According to Tika Milan, who is currently spotlighted on MTV's reality series I'm From Rolling Stone, the experience of having your entire life documented is quite odd. “You always have three people with you at all times,” she explained. “There's always a microphone, there's always a camera person, so you kind of have your three little shadows with you.”

Milan, 26, is a poet, African American and an out lesbian. "They tell you, ‘Just forget the cameras are there,' but that's just not true. I was kind of always aware that they were there, and I was just very deliberate to not make myself out to be an a--hole.”

I'm From Rolling Stone follows the lives of six young writers competing for a highly coveted, full-time position at the famous music magazine. True to the reality TV paradigm, the “interns” are given far more interesting assignments than regular editorial interns normally are, including high-profile celebrity interviews and trips (sometimes to distant locales) to cover major music festivals.

And as might be expected, the tendency toward dramatics is never far from these six competitive, talented personalities. But Milan vowed to sidestep the drama and let her writing speak for itself.

She said that despite the typical marginalization that occurs on TV, she never felt pressured to represent herself in a certain way. “You become that ‘it person' for your community,” she acknowledged. “So I just had that responsibility and understood that that was going to happen, but at the same time I wasn't making an issue of it.”

She continued: “I didn't want to come off as the angry black person, or as the man-hating gay person, either. That's not me, so that wasn't ever going to come out. I was just going to be myself.”

Milan also felt it was important that general audiences just see her for who she is: a completely normal person. “I think the biggest thing for me was to show that people like myself have regular lives and just do what regular people do,” she said. “It's not all parades and drag queens, you know?”

So far, she is happy with the way the show has been edited, and she is happy that she carried herself with a dignity not always characteristic of reality TV stars. “I'm glad I didn't make an ass of myself,” she said with a laugh. “You know, I was a respectable person. I know when I was 15 or 16, I was dying to see another gay person on television, another gay, black woman on TV. [Nowadays] I could sit around and watch The L Word all day, but nobody on The L Word looks like me.”

Milan is one of the very few lesbians on television with an appearance that is not traditionally feminine. “I think just me being me is kind of important, so that's cool,” she added. “I'm really humbled by that.”