Interview with Bill and Joe from "The Amazing Race"

AE: You seem to be very aware of your status as gay role models. How do you feel about other gay reality stars or actors who say they don't want to be role models?
Bill: Let me address that. When we first applied for the first season, that's the first thing we said. We said, "Please. We want to be on your show. We want to be treated like any other contestant, so look at us as human beings.” We were almost afraid that being gay might be a detriment to getting on the show. At that point, no one had really been on TV. You had Will & Grace. You had a lot of fictional gay characters, but you had no real gay people on shows. You had Richard Hatch. He'd just been on Survivor, but not a couple and how a couple interacts in real life in real time.

My point is, take us for who we are as people. If you like us, fine, if don't like us, fine. We just want to be considered cast members. That's it. After that, if you draw some other conclusions, then so be it. We never really put ourselves out there to be role models. From that first season, we got vilified, and that caused a lot of problems within the gay community. We've never really been accepted like Reichen and Chip were because they were in a different genre than we were. Being a villain is a hard thing, personally, to go through. We thought we were lovable, believe it or not. After that experience, we thought, "Okay, at least we got on."

What happened was, we got contacted by a lot of people who said, "Hey, I watched the show with my mom, or I watched the show with my grandparents, and that's the first time we ever talked about me being gay. They knew I was gay, it was always there, but they had never talked about it." It sort of gave people an opportunity, and that's when we realized that it was a special opportunity for us. We're grateful for that, because there's a lot of stuff that's happened behind the scenes that we never talked about. A lot of people have been helped by it. I don't want to say that we would ever consider ourselves role models. We're just who we are. We're not trying to be anything special to anybody. We're just trying to be ourselves.

Joe: If I could just add something I was aware of way back in 2001. I don't like to use the word "role model" because I don't consider myself to be a role model, but I was aware that I wanted to be an example, especially to young gay men — high school and college students who might be coming out and having a hard time of it. Especially people from small towns, like I was. You think you're the only one around. There must be somebody else out here, but how do you contact them, how do you identify them? Where are they? Where do they go? Oh my God, I'm never going to find anyone who loves me or I can love, and I'm going to be sad, and lonely, and alone my whole life.

These are a lot of things that I went through back in the 60s and 70s growing up in a small town in upstate New York. It's not like that at all. You just have to put yourself out there. Gay men can find true love and true happiness. Here's an example of two men who have done that. Not to say that we're role models in any sort of way, but it did happen to us. We are very happy and in love. We've been together for 20 years now. We were together for 14 years at that point, which was unique. The other thing was, way back then, we were told by the psychologist that took us through the interview process for TAR1, he literally said, "You guys are unbelievable. You're some of the most stable people we've ever seen, gay or straight. If CBS has the courage to cast a gay couple on television then you are shoe-ins. If you don't get on the show, then it just means CBS isn't there yet. They're not ready for a real, live gay couple on national television."

There had never been one at that point and time. And we were cast! The curiosity is that, rather than making us lovable — because they could have made us lovable too, there was so much stuff there you could do whatever you wanted to do — they kind of leapfrogged and they took somebody who, you're starting off brand new here with a gay couple on television, and not only just portraying them on TV as themselves, but also making them villainous at the same time. In reality, that takes a double leap of faith on CBS' part that they could do that and get away with it.

Bill: Obviously, they pulled it off. We were very controversial. It made sense, but it was really only one facet of who we were on that first show. We were being competitive. We were being hard-fought competitors, aka Richard Hatch. He won. That's what we wanted to do. We wanted to be strong. We wanted to be smart. We wanted to be fast. And we wanted to be competitive. We wanted to win.
Joe: Bill, I think we missed the fast part this race. [Both laugh]
Bill: We're six years older now!