Just Because Mel White of "The Amazing Race" is Paranoid Doesn’t Mean People Don’t Want to Kill Him

AE: Was Luke Adams out to the other players?
MW: Yeah, pretty much. Once he found out that Mike and I were being billed as gay, he wanted to be billed as gay, too, and I called the producer and they said, “No, we’re establishing you as what we want you to be established. He’s established as deaf. You’re established as gay, so don’t be interrupting what we’re trying to do here.” So they were very clear about not wanting to muddy the waters by bringing in another issue.

AE: But that’s what’s so great about it. There are plenty of deaf gays who don’t see themselves represented on TV and plenty of older gays who don’t see themselves represented.
MW: Well, fortunately it kind of got out. And also Lakisha’s a lesbian, the black sister. And there are rumors about others, which I will not pass on.

Luke Adams

AE: What did your husband Gary have to say about your doing this? You didn’t have contact with him during the race, right?
MW: In fact, for almost 40 days I could have no contact with anyone. Twice CBS called him to tell him that we’re all right, but that’s all. They didn’t tell him where we were or what we were doing, so it was really kind of an isolation thing.

Gary Nixon and Mel White

AE: So is what we see on TV a pretty accurate sense of what happened?
MW: It’s fairly accurate, but it’s sped up so fast that you miss the real misery. They show you arriving at the destination. They don’t show you running straight up the hill for a mile to get to the destination. But nothing is staged at all. It is just totally, “You’re on your own, kids.” And they favor no one.

They have 2,000 employees for this one season, so when you go into a country, it’s just amazingly organized. Unbelievably organized. And without a hitch, we went through all of those episodes, you know. It was something. Just exactly what you get.

AE: So the fact that you and your son are both gay [Mike is bisexual] seemed like such a non-issue. It was mentioned, but then it didn’t really come up again. Was it ever an issue on the show that we didn’t see?
MW: Well, frankly, I kept wishing they would bring it up more because I’m an activist and I want people to see, for example, they are constantly saying that gay people are a threat to children and all this stuff, so I wanted to show that gay parents are good parents, too. I wanted to represent gay people and they just didn’t go there.

AE: Taking a step back away from the show for a moment, it seems like we had the great back-to-back gay rights victories in Vermont and Iowa recognizing same-sex marriage. What is your sense of where we are as a country and as a world and where we’re going in the years ahead?
MW: I think we’ve seen the last of the big fundamentalist tsunamis. They will continue to groan and organize, and once they get defeated on the federal amendment prohibiting marriage, once they get roundly defeated on that, then it’s really over. But that’s the last big stronghold is to go to that – to defend the defense of marriage act and to get a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. But I think the changes are coming fast and furiously now, but I’m almost 70. It doesn’t seem like it’s very fast, especially when I think about churches.

You know, religion isn’t changing that much. Here’s the most liberal church of all, the Episcopal Church, being divided down the center by it. And here’s the United Methodist Church pastors holding at the national assembly this last summer to allow pastors to deny membership to lesbian and gay people. Allowing them to deny membership, not ordination or marriage – membership.

And the United Methodists have this great tradition of progressive kind of stance with John and Charles Wesley and the Native Americans and all that kind of stuff – they’ve always been liberal – now they’re being taken over by these right-wing organizations within their church. And the Catholic Church, I mean when the Pope just a few weeks ago says it’s as important to save the world from homosexuality as it is to save the rain forests, I think we haven’t gotten very far with him either.