MTV's "The Real World" probably hoped that's its impact on American society would be more than the launching of the reality television genre that has brought us "Survivor" and "Fear Factor."
When the show launched in 1992 its creators hoped to educate young people by locking eight strangers from completely different backgrounds in one amazingly beautiful home boobey trapped with cameras.
In 1994, the show came to San Francisco and perhaps made its greatest, and possibly its most controversial, contribution to American pop culture when it put the first openly gay HIV positive man on television.
Pedro Zamora was a Cuban American gay man who starred on the third season of the show. He may have been immortalized for fighting with the rather dirty bike rider Puck, who had a habit of sticking his grubby fingers in the ultra clean Pedro's peanut butter.
Zamora brought the plight of gay Americans to the forefront of the MTV generation through his activism. He died at the age of 22, the day after the San Francisco show stopped filming.
Now the creators of the show are releasing a movie on the life of Zamora and his impact on the gay community.
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"Brooklyn" trans gender cast member Katelynn Cusanelli, 25, told the Los Angeles Times she was a huge fan of Zamora. The movie reenacts scenes from the show and parts of Zamora's life that were not seen on television.
"It was him and Ruthie, pretty much, from 'Hawaii' (Ruthie Alcaide was a bisexual cast member in Season 8) those were my role models growing up on television," she told the paper.
The movie will air on MTV at 8/7 p.m. central on Wednesday. Find out more about the movie on its Web site.
