I’ve been trying to make the term “Bravo Dyke” happen for half a decade now. We — the lesbians who watch Bravo — are often forgotten by the broader Bravo fandom. I get it; we’re a small crew. When my friend and I attended a Bitch Sesh live show, we were surrounded by the demographics considered Bravo’s main market: straight women and gay men. Our glaring minority status in that massive theater, though, surprised me. I’m so used to discussing Bravo exclusively with lesbians. I think we view the hyper-heteronormative, hyper-patriarchal contexts these reality stars exist in with both the unabashed intrigue and thirst for messy entertainment of any other Bravo enthusiast but also through an acutely critical lens. Almost like we’re anthropologists. What I’m saying is I think lesbians are the ideal Bravo viewers.

But it’s no secret Bravo has long had a lesbian problem. Or, more accurately, the straight people who make up the majority of its casts have long had a lesbian problem. Too often, Bravo series serve as a stark argument for why queer women shouldn’t be in friend groups that are predominantly straight. Lesbophobia is so deeply ingrained in the social groups these shows comprise, and that reflects reality, too.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it’s top of mind lately thanks to a storyline currently airing in season two of The Valley, a spin-off of Vanderpump Rules, which itself is a spin-off of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It’s about a social group of parents living outside of Los Angeles stuck in some of the worst marriages I’ve ever seen. The most functional relationship on the show appears to be that between Jasmine and Melissa, two queer women from the same hometown in New Jersey who reconnected when Melissa moved to California and started dating.

There’s also a gay man on the show — Zack Wickham — but this is typically how most Bravo casts go in terms of there being one solitary queer woman or one solitary lesbian couple amid a sea of straights (there are a few exceptions, but we’ll get to that later). Jasmine and Melissa don’t get a whole lot of screen time or storylines on The Valley, perhaps because their relationship is relatively stable compared to the horrific other marriages, but I’m also just convinced Bravo producers and editors don’t understand that lesbians and our lives can make great reality television.

In any case, there’s finally a plotline this season that concerns Jasmine and Melissa, but it’s one that completely strips them of agency and makes Jasmine out to be an over-reactor. When one of the show’s husbands, Danny Booko, gets very drunk on a cast trip and sneaks tequila in a pantry, Jasmine is immediately triggered, bringing up a time Danny got so blackout drunk at a bar that he squeezed her thigh and asked her to “get daddy a drink” before grabbing Melissa’s ass. Prior to Jasmine bringing this up on camera, Danny had apparently apologized and gotten to a better place with Jasmine and Melissa, but his excessive drinking and attempts to hide it, along with his wife Nia Sanchez trying to downplay his inebriation by saying he was just tired, makes her rightfully realize Danny’s relationship to alcohol is still questionable. “Just knowing he’s taking shots in the cupboard, it’s like, ‘okay, is gonna do something he shouldn’t be doing?’” Jasmine says in the episode where this all comes to light. “You can’t just go around grabbing your friends’ asses and telling people to call you daddy.”

How do Danny, Nia, the rest of the cast react to any of this? Oh, you know, the way reality casts tend to react to things: Everyone finds a way to make it about themselves. But notably, no one seems to be taking Jasmine or Melissa’s safety and autonomy seriously at all. There is simply no way in hell any of this would have gone down the same way if Danny had grabbed the ass of Janet Caperna or Michelle Lally, two of the straight wives on the show. It’s not that people don’t believe Jasmine and Melissa (Danny, after all, has admitted it); it’s that they dismiss it as a simple drunken mistake and quickly move on, making Jasmine out to be the bad guy for bringing it up on camera when it was already supposedly resolved by Danny’s off-camera apology tour. Fuck that!

I think there are a few underpinnings to the cast’s casual dismissal of Danny’s behavior toward Jasmine and Melissa. Nia might not see her husband’s behavior as crossing a line because Jasmine and Melissa are queer. It’s easy for her to write off in her head that he was just confused and unaware of what he was doing, because surely he wasn’t hitting on coupled up queer women, right? These reactions hinge on the belief that relationships with women also aren’t that serious or meaningful. Danny would be terrified of any of the boyfriends or husbands had he done this to one of their girlfriends or wives; he doesn’t seem to believe there are the same consequences when it comes to doing this to two women in a relationship.

The rest of the group similarly doesn’t take Danny’s transgression as seriously as they might if it had happened to any other woman in the group. And I think it all comes down to a pervasive problem I have seen across Bravo shows, which is that queer women aren’t merely hypersexualized by straight men, but by straight women, too, who have adopted these patriarchal notions of lesbianism as something inherently sexual and fetishized by men while also seeing relationships between women as somehow flimsy or unreal.

This week, on The Valley season 2 episode 7, Jasmine brings all of this up explicitly during a conversation between her, Melissa, and Danny. Jasmine explains to Danny that she feels like when things happen to them as a couple, it gets “pushed away, like it’s not a big deal.” “On the daily, I have to like defend our relationship,” she says. “Anytime we go out and we go to a bar, guys are like ‘kiss her to make sure it’s real.’ And I’m like, okay, just because I don’t have a ring doesn’t mean our relationship is not valid or doesn’t matter, you know?”

Here, Jasmine and Melissa both express everything that has been on my mind since this storyline began. It’s this simultaneous hypersexualization (guys at bars urging them to kiss) and invalidation of the relationship (to make sure it’s real) that dictates so many of the interactions between the queer women on these Bravo shows and their straight castmates. Jasmine, who is bisexual, shares all this with Danny from the perspective of wanting to educate him as his friend. Melissa points out the same disparity I’ve been saying for weeks: that all of this would have gone very differently if either she or Jasmine were a man. He admits he never thought of it that way.

