Art Streiber/E! Entertainment
A naked gay man changed American culture as we know it.
That’s not cheeky (heh), but very real: Twenty-four years ago, Richard Hatch was the first winner of Survivor. The CBS competition series birthed the reality TV craze with its blockbuster premiere season in 2000, seizing the zeitgeist, turning its Average Joe (and Joanne) contestants into the biggest celebrities of the summer, and bushwhacking the path for countless reality series and stars to follow.
Hatch was 39 when he outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted 15 castaways to become Survivor’s first million-dollar winner. He was the kind of TV presence Americans hadn’t seen before. He was openly gay, unapologetically—and often hilariously—cantankerous, and boasted a giddily mischievous mastery of reality TV gameplay long before there was a model to follow.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com