Naked ambition

Richard's win was a victory of brains over beauty

by Robert David Sullivan

Richard Hatch

FOR SOME people, 95 percent of success in life is just showing up. The rest of us can take comfort in the victory of Richard Hatch on the TV series Survivor. And I have a message for all the outraged fans who swear that they would never behave the way Rich did on that deserted island in the South Pacific: someday, if you live long enough, you'll see things his way.

Richard won the Survivor contest by planning ahead (or "scheming") instead of living in the moment. He improved his chances by feigning interest in other people who actually bored him. He often kept his true feelings (if not his body) hidden, and he was selective in revealing information about himself. Some of the other contestants -- and millions of TV viewers -- were appalled by this behavior. "This entire thing just reminds me of Lord of the Flies," wrote an America Online member after Richard's triumph. "How sad." "Score one for good old ruthless American capitalism," wrote Janelle Brown on Salon.com, "zero for the frailty of human emotion." When I read that statement, I suddenly felt like Star Trek's Mr. Spock -- as if I belonged to a different species. "Fascinating," my inner voice said. "I wonder what it's like to live in their world."

Actually, I didn't root for Richard until the final half-hour of the series, having preferred the straight-talking Susan ever since the first episode. But then he and Kelly appeared before the jury of seven banished contestants who would pick the million-dollar winner. Richard was up-front, claiming that he had earned the prize: "I certainly had a strategy, and I came to play the game." Kelly, who had joined Richard's infamous "alliance" and had done plenty of scheming herself, pleaded for a different set of criteria: "I hope we're not judged on how we play the game; I hope we're judged by the kind of person we are. I hope the better person will win."

Kelly's statement sent a chill down my spine. She was essentially asking the jurors to turn back the clock, ignore the events of the previous 39 days, and base their votes on first impressions. She wanted Survivor to come down to a choice between a fat, 39-year-old gay nudist with a sinister-looking beard and a lean, attractive 23-year-old woman. Kelly turned into the Johnnie Cochran of the tribal council, telling jurors to ignore the facts and vote against Richard as revenge against anyone who had ever outwitted them in the real world.

As a gay man with a less-than-perfect physique and a guarded personality, I flashed back to dozens of instances when I had to overcome first impressions: job interviews, roommate searches, blind dates, and even attempts to get the best seats at snooty restaurants. I remembered that I've done plenty of the things that seemed "ruthless" and "conniving" when Richard did them. For instance, one of the most memorable moments in Survivor came when Richard nodded sympathetically as Kelly talked about her rocky friendship with Sue, then rolled his eyes toward the camera after Kelly walked away. Well, I've pretended to be interested in the problems of friends, dates, and co-workers lots of times. I never thought I was being malicious by letting them talk instead of saying, "I have to leave now so I don't give the false impression that I care about your cat." Gay men, in particular, get pretty good at politely listening to the embarrassingly intimate stories of straight people who would probably remember that they had to be somewhere else if we started talking about our boyfriends.

Zap2It.com, a Web site for television junkies, criticized Richard for "backstabbing" -- specifically, for lying when Survivor host Jeff Probst asked, during the middle of the contest, whether there was an alliance to vote certain people off the island. "Bluffing" is a better description of that particular moment, but in any case I think it can be morally acceptable to lie for selfish reasons. I sometimes lie when strangers ask what I do for work, because I don't always want them to connect me to my byline. (Maybe the guy cutting my hair and holding a razor against my neck loves George W. Bush, so why antagonize him?) I play dumb when someone asks whether I've heard a particular piece of gossip, because I like to hear a different version of the same story. Like Richard, I'm openly gay, but I'm still careful about when and whether I let people know about my sexual orientation. I'm enough of a survivor that I would have no qualms about lying if a bunch of street toughs asked whether I'm a member of that alliance known as the gay community. Would I then be guilty of "backstabbing" gay-bashers?

Richard figured out ahead of time how he could benefit from other players' weaknesses. Good for him. I once took a part-time job, got along fine with my supervisor, and then moved up to replace him when he got fired for not working as hard as I did. Was it Machiavellian of me not to defend him or warn him when I realized that he was on thin ice? Too bad. I'm still convinced that I never would have been hired full-time by that company if I had gone through a formal interview process. I'm soft-spoken and often self-deprecating or ironic, qualities that may be attractive to long-time friends but are usually repellent to human-resource managers. It was only after I had proven myself -- or caught a few fish, as Richard did on Survivor -- that I was taken seriously.

KELLY DID have an honorable case to make before the jury. She could have acknowledged Richard's shrewdness in guiding the alliance but then pointed out that she won the last five immunity challenges on her own. In other words, that she was the player who best combined strategic thinking and physical perseverance. Instead, she told the jury that she regretted joining the alliance -- a breathtakingly hypocritical statement, given that she had already exhausted all the benefits of being a member. (The only worse example of hypocrisy in this whole Survivor craze came from the various academics and analysts who scolded the American public for paying more attention to a silly game show than to the presidential campaign. As someone who makes money writing about politics, I can say that none of us "experts" watches campaign speeches or debates in order to make an informed voting decision. We watch for the same reason we watched Survivor: to root for our favorites and second-guess their strategies. Anyone who gets quoted by pretending otherwise is a bigger media whore than any Survivor contestant.)

