Married At First Sight Australia To Get Gay Grooms
Image: MAFS Australia cast members Stephen Stewart and Mike Felix. Image: Instagram/ LinkedIn
Married At First Sight Australia’s upcoming season will mark a significant milestone, reportedly featuring the first gay, male couple on the show in years.
Yahoo! Lifestyle confirmed that groom Mike Felix is set to walk down the aisle. Raised in Ohio, Felix currently lives in Melbourne and finished a three-year stint as a Tesla sales advisor.
Last August, Felix’s original match Simon dropped out of the show at the last minute which prompted MAFS producers to hurriedly search for a last-minute replacement.
Stephen Stewart was brought in as a replacement groom for Felix.
A paparazzi closely following the new season shared with Yahoo! Lifestyle, that Felix and Stewart have been seen filming but speculated that the producers may have “dropped the same-sex couple” or “purposely held them back and are now making them intruders”.
Since the reality show’s debut in 2015 , MAFS Australia has showcased only one gay male couple, Craig Roach and Andy Ankers in season three.
The pair were “married” in a 2016 New Zealand ceremony, but their relationship abruptly ended days later.
Several months after his appearance on the show, Roach took to Facebook, asserting that “nothing in the show is real.” In the damning social media post, Roach described the wedding as “torture,” and that he failed to get enough sleep before he decided to get the “fuck out of there”.
“Fortunately for me, I knew within 24 hours that this guy wasn’t good for me at all and got the fuck out of there. We were required by the producers to shoot some footage of us getting to know each other as they didn’t have any. So I agreed to 2 scenes of us spending time together that was all scripted,” he wrote.
MAFS Australia admits faults in matching gay couples
During a conversation with Metro in 2022, MAFS expert Mel Schilling emphasised the significance of diversity within the show. She openly acknowledged that the Australian version’s approach to matching individuals based on sexual orientation “got that horribly wrong,” and there were “great lessons to be learned from that”.
“For us, it was really important for us to find people who genuinely wanted to find love, and to really delve into the intricacies of their attraction and their types, what that means for them so that we’re not just saying ‘you’re gay, you’re gay’,” she told the publication.
In 2020, MAFS featured its first lesbian couple, Amanda Micallef and Tash Herz. However, the couple had a bitter split after the show ended.
The latest season of MAFS 2024 is set for release on Monday, January 29 at 7:30 pm on Channel 9 and available to stream online at 9Now.
