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Chris Harrison Says The Audience Will Decide If There Will