"You can't blame me for joining an alliance," Kelly seemed to be saying, "because I'm not like these other losers who had to be sneaky -- fat faggot Richard, cranky old man Rudy, and trailer-trash Susan. I could have sailed through this contest just because I look like someone out of a Mountain Dew commercial."

It was bad enough for Kelly to argue that Richard deserved to lose precisely because he played the game better. Even more alarming for those of us with complicated personal lives is the widespread opinion that Richard shouldn't have won because he's done bad things off the island. He was arrested for hitting his adopted son (the charges were later dropped) and he's been indiscreet in talking about the kid's "troubled past" on national television. Worse yet, he apparently makes his living by visiting corporations and making the employees play stupid games in an attempt to boost morale. Professional journalists are generally too enlightened to express outrage that an openly gay man won the contest, but there are plenty of Internet postings to the effect that a queer shouldn't have been allowed on the island in the first place. ("He is a prime example of how the gays are manipulating us to win in their agendas," wrote one person on AOL after Richard's victory. "He never would have won if he was a God-fearing, Bible-believing Christian," claimed another.)

I don't know enough about Richard Hatch to decide whether he's a good person. In fact, I don't give a roasted rat's ass about his off-screen character. Admittedly, I have a vested interest in arguing that someone's personal life should not be counted against him at work or on a playing field. Millions of Americans think I deserve to burn in hell because, like Richard, I had a hankering to see Dr. Sean run around naked on Survivor island, and millions more think I'm going to hell because I don't acknowledge that it exists. I believe, as fervently as the most devout Christian could believe about himself, that I'm a moral person. But I don't have the luxury of believing that I'd be fairly treated by any jury that based its decision, in Kelly's words, solely on "the kind of person" that I am.

Oddly, Richard's character wouldn't even have come into question if he had won a million dollars in a casino or through a state lottery. Personally, I have my doubts about the fitness of any parent who spends 20 percent of the household income on scratch tickets, but if such a person hit the jackpot, there'd be no handwringing about it. After the Survivor finale, an America Online headline read, EVIL RICHARD WINS MILLION. But you'll never see a ProJo with the headline IDIOT WINS POWERBALL. Luck gets more respect than brains any day.

My defense of Richard doesn't mean that I'm turning into a Republican, or a follower of Ayn Rand. I don't believe that the ends justify the means, or that self-interest should always dictate our actions. But it's going too far to say that you can never outsmart someone without losing your soul. It is possible to be both a ruthless chess player and another Mother Teresa. Besides, I don't see where ethics ever entered the picture on Survivor. None of the contestants had a moral claim on the million dollars. In fact, Survivor offered players a chance to do something that is almost impossible in real life: to get richer without directly causing anybody else to become poorer. (CBS certainly got its million bucks back.) Richard didn't win the money by beating the other 15 players in a poker game. All of them ended up with more money and fame than they started out with, so how exactly were they harmed in all this?

While watching the final episode of Survivor, I divided the 16 contestants into three groups. There were the Body Shoppers: young, good-looking, sunny-dispositioned idealists whose biggest dilemma in the real world is "paper or plastic?" The Pagong Tribe ended up with five of them (Colleen, Greg, Gretchen, Jenna, and Joel), while the Tagi Tribe got only hapless Sean. Then there were the Loners, who didn't quite fit in with the beautiful people but found contentment in other ways: ukulele-strumming Sonja, workaholic B.B., born-again Dirk, and deliberately laid-back basketball coach Gervase (who seemed to figure out what was going on before his doomed tribemates did). The other contestants were the Backstabbers -- a pejorative term that I'd like to claim with pride, just as gay people have done with "queer" and "fag." They all had a bit of a chip on their shoulders, and the Tagi Tribe got five of them: Richard, ridiculed all his life for being overweight and gay; Rudy, whose straight-and-narrow US Navy view of the world has been undermined by people like Richard; and three women who appear to have had to put up with a lot of crap in male-dominated professions -- lawyer Stacy, truck driver Sue, and river guide Kelly. (Ramona, the polite but wary chemist who got voted out of Pagong for throwing up all the time, might have become a Backstabber had she lasted long enough.)

The Body Shoppers looked like the kind of people you see all over television -- on commercials, on sit-coms, and on soft-core game shows like Blind Date and Strip Poker. Most of the Backstabbers looked like people who really had to do something worthwhile in order to get noticed by society. That the final four Survivor contestants were all Backstabbers made me feel that, for once on TV, the cream had risen to the top.

Kelly, as the Backstabber most likely to be mistaken for a Body Shopper, came close to getting the best of both worlds. And I have to give her credit for recognizing that it would take more than a smile and a good haircut to win at this game. Most of the Body Shoppers, as they get older, will figure this out as well. But on Survivor's judgment day, Kelly played it too cute, denying her shrewdness while Richard, once again, was too proud not to show his off. Naked ambition won by a single vote, and I woke up the next day feeling a little bit better about the world.