Everybody Loves Tila

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More often than not, these loves were women. “I think every girl is born bisexual,” Nguyen says. “Before I was 10, I had had experiences with girls. But when you’re that young you don’t think, Oh, I’m having sex! I’m a lesbian! Still, I always knew. I didn’t have my first kiss with a guy until I was 15. I was with women long before that.” Although she didn’t declare herself bisexual until the show’s debut, Nguyen says she was open about it with friends and recalls getting no static. “I think a lot has changed,” she says. “It’s not the ’90s anymore. I think the gay community is a lot more accepted these days.”

Of course, the hot-female gay community is especially accepted—as anyone can see from a quick visit to Howard Stern, “Girls Gone Wild” or countless other venues where MySpace lesbians canoodle for male delectation. “Prior to the show, people might have thought I’d be one of those girls,” Nguyen says. “Like, ‘Ooh, look at my tits!’ ‘Let’s eat strawberries out of my mouth!’ But people see that I’m real. I know the lesbian community was worried at first, but once everyone saw how I am, they felt differently.”

Indeed, the show took MTV’s already strong track record for promoting tolerance and improved it: presenting one character’s bisexuality as a simple fact of life, revealing a surprising camaraderie between straight men and gay women, and showing that attraction, at least, is a far more slippery creature than most media would have us believe.

Still, Blender surely speaks for fellow lesbians when we ask how Nguyen could possibly have turned down sweet, grounded female firefighter Dani Campbell for callow pretty-boy Bobby Banhart, winner of the show’s final love-off. “That was a hard one,” she says. “I think I was just scared. I’d been with lipstick lesbians but not so much with the more tomboy-type girls, so I picked something that was more predictable. Guys are a bit more predictable.”

Predictability was in short supply chez Shot at Love. “You’re in a house with 35 people, you can’t make calls, no magazines or Internet, so every day you’re focused on these people,” Nguyen says. “When you’re scared and lonely, your only friends are these other contestants, and you kind of lose it, man.”

And start pledging your love while trying to kill your rivals. That’s the thing about A Shot at Love: the fights, tears and anguished declarations have a palpable impact, a frisson of genuine lunacy. Somehow, Nguyen really did seem to get people going crazy in love.

“I think it’s because I’m very real,” says Nguyen, emphasizing the only word she seems to like as much as love. “When you sit down and talk to somebody and you look them in the eye, you can sense how real it is. And then people start to fall in love.”

Love? Dr. Drew Pinsky has another phrase for it: cluster B. “The kind of people selected for a reality show are … well, they have issues,” says the therapist-host of the sex-advice radio program Loveline and the VH1 show Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. “They tend to be what we call ‘cluster B’ personalities. That’s narcissist slash borderline sociopath. They’re people who are exhibitionistic, have poor boundaries, are trauma survivors and want to be famous not because they have something important they want to do for society but because: Hey, it’s me!”