The Bachelorette Australia is making history by casting the first ever openly bisexual lead.
On Wednesday, May 19, Australia’s Channel 10 announced that the popular dating series will feature Brooke Blurton, an openly bisexual individual, this season. As such, the cast will include male and female contestants as her date. Presently, the show is still casting participants for the season. Further, there’s no premiere date yet so fans have to wait.
This is the first time ever that The Bachelor and The Bachelorette franchise will have a mixed gender cast. During an interview with The Daily Telegraph on May 19, Brooke said, “If it makes people feel uncomfortable in any way, I really challenge them to think about why it does.”
The 26-year-old lead was a contestant in The Bachelor in 2018, specifically during Nick Cummins’ season. Further, she appeared on Bachelor in Paradise a year after.
On May 19, she took to Instagram to post a photo of herself to announce the good news. She captioned the post, “I’m ready, I hope you are too!”
The Bachelor and The Bachelorette never had an openly bisexual lead although there as a time on the 2019 The Bachelor with Colton Underwood as the lead that Demi Burnett tried her luck with him. She eventually joined Bachelor in Paradise that summer together with her girlfriend, Kristian Haggerty.
Mind you but Brooke isn’t the first openly bisexual to join the series. Jaime King, an openly bisexual individual, was a cast member during the U.S. Bachelor when Nick Viall was the lead. In 2019, she wrote an essay which was published in Playboy, where she expressed her feeling of being “completely alone in this heteronormative reality-dating franchise.”
In 2018, Colton became a contestant in The Bachelorette when Becca Kufrin was the lead. In 2019, he became the lead in a cast of female contestants. Only last month, he was interviewed by Robin Roberts in Good Morning America where he came out as gay to the surprise of his fans.
Meanwhile, the U.S. season of The Bachelorette with its lead, Katie Thurston, will premiere on Monday, June 7 at 8 p.m on ABC.
