25 Years Since The Real World: New Orleans: Danny Roberts on uplifting stories, increasing visibility, and the fight for queer History Unerased.
photos by Lulu Dropo
Danny Roberts is the last man I had a crush on. And twenty-five years ago, Danny Roberts was everyone’s favorite crush. The freshly out 22-year-old was navigating love, monogamy, and the realities of being gay in America as a cast member on MTV’s The Real World: New Orleans, the reality show juggernaut (think Love Is Blind levels x 10) that introduced audiences across the globe to the lives and stories of people (especially BIPOC, LGBTQ, and rural folks) who were largely left out of mainstream media.
The show exploded him to worldwide fame and immediately thrust the baby gay into the role of LGBTQ+ advocate and leader, sending him on a multi-year speaking tour to uplift queer stories across the country, before his love of storytelling led him to LGBTQ+ history and education organization History Unerased. In honor of the Real World: New Orleans’ 25th anniversary, Queer Kentucky sat down with Danny to discuss the power of storytelling, advocacy, and queer history.
Danny’s presence as a freshly out, boyishly cute gay man was revolutionary at the time. His willingness to live openly and authentically in front of cameras led millions of viewers to feel connected to a member of LGBTQ+ community for the first time. Danny’s decision to apply for The Real World in 1999 was not one taken lightly and was in large part a reaction to the murder of Matthew Shepard. He explains, “It was actually a big inspiration for me wanting to do the show. It scared the shit out of me. It was literally life or death in many ways.”
And if the goal was visibility, there was no better platform than The Real World. Back in 2000, when the Internet was still a baby and way before streaming, this show was one of the largest in the world. It was the one space that Queer folks could turn to see even a glimmer of community and hope beyond movies and shows coming out of Hollywood that almost always featured LGBTQ+ storylines hammering home the rejection, the risk of assault, and HIV/AIDS diagnosis just waiting around the corner should you choose to be your true self.
Post-show Danny continued to share LGBTQ+ stories, at first using his fame as a tool to connect with LGBTQ+ students, as well as the general public, while touring colleges across the country and helping other young adults find their way. He says, “It was kind of like meeting people in their living room and talking through their worries about people being out and disarming people, teaching people about real-life consequences of policies like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, like just humanizing queer people.”
Today, LGBTQ+ folks are seeing terrifying parallels to the politics of 2000 with marriage equality under attack, DEI initiatives being rolled back across the country, and a Trump executive order banning trans military being signed earlier this year. (The EO is currently blocked by a federal judge.)
And for those living in insulated “blue bubbles,” it’s easy to forget the stark realities still faced by many in small towns and conservative spaces where being out can still be as dangerous as it was in the 90s. “For many of us, perhaps maybe most of us now, we have made enormous progress and generally feel welcome and safe to be open in our lives,” Roberts said. “However, there are still plenty of places where in many ways it’s still the 90s. I think that that is far too easily forgotten today and too many people and really, really cozy, safe blue areas have just completely lost touch with how what life is like for much of America.”
The regression of LGBTQ+ rights a few years ago fueled Danny’s path to History Unerased, a nonprofit organization that works with school districts and individual teachers to add meticulously curated supplemental LGBTQ+ content to the curriculum.
“A big part of why I started doing this work with History Unerased is because, through my own experience, I learned deeply the power of stories and how important visibility is,” he said. “And what inspired me really to start working with the organization was seeing in the past few years how things have been regressing, and how regressive attitudes are turning again. The same old scapegoating and the same old narratives, again, it’s all very retro and it’s so wrong and it’s so the wrong direction.”
Danny sees the contrasts between progress and regression as an urgent reminder to resist complacency. “I realized that the only way we move beyond this plateau where we are now, this war of attrition is that young people need to understand we’ve always been here. We’ve always been part of the story of this nation.”
Interested in following Danny or learning more about History Unerased?
