An out lesbian singer with short spiky hair and a casually butch dress style is voted the winner in a national TV talent contest. Sound too good to be true? Maybe in the U.S., but not in the UK, where 19-year-old Alex Parks recently emerged the winner of the second season of the UK reality show Fame Academy.

Fame Academy is a sort-of American Idol-meets-MTV's the Real World, in which teenage contestants called "students" board inside the "Academy" for nine weeks, while competing against each other in talent contest and getting advice from the "head teacher." As the winner of the seven-week show, Alex was awarded a twelve-month recording contract, along with a high-end apartment in London and a flashy car.

Parks almost didn't even try out for the show. Last year, Parks discovered shortly after she found her girlfriend in bed with another woman, that her father had submitted her name to be a contestant on the show. "I was confused and [the breakup] knocked me pretty hard, to be honest," she told the UK newspaper The Telegraph. "...[but] I wouldn`t have done [the show] if I was still in that relationship. There is no way I would ever have dreamt of going off and leaving my true love. So something good did come out of it, after all."

Alex grew up as the youngest of four children in a 300-year-old cottage in a village in England called Mount Hawke. She dated boys and girls during her early teen years, until finally coming out as a lesbian in high school; fortunately, her parents have been very supportive of her, both when she came out and as she competed in Fame Academy. She speaks openly and matter-of-factly about her sexual orientation, but doesn't overemphasize it, either.

There have been reality TV show winners who have never gone anywhere since, and it remains to be seen whether Parks can parlay her fifteen minutes of fame into a lasting career as a performer.

But the signs so far are encouraging. Her first single, "Maybe That's What it Takes," debuted in third place on the UK pop charts in the middle of November, and her first album, "Introduction," has stayed in the top 5 since it debuted shortly thereafter. She has received a lot of media coverage in the UK, and she draws large crowds whenever she performs or tours record stores to promote the album.

The larger question, however, is whether Alex Parks' success signifies a paradigm shift in Western attitudes towards lesbian visibility in music, or whether she is just an isolated case. Before now, there has never been a singer like Parks who has been so openly embraced by the general public in the UK, and there still hasn't been someone like her in the U.S. There are plenty of openly lesbian singers in the U.S., of course, but few that have really broken through on a national level since Melissa Etheridge and kd lang came out over a decade ago.

Russian pop duo t.A.T.u. has a large following in America and the UK, but they are also more feminine, and lesbianism for them is part of their performance (whereas Parks just is a lesbian, she doesn't incorporate overt displays of lesbian affection in her performance). And recently there has been a slew of straight female pop stars engaged in same-sex kissing, but none of these women have come out publicly as lesbian or even bisexual.

Perhaps Parks' success is also partly due to Fame Academy's format, which allows viewers to see beyond her sexuality, as they meet her parents, watch her form friendships, and deal with the pressures of singing. It seems unlikely that someone like Parks would even be cast on a reality TV show in the super-image-conscious U.S.--where all the women on TV, gay or straight, look like beauty pageant contestants--let alone voted the winner.

It will be awhile before we know whether Parks is the tip of the iceberg for lesbian singers in the UK or just a fluke, but it's clearly a step in the right direction. Whether Parks' success will have any impact on the music scene in the U.S. is still unclear, since she hasn't developed a large following here yet, but in the end, it's all really about money in both countries. If Parks and other lesbian performers can prove to the record labels that there's an untapped market in backing openly lesbian performers, we just might see a paradigm shift, after all.