We see these dynamics at play on other Bravo shows, too. Just look at  Julia Lemigova’s treatment on the rebooted Real Housewives of Miami. The women all consider Julia inherently sensual, flirty, kinky. One jokes she has a “fetish” for Julia. Another makes a comment meant to be a joke about how Julia would make the “best prostitute” of the group, which triggers Julia because she dealt with assumptions about her and sex work when first immigrating to the US from Russia, but which also seems steeped in the group’s overall conception of Julia as hypersexual for merely being bisexual. This is a woman who lives on a farm with her wife. She arguably has the most quaint and low-drama marriage of anyone on the show. (She’s married to retired tennis player Martina Navratilova, who in recent years has doubled down on her anti-trans sports exclusion stance, so this is in no way an endorsement of either party or their relationship, merely an attempt to show how misaligned the group’s idea of Julia is from her reality.)

There’s a similar effect in the rebooted Real Housewives of New York, where Jenna Lyons is at first the sole lesbian in the cast. The rest of the cast, especially Brynn Whitfield, love to “flirt with” Jenna and make references to sex around her. Jenna, like Julia of RHOM who also has a friend constantly flirting with her on the show, is in a committed relationship, and I doubt these same lines would be crossed if that relationship were with a man. Brynn tries to make flirtation a cornerstone of her reality persona, but it’s still markedly different when it’s directed at Jenna, almost like it doesn’t count as “real” flirting. The other women of RHONY regard Jenna as if she’s erotic and exotic; even their questions about her coming out feel off, more aimed at making her queerness legible in their heterosexual worlds than at getting to know her.

This past season added two more queer women to RHONY: Racquel Chevremont, a main cast addition, and her fianceé Mel, a “friend of” addition. Racquel and Jenna have an existing friendship and similar coming out stories. Any scenes we got between them were genuinely delightful, deepening the queerness of RHONY in an authentic way. But the rest of the cast’s continued obsession with Jenna and now with Racquel and Mel continues to feel less like genuine interest in understanding queerness or even exploring their own latent sexual curiosity (I do think some of these women could be bi) and more like they’ve adopted the voyeuristic gazes of their straight male counterparts. It doesn’t help that they don’t even try to meaningfully engage with any of the queer culture Racquel attempts to introduce them to, like ballroom. Erin Lichy loves how obsessed her husband is with Mel. I don’t think she’d be as crazy about him loving the wife of a man the same way.

Whenever there is only one or a couple queer women present in the cast, their queerness is either dismissively ignored, gawked at, or flattered into a punchline — sometimes worse. On Real Housewives of Atlanta, Phaedra Parks infamously made up a rumor about Kandi Burruss drugging and sexually assaulting another cast member. Even if you don’t watch the show, you’ve probably heard or seen the meme of Porsha Williams saying “who said that?” And that’s about this whole mess! Phaedra invents an assault relying on the harmful stereotype of the aggressive lesbian. Porsha hops onboard and tries to “accuse” Kandi of being a lesbian, “accuse” not at all being my choice of language but the language often employed on these Bravo shows when someone tries to say someone else is gay. It’s always an accusation, as if being a lesbian is somehow a wrongdoing.

Kandi usually doesn’t label her sexuality explicitly, but she has openly shared that she’s had sexual experiences with women in the past, and it has been weaponized in strange and off-putting ways against her. Meanwhile, Kandi herself tried to turn the tables on Porsha, suggesting she was a lesbian by saying she turns into an “aggressive lesbian” when drunk, re-weaponizing the same rhetoric used against her. There are a lot of nuances to all of this and to ongoing conversations about who is and isn’t a lesbian on Real Housewives of Atlanta, but there’s definitely a throughline of implicit biases about queer women being overtly, even aggressively sexual.

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has found itself mired in similar biases. Cast members exacerbated rumors of Kyle Richards dating a woman just as much as viewers did, and tabloid magazines have been covering Kyle and her friend Morgan Wade like it’s some sordid story, even though they’re both single women. Little has changed since the days of Jenna Lyons being quite literally outed by a tabloid. But reality television — like trashy tabloids — still indeed lives in this world where lesbianism is scandalous and salacious.

I have been disappointed by how the cast — and many viewers, especially on Reddit — have responded to Danny’s drunken treatment of Jasmine and Melissa, but I have not been surprised. It follows a pattern set by the rest of these Bravo shows about how queer women are sexualized to the point of stripping away their personhood. The straight male gaze’s fetishization of queer women is so often critically examined, but the straight women on these shows are often just as complicit. But there’s a frustratingly contradictory set of assumptions directed at lesbians: that we’re hypersexual but also that our sexuality is somehow invalid, neutered by the lack of a male presence. Both sides of that feel bad. I’ve had well meaning straight women I play tennis with tell me it must be nice to be with a woman because it’s like hanging out with a friend. I had to remind them that, actually, we fuck. We’re not platonic besties doing each other’s hair every night (my wife is very good at doing my hair though).

On Bravo, this brand of retrograde homophobia runs rampant, and it’s almost never addressed because the biases on display on the show are just as on display in the fandom. Andy Cohen only tends to interrogate instances of homophobia in the Housewives universe when it’s directed at men; the lesbophobia and biphobia pervasive across the franchises gets swept under the rug, again like it’s inconsequential or not a big deal when it comes to queer women.

You would think all this would mean I have no interest in watching these shows, but this is why I jokingly say watching them feels akin to an anthropological study, an intimate if also heavily produced (though let’s be real, all these biases and dismissals of queer women and their relationships are extremely authentic and not for the camera by any means) look at heterosexual social politics. This is reality! Lesbians are tokenized sexually, and lesbian relationships are casually dismissed as less valid than heterosexual relationships, even in supposedly open-minded social circles.

If nothing else, these shows make me very grateful to have so many queer friends. I hope the queer people on Bravo have more of them off camera.

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