Brotherly love: Seany (left) and Gerry in Big Brother 8. Photograph: Channel 4
It's now almost exactly ten years since, in the opening episode of Channel 4's Queer as Folk, the rampant Stuart picked up and took home a precocious blonde teenager whom he later found out was a schoolboy. Clothes are shed. Kissing happens. "Do you like rimming?" quizzes the arrogant courtier, to which the boy gives a facial response which basically translates as "eh?" They then get down to it. In this short, sharp, shameless scene, gay sex was both demystified and made beautiful. It had been portrayed with gravitas on film before - in My Beautiful Launderette, Prick Up Your Ears, et al - but it had never been done for TV with both humour and hotness.
Since then, Queer as Folk's influence has been felt everywhere from Will and Grace to the barman in Coronation Street (played by Queer as Folk alumnus Antony Cotton) sleeping with his bolshy female colleague's boyfriend; from Hollyoaks (which could barely exist without a steady stream of H&M-clad boys getting off with one another) to classy literary adaptations (The Line of Beauty had inter-racial anal sex in its first 40 minutes). Channel 4 has also become far less renowned for fictional drama - with the distinct exception of its US buy-ins - yet it has become the master of what provides the defining moments of drama for a new generation of viewers: reality TV. Thanks (inevitably) to Big Brother, once again this year's defining moment could involve that same taboo. You've had the fictional variant - are you ready for real gay sex on TV?
Last Friday night, Big Brother put two gay men, Gerry and Seany, into the house of femme fatales. There have been several pairs of gay boys sharing house-space before over at Elstree over the years, but they have been chosen, cannily, as adversaries. In the second Big Brother, Josh Rafter was a confident Soho gym bunny. His effect on the existing gay contestant Brian Dowling - an air steward who appeared to be almost virginal - was destabilising, and their interaction famously inspired Matt Lucas and David Walliams to create Daffyd Thomas, the "only gay in the village".
Other pairings have followed a similar dynamic. Marco (screaming, flapping) and Daniel (claimed to only sleep with straight men) in BB5. Derek (fortysomething Tory toff) and Kemal (flouncing fashion Muslim) in BB6. This climaxed with last year's Richard (self styled "sexual terrorist") and Michael (claimed to be divining God in the house) engaging in a two-week long argument about whether Richard had the right to refer to Michael as "she". The possibility of romance or sex between all these pairings was unimaginable. They provided excellent fodder for human drama, but little for a lascivious one, something the straight housemates are regularly cast with one eye on.
But Gerry and Seany are different. There is a frisson. They are openly tactile and affectionate with one another. Both possess a confidence of which the other has claimed to be a little jealous. They are neither ugly nor pretty enough to be in competition with one another, and both have clearly been around the block a few times. Cleverly, they have been allowed to incubate their relationship with one another over a week long period in which there has been no other male distraction apart from Ziggy, who is clearly smitten with Chanelle and therefore off limits.
Do you see where I'm going with all this? Obviously, it's pure conjecture at this point. But I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that after the recent racial distractions in the house, Channel 4 could do with a bit of ground-breaking, positive integration in the Big Brother human zoo.
