IMHO "The Amazing Race" (14.01): They are the cheese ... plus, a stealth gay!

Last night The Amazing Race returned to television with a new round of globetrotting goodness and of course a delightfully bizarre assortment of players battling for the prize. We tuned in to see gay father/son team Mel and Mike White but of course with TAR you always get more than you sign up for when tuning in.

In case you missed the ep, the full premiere is available online. Below, my spoilery discussion, as well as the revelation of this season's unadvertised gay contestant!

Mike White
  

So let's start with Team Gay, gay activist and Soulforce founder Mel White and his son, screenwriter/actor Mike White. I'd always heard Mike described as bisexual, but in the first few moments he makes reference to being gay and having a gay dad, which might have just been for the sake of brevity or maybe he's come over fully to the dark side. Either way, it's pretty ... uh, amazing to have a father/son team who are both gay and successful public figures in the game.

But here's some more news: Mel and Mike aren't the only gays in the running (and biking ... and cheese-hauling) this season. It turns out that Luke, the deaf fella who is competing with his mom, is also openly gay as per his Facebook profile, though the network doesn't mention the fact in his bio. Maybe "deaf" trumps "gay" in one-line bios? Whatever, it's awesome to have him here and to see a gay man with a disability competing with a parent who is clearly super supportive of him.

So to make things clearer given this new bit of info, let's make Mel and Mike Team SuperGay, and Luke and Margie Team Deaf(gay). The rest of the teams can be described thusly: Team Slingblade, Team Nugget, Teams Breeder (Parts 1 and 2), Team Fogie, Team Asian, and Teams Doublemint (Parts 1-3).

Teams Doublemint #1-3
 

The first challenge involved racing to the airport, picking one of two flights to Europe, and then hopping a train to Switzerland, where they had to locate a church and sign a guestbook to get a starting time for the next morning. Team SuperGay came in 6th, which put them in the middle starting slot. The next day the teams had to find a car to take them to the second-highest bungee jump in the world, execute a dive, then race to a mountain farm where they had to carry 200 lbs. of cheese down a hill. They then had to track down yodelers, cross a river and find the finish line.

Stealth gay Luke

Now that's a busy day. Not to mention a hell of a lot of cheese.

Team SuperGay came in fourth overall (nice!) and in the end Team Breeder #1 (Preston and Jennifer) lost and were sent to a resort in Thailand to bicker by the pool and wait for the other losers to join them. Nice work if you can get it!

I think my favorites so far are Team Doublemint: Ginger (the former cheerleaders who have been Feria'd within an inch of their lives) and Team Slingblade, because they're just a hot mess waiting to happen. In the previews for next week we see Luke and his mom getting pies in the face, which doesn't look too terribly nice. 

What'd you folks think?