Barack Obama had just become president, we were still in the early days of dating apps like Grindr, Facebook was the go-to social media app (Instagram and TikTok didn't exist yet) and a pre-"Born This Way" Lady Gaga was just starting to get weird.
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"1 Girl 5 Gays" was originally hosted by Aliya Jasmine Sovani before "Degrassi" actress Lauren Collins took over in 2013 until the show ended. The gays were a rotating panel of gay men, and, according to Wiki, included:
Michael Yerxa, Alex Illest, Jean-Paul Bevilacqua, Juan Manuel Gonzalez Calcaneo, Jonathan Morton-Schuster, Matt Barker, Dean McArthur, Matt Santos, Philip Tetro, Ian Lynch, Andrew Edwards, Jake Mossop, Thomas Trafford, Ish, Jonathan Nathaniel, Gerry King, Simon Lysnes, Max Claude, Alex Brown, Jason Yantha, Dillon Scheenaard, JP Larocque, Rafay Agha, Gabriel Rojas, Jae MT, Kiel Hughes, Gaelan Love, Michael Lehman, Shawn Hitchins, Taylor James, Thomas Haskell, Chris Corsini, David Robert, Maurie Sherman, Ralph Rosario, Brad Blaylock, Ryan Carter, Ibrahim Hasan, Scott Do, Matthew Agius, Micha Baltman, Anthony Berardinucci, Matt Sims, Perez Hilton, James Bar, Jeffrey Bowers, Brett Ashley, Chase Hutchinson, Jonathan D. Lovitz, Mitchell Boucher, Mike Germanotta, Jamie Gillingham, and Taurel Lorenz.
There were also lesbian women who appeared on the talkshow: Brittany Leigh, Christina Mac, Brittany Emmons, Courtney Jean Milner, Valerie Bosso, and Nicole DeLargie.
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Last year, the show was rebooted as "1 Queen 5 Queers" on Canada's Crave TV network, with "RuPaul's Drag Race" star and "Canada's Drag Race" host Brooke Lynn Hytes with a rotating panel of LGBTQ+ people taking about the community's issues. Season 2 premiered earlier this year.
Though not all of the moments from "1 Girl 5 Gays" still hold up in 2022, it is a unique and often hilarious snapshot of gay life that wasn't too long ago but feels like a lifetime ago. Check out some clips from the original run of "1 Girl 5 Gays" below.
