"Design Star" Season 3: HGTV gets even gayer with two new out contestants

My favorite television commercial these days is the one on HGTV featuring a series of vignettes of people watching a real estate show, probably House Hunters.

One viewer wonders which house a couple will choose. Another comments on a kitchen, or the landscaping.

And in the last, a guy looks at the woman he's watching with and plaintively says, "I thought he was his brother."

The woman looks at him pityingly. "They're not brothers."

And that is why I love my big gay home decorating network.

Three years ago, HGTV introduced America to Design Star, a reality competition show for interior designers that went on to become its highest-rated show ever. The out gay winner and breakout star of that first season was David Bromstad, who has gone on to host HGTV's successful Color Splash and inspire legions of fans to fix up the family room and hit the gym and/or tattoo parlor because hello: David Bromstad has some nice arms, yo.

The second season of Design Star featured two out gay men as contestants, Josh Johnson and Scott Corridan, although they both were eliminated fairly early in the competition.

AfterElton.com just got word that Season Three will also feature two out gay male contestants, marking yet again a bold new incursion of gay men into the previously straight-dominated world of interior design.

First is 23-year-old Michael Stribling of College Station, Texas. He's the competition's youngest finalist, and HGTV tells us that he "attributes his success as a designer to his fresh and youthful approach to style."

Michael's audition video is on the Design Star website. He is both fabulous and awesome, and we know it because he says so.

The second out gay contestant is Matt Locke, 38, from Los Angeles. He's the son of an architect dad and artist mom who "provided him with a wildly creative home where he was allowed a great deal of artistic freedom. By age 6, Matt had planned his first bedroom and by age 27, he had built his first house. This Princeton grad also studied fine art and industrial design at the university level and for the past five years has operated his own custom furniture, lighting and interiors company. Matt describes his design style as warm and modern and looks to the great architecture of the world for inspiration."

You can check out Matt's audition video over here. He clearly knows his way around power tools, and don't tell anyone, but Brian has a little crush on him already. (Ed.: I'm quite sure I have no idea what she's talking about, and my testimony will reflect this.) And given that his favorite HGTV show is Divine Design and his favorite film is 9 to 5, I might have a little lesbian version of a crush on him myself.