Jerrod Carmichael Talks Sex Addiction and His Relationship Status After 'Reality Show' Episode 2
Jerrod Carmichael is definitely exploring radical honesty on HBO’s Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show, so far in an especially vulnerable way. In the first episode, Carmichael had an awkward conversation with his best friend, Tyler, the Creator, about his romantic feelings for him. It didn’t go great! As we pick up the action in episode 2, Carmichael is still keeping it honest and vulnerable: “Did you ever suck a straight dude’s dick,” he asks a club audience, “and he tells you how much better it was than his wife’s?” There are gasps and laughs, and he continues: “That’s pride. That’s what a positive self-image is, for me.”
Then he says the single word that reveals both his internal tension and the theme of the episode: “Unfortunately.”
Carmichael came out relatively late in life, by today’s standards. “I was basically 30,” he explains to the same crowd. He’s 37 on Saturday, April 6—happy birthday, Jerrod!—or, as he says it: “In gay years, I’m 17. And I want to fuck a lot of people all the time.” He lists his current turn-ons, at least one of which, sucking toes, we have seen on screen and can confirm. “People say ‘try new experiences,’” he says with palpable frustration, “but then they also say ‘you have a sex addiction.’ So which is it?”
This episode is going to be all about sex and monogamy, and although the word is never said out loud, it’s going to be about how the closet can warp your feelings about those topics. It’s also going to be about honesty, and it’s going to be the one episode in this season that fundamentally feels the least honest to me.
But we’ll get there.
Carmichael’s favorite movie is Phantom Thread, as he told me when we spoke last month for an Esquire profile. “It’s narrative fiction, but it feels documentary to me,” he said. And as the show gets back to Carmichael’s apartment, we find that he has received a shipment of lapsang souchong tea, the kind Daniel Day-Lewis’ character in Phantom Thread drinks by the potful. And this shipment has been a gift from…Carmichael’s first boyfriend. Carmichael’s got himself a boyfriend! Sweet, bookish, deadpan Michael, whom he’s known through friends for a long time and who you cannot tell me is not being portrayed by Sufjan Stevens. Michael is a writer, getting his master’s degree at the University of Iowa. “It’s long distance,” Carmichael says on stage. “But also it’s not, because I have a lot of money.” Michael seems to spend weekends in New York with Carmichael. And they’re sweet together!
“You ever kiss someone and it all makes sense?” Carmichael asks his audience. “I told my boyfriend I loved him, and I got hard. And then he told me he loved me back, and I got harder.” Listen: when you live authentically, you kind of can’t stop thinking and talking about it, and when you’re as good at thinking and talking as Carmichael, it’s a lot less tedious than it usually is. My poor friends had to listen to me.
Anyway, on one of the weekdays when Michael is back in Iowa, Carmichael calls over a Grindr hookup. Carmichael’s friend and fellow standup Jamar Neighbors clocks it, and they both talk about it onstage and into the camera, so it is both a secret and not, the way a lot of things are a lot of things at once in a reality show about a very candid standup comedian.
Carmichael reads up on sex addiction, and some of it begins to resonate. “I think I’m drawn to secret sex,” he tells Jess, his friend from home, the one with the spicy marg in the last episode. “Why do I feel needy? Why do I need so much attention?”
“You are sho going down the rabbit hole,” Jess replies. Jess, I have five different kinds of tequilas in my home and all manner of spice mixtures and hot sauces. Be my friend.
But Carmichael needs a little more analysis on this subject, so he goes therapist shopping, or at least meets with the three therapists in New York City who will consent to having their sessions taped and broadcast. He explains to one that he was a sexual kid; he had experiences with older boys that evolved into secret hookups throughout his teens and twenties. When asked to put a number on that, he replies, “It has to be a thousand.” When asked how he feels about that number, he replies, “like I’m low-balling it.”
Anyway, Michael attends one of these therapy sessions after learning about the recent hookup. “Being cheated on doesn’t feel good,” he says, and Carmichael clearly feels guilty. On stage, he says, “I want to be faithful to my boyfriend, but he wasn’t in the city I was in, and that was all it took.”
And then Michael leaves town again and Carmichael gets on Grindr and this show really nails the small-talk-into-smooching-a-stranger Grindr maneuver in a way never before seen on television.
In a later therapy session, Carmichael says he doesn’t want to cheat again, even though we know he already has. And so does Michael, because he is a smarty: he clocks that when Carmichael said those words and the cameraman got right up in his face. “Right away, I knew he knew something that I don’t.”
When we spoke last month, I asked Carmichael where he was with his self-definition right now, as far as sex addiction. “I have more control,” he said. “There was a lot of novelty to it. I was stuck in the kink of that for a while, needing the transgression. And then going to The Eagle”—a Los Angeles’ leather bar—"and being out was so new. I'm able now to have some control and calm down and not need the novelty as much. And my boyfriend's very understanding about where I was and where he found me, and I've been really enjoying sex with love, with affection. Non-performative sex with him is great. It’s deeply connected.”
Reality Show “does feel in line with culture,” Carmichael said in that conversation. “Like the way we're obsessed with the camera. We're obsessed with ourselves. I'm obsessed with my soul, definitely. And this show is my TikTok. It is my IG live. It is my Twitter feed. This is how I express myself, but it is different just because of the career path that I've chosen.”
In episode 2, Carmichael definitely showcases his relationship with sex and monogamy in a way one would present their life on social media. The truth, but not quite. Because here is something that I know and I think you do, too: if two gay men in their thirties are beginning a relationship in a situation where they will be in separate cities five days a week, particularly when one of them is famous and rich and came out of the closet forty-five minutes ago, particularly when one of them is absolutely Sufjan Stevens, there is no way on planet Earth that they haven’t at least had a conversation about keeping the relationship open. I buy that a failed attempt at heteronormative monogamy has narrative weight, I just don’t buy that such an attempt would have been made in the first place. A very open standup comedian whose life is his act, and a guy getting his master’s at the University of Iowa, dating like Dick and Jane in the 1950s? Get outta here.
I loved watching it, but I don’t buy it. And that's the lapsang souchong tea.
Read More About Jerrod Carmichael:
Esquire Cover Story: Jerrod Carmichael Has Done the Unthinkable
The Complete Release Schedule of Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show
You Might Also Like
