Alice Clarke finds there’s still one gay contestant left on MasterChef, after Michelle met a slippery end this week.

Channel Ten’s new reality cooking competition, MasterChef, may not be pretty or even remotely witty, but it is certainly gay. The first season of this occasionally entertaining show boasts two out and proud contestants: Tom Mosby, the gay solicitor from the Torres Strait and Michelle Darlington, the lesbian bookstore owner from NSW.

While it’s hard to find an American reality cooking show without a lesbian on it, lesbians have been conspicuously absent from Australian reality TV. It’s something Darlington – voted off on Monday for under-stuffing a squid – is aware of. “I was really glad when I got on the show, because all the reality TV shows I’d seen in Australia had never had a lesbian in them,” she told MCV.

“I was quite proud to put myself out there, especially because of the fact that I was 45, not 25. I think the show expresses that food is the common denominator.”

Darlington decided to follow her passion for food when she had a chance encounter with a psychic customer: “I was a bit over the whole bookshop thing, and she just turned around to me and she said, ‘I see food all around you, I don’t know what it is you’re going to be doing, but I see food all around you.’ And in that moment I knew that I was on the right track.”

Inspired, Darlington decided to start taking lots of cooking classes, which then led her to test out the viability of her new-found career path. “One of the guys I did some cooking classes with was going to Italy, so I told my girlfriend, ‘I’m going to Italy’ and she said, ‘Not without me you’re not!’ So we went for a month and we cooked with him for about eight days. After eight days of constantly cooking with a chef, you pick up a lot of skills.”

Although MasterChef focuses on turning cooks into chefs, Darlington was disappointed with the lack of opportunities to cook or at the very least, learn on the show.

“I learnt a lot about myself, but you don’t really get to cook as much as you’d think during the week. You only get three opportunities. The rest is all about filming and making television. Perhaps I would’ve learnt more from the [show’s] caterers if I’d spent time in the catering truck.”

Despite leaving the show, Darlington says she will still value the short time she had and seek out further training. “It was a positive experience, I loved it,” she enthuses. “It had its good points and its bad points. I didn’t do as well in the competition as I’d hoped, so a little bit disappointing for me there. None of us are trained chefs, we’re amateurs. We’re very good cooks, but if you want to get into the food industry you need some serious training or else no one’s going to take you seriously.”

Although Darlington is now looking to fulfil her dreams elsewhere, you can still catch Tom and the other chef hopefuls on Channel Ten, 7pm weeknights and 7.30pm Sundays.

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