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the ones who’d heard the story of Bonn at dinner, who’d seen the quiet, pale boy grow paler and fall, rose a murmur: He has had a vision, they were saying. The young rabbi has had a vision.

THE NOVEMBER STORY
    M arkus is a gifted crier. We just say, “Tell us how your grandfather would feel,” and he gushes like Miss America. “My grandfather would be so proud of me,” he says, and blows a kiss to the sky.
    Or we ask if he feels that his whole life has been a struggle. He says, “I just feel like my whole life has been just this huge struggle,” and then he starts snorting and choking and holds up a finger.
    The producers love the criers, and they love the cocky bastards, and they love the snarky gay men. The others, we try to get drunk. If there are any straight guys, we flirt. (Ines flips her hair. I undo one more button on my blouse.) If necessary, we feed them lines.

    I don’t try very hard anymore to explain to Beth what I do, why my voice is never actually on the show. Really, I think she’s pretending to be confused. I think she likes saying, “Okay, but why don’t they just have the contestants talk to the camera on their own? Aren’t they smart enough?”
    She eats her unfrozen lasagna on the couch with her heavy blanket around her, even though it’s the middle of June and pretty warm, and if I try to tell her about Sabrinah screaming at the judges, or Astrid getting drunk, she says, “Don’t tell, you’ll ruin the show for me.” Even though half the time, she doesn’t watch what I’ve worked on. And so I stop talking, because what else could I possibly talk about?

    Hour after hour, Ines and I sit side by side in folding chairs. The contestants sit on what looks like a throne—something oak and leather the producers found in the library. Ines is great at maintaining a lethally bored expression, so that whoever we’re interviewing feels compelled to say more and more interesting things—more outrageous, more emotional. More likely to make their relatives change their names and move to Arizona.
    Or we say, “This isn’t who we picked. We picked someone vivacious, opinionated, funny. Please remember that the producers have the final decision.”
    We say, “We’re not getting a character arc from you. This is going to be boring TV.”
    We say, “Remember that this is a job, that we’re paying you, and your job is to answer all the questions.” Then we ask, “What do you hate about Lesley?”
    “I don’t hate her,” they say.
    “Yes, but you need to answer the question.”
    “Well, she’s pretty sure of herself. I mean, she’s
good
.”
    We say, “That’s great, go with that. What does her confidence remind you of?”
    “Umm, like a gorilla? Like, this big silverback gorilla that’s bigger than you?”
    “
That
’s what we’re looking for. Now we need a full sentence. About how you hate it.”
    “Lesley’s been swaggering around like some big silverback gorilla, like, beating her chest and telling everyone how great she is. It’s driving me crazy.”

    If you’ve ever seen
Starving Artist
, if you’ve ever even heard of it, you’re probably a gay man between twenty-five and forty. We gather artists from all different fields—this season a sculptor, a painter, a dancer, a poet, a singer-songwriter, a glassblower, a graphic artist, a playwright, a piano composer, and a puppeteer—and stick them in an old, defunct artists’ colony in northern Pennsylvania for twenty-three days. We give them prompts: The first episode was “Nightmare.” Then “Shakespeare.” Then “Baseball.” They work for a day and a half, creating something small and potentially beautiful and always tragically rushed, and then they’re judged, eliminated, given warnings, awarded prizes, the usual deal. The poor playwright got a fifty-second performance limit on each play. It seemed like nothing, but it was an eternity on air, and we were giving him at least twice as much screen time as anyone