When the cast list for The Traitors season three was announced, I was agog. Chrishell Stause, Bob the Drag Queen, Gabby Windey, Carolyn Wiger, and other LGBTQ+ reality stars all packed into one show? As a queer fan of Selling Sunset, The Bachelor, and Survivor, I couldn’t believe my luck. All of my worlds were colliding in spectacularly gay fashion.
As it turns out, I have none other than Traitors host (and tartan fashion icon) Alan Cumming to thank for this embarrassment of riches. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly for the outlet’s 2024 Pride cover story, Cumming said he “lobbied quite hard” for producers to make the queer contingent of the cast more sizable after Peppermint was banished first last season. Cumming acknowledged that the early elimination of Peppermint, who was the only trans contestant on her season, was not a “good look in the world we live in.”
Fans of the reality competition show will recall that Peppermint was sent home first from the castle after a verbal slip provided fodder for her fellow contestants to argue she was a traitor. Later, in the show’s reunion episode, the Drag Race star said that, in the absence of proof, “people have to rely on the biases that they bring into the game, which end up targeting whoever’s the most different from the group.” Elsewhere, in an interview with Out magazine, Peppermint spoke about the need for there to be more than one person from a marginalized group on reality show casts, saying, “Don’t just get one person in front of the camera. Let’s get a trans director. Let’s get a trans writer. And let’s not have it be one show.”
That was a sentiment Cumming seemingly took to heart. In his EW interview, the host noted the importance of making sure that LGBTQ+ people are not treated like a “token” on television, and are instead featured widely even amid “a backlash against change.”
“My response to that is to push back and say, ‘No, we’re not going to hide. Here are those people,’” Cumming said. “And if I have a chance to help do that by just saying to the producers of The Traitors, ‘We need to make sure there’s more queer and trans people on the show,’ I will.”
The fact that he probably said that while wearing the most devastatingly stylish plaid outfit anyone has ever constructed only makes his statement of solidarity even cooler.
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