File under: Extremely advance speculation

We caught wind (better catch than break, I always say) of an interesting pilot casting notice today calling for:

"HANDSOME GAY MALES who have an ADORABLE single FEMALE friend they would like to help out with her dating life! Think 'Date My Mom' with a GAY BEST FRIEND."

Date My Mom with a gay best friend? Why am I terrified that this is going to have some horrible name like Date My Hag or something...

At any rate, my first reaction to this notice was "how quaint!" After all, gays-as-fairy-godmothers was so Second Phase of the Gay Reality Television Takeover (following First Phase, gays-as-prizewinning-nudist-sociopaths), and only a bona fide pro like Tim Gunn can really swing the "gay guy teaches a girl how to live her life" thing as a central concept anymore.

I mean, we've had Boy Meets Boy, which aside from it's rather icky "stealth hetero" angle was far ahead of the curve and at least acknowledged that gay men actually date. And a lot of the dating shows on now (particularly Next and Parental Control on MTV) are sexuality-agnostic or include gay people in with straights (even when, as in the case of Gay, Straight or Taken?, the result is about as thrilling as waiting for the streetlights to come on).

The whole "wry homosexual spends his time sizing up men and ensuring the romantic happiness of the heterosexuals around him" thing is a bit tired, IMHO. How about at least reversing it? What if the girl set up the gay guys and screened their potential dates?