Fridae

A new TV dating show is set to take over every Amercian gay man's TV sets this summer. Boy Meets Boy, a six-episode series will centre on one gay man who must find his love match from a pool of 15 fellow male singletons. The producers will also secretly include straight men pretending to be gay among the pool of dating prospects.

Produced by The Bravo Network, the cable arts and entertainment channel owned by the NBC unit of General Electric Co., the series billed as TV's first gay dating programme will premiere in July.

Bravo said Boy Meets Boy will feature a leading man who spends eight days on location with 15 potential partners and turns to a trusted female friend to whittle down the prospects.

"The idea is to have the straight men there to really challenge the audience's preconceived notions of what is gay and what is straight," Kirk Marcolina, the show's supervising producer, told Reuters news agency.

While the details of the show are still sketchy, the network revealed that the is a 32-year-old HR exec from Southern California who recently spent nine days in Palm Springs on a whirlwind dating bonanza. The network also added that any intimacy beyond kissing will be strictly prohibited.

To avoid springing any nasty surprises on anyone, the producers have also reportedly told the leading man and all the guys on the show that they should see it "as a fun experience" and not necessarily to "fall in love."

In a tragic case in Michigan, a gay man was killed by his straight acquaintance after he declared he had a crush of the latter during a TV show taping. The killer was sentenced in September 1999 to a minimum of 25 years in prison.

The show has already attracted opposition from the Traditional Values Coalition who reportedly has plans to alert its 43,000 member churches to protest the series, Andrea Lafferty, the Washington-based group's executive director, told The Associated Press.

"Clearly, they've hit a new low," Lafferty said. "What's next after `Boy Meets Boy'? `Boy Meets Sheep'?"

Bravo will also launch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a reality series where five gay men from various worlds of style makeover a straight man every week. The series, which also premieres in July, will transform a "style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture".