Where were you when Lisa Rinna left Real Housewives? I was in Budapest on a spa break intended to start the new year with a clean slate and empty mind. This stab at tranquility was interrupted on the third morning when I woke to a flurry of notifications from frenzied gays – had I heard the news? After eight years as a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, agitator-in-chief Lisa had been let go. Attempting to elicit some kind of response from my sleepy boyfriend, I may have referred to this history-changing development as “our moon landing”.
For gay people, the Real Housewives franchise has become a uniting force. It binds disparate groups – from Canal Street twinks to Stockwell bears – with a shared interest and common parlance. It is football for gays; a fast track to intimacy between men with little else in common. “Are you up to date on (Real Housewives of) Potomac” has become our “did you see the match?”
As with football, fans are fiercely loyal to their favourites – although these are highly medicated 50-year-old women rather than regional teams. Each episode is accompanied by fiercely contested post-match analysis. Did Mia go too far by throwing a drink at Wendy? Does Yolanda really have Munchausen syndrome? Where does the recent conviction of Jen Shah (tagline “the only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing”) for wire fraud leave the women of Salt Lake City?
If you want to explain the appeal of Housewives for a significant contingent of gay men, you could do a lot worse than look at Lisa Rinna’s departure. It came after feuding with recently anointed fan favourite Kathy Hilton (mother of Paris) during a trip to Aspen, in which Lisa claims that Kathy suffered a “psychotic break”, referred to her fellow castmates as “pieces of shit” and threatened to “ruin” her sister, show stalwart Kyle Richards. The majority of fans believe that Lisa had exaggerated Kathy’s tirade, leveraging the drama for her own ends and damaging an already fractured relationship between Kathy and her sister. Lisa, a woman entirely unacquainted with the concept of understatement, claimed that she would “get cancer” if she was unable to gossip about Kathy.
Housewives is Dynasty for the TikTok age. Susan Sontag defined camp as, “a love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” On the strength of Lisa’s lips alone, the show fulfils that brief. In a world which has sought to diminish us, gay people love to self-aggrandise (note our propensity to refer to people’s opinions of us as “fan theories”). This is also true of the Housewives, who approach choosing a reunion outfit as if they are strategising an armed conflict.
Sontag also suggested that, “the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious”. Life is hard and being gay is stressful, from the cost of living crisis and a surge in LGBTQ hate crimes to unflattering office lighting. Look, I’m not saying that dissociating by watching rich women accuse one another of having bad breath is an act of radical queer joy. But I’m not not saying that.
And for the record, Lisa was right, Kathy is evil.
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