Ivette, the first out gay female contestant on the Big Brother reality series, has opened her mouth and inserted Carrie Bradshaw’s entire shoe collection. She might be a pretty, chic, and feminine lesbian (excuse the vulgarity), but she isn’t a very thoughtful one. Nor is she all that hip—the world has been offered a “different perspective of what gay women look like” for quite some time now, pre-L Word, on and off TV.

Where has Ivette been? Not at charm school.

Ivette speaks as though she’s the first “lipstick” (her noun, not mine) to be on television, but she’s not. She speaks as if Portia De Rossi is a dream and lesbians on the other side of the spectrum aren’t concerned with hygiene. What it appears Ivette is offering viewers is not a new, more glamorous perspective of lesbians, but a revealing peek into a timeworn and much more grim corner of lesbianism—shame.

Remember, she made the leap from “lesbian” to “vulgar,” I didn’t.

But let’s back up the truck for a minute. While it might be possible that Ivette is as arrogant and self-absorbed as she sounds, I suspect that she is not. I doubt that she meant for her words to sound so…horrible. It’s not all that easy to be interviewed, after all. It’s often hard to think on your feet, to come up with perfect words when a camera is rolling.

I believe, rather, that Ivette was absolutely well intentioned--guilty of immaturity, self-promotion, and inarticulate delivery, not necessarily malice.

I think she was saying that she hopes to shine a brighter and (gulp) prettier light on lesbianism. She feels a need to do her part to wipe out the old and ugly stereotypes that feed off of some of us like mold on cheddar.

Or, maybe she was trying to say that she is no less a lesbian just because she is pretty and chic.

Whatever her point, she failed miserably in her effort to express it well. As a result, she left the door wide open to conjecture. And it’s through that door we wander and subsequently wonder if insecurity is at the root of her seemingly subconscious hostility.

This is very sticky ground—a gooey passage that I am, admittedly, not qualified to navigate. Unlike Tom Cruise, I don’t know the history of psychiatry.

Still, I can speculate.

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