Another victim, er, castmember for Dante's Cove

The last couple of weeks have seen a Dante's Cove population explosion of the queer (and tangentially queer) near-famous. And the latest news is that ex-Amazing Race reality show personality and ex-Lance Bass boyfriend Reichen Lehmkuhl is joining the cast. (Someone needs to explain to him that the Cove is an extremely dangerous place.)

Now, I actually applauded when they added Jenny Shimizu. It was my duty as a lesbian, and I did it. And we blogged the other day that Noah's Arc's Jensen Atwood, who played Wade, the man with the most perfect eyebrows in the history of television and, my male colleagues tell me, many other very fine attributes as well, is also going to be on the show.

But I'm not so sure about Reichen.

According to here!network's press release, "Lehmkuhl first rose to fame after winning the grand prize on the CBS show The Amazing Race." I was not aware he had risen to fame, but I digress. Meredith Kadlec, Vice President of Original Programming for here! said, "We couldn't be more thrilled to have a talent like Reichen on board. He is the perfect triple threat for Dante's Cove – he has a loyal fan base, he is proudly out, and he is simply gorgeous." (As our friends at Towleroad pointed out, no mention of, you know, acting talent.)

The media release continues, "On the show, Lehmkuhl will play Trevor, a business school graduate who comes to Dante's Cove looking to find himself. While there he becomes quickly intertwined with the beautiful men and enigmatic forces crawling all over the island." Of course he does.

I loved this little slug so much I stole it from Brian's blog entry about Jensen Atwood:

Dante's Cove airs on the here! pay-for-gay channel.

The new season is filming now in Hawaii, and will premiere in October of this year. If you've never watched it, you really should. It's the most terribly fabulously badly good thing ever made for television. I recently watched it for the first time for an article I'm writing, and I literally couldn't look away, it was like watching those surgery shows on the Discovery Health Channel. You know it's wrong, you know it's going to get ugly, you even know someone's going to be eviscerated, and you cannot stop watching.

I was also thinking, wasn't it just a few days ago that Reichen gave an interview to Ben Patrick Johnson where Reichen lamented the fact that his willingness to go shirtless had diminished his ability to be taken seriously as he battles Don't Ask/Don't Tell and other gay rights issues? Reichen, er, have you WATCHED Dante's Cove? Do the guys ever get to keep their pants shirts on at all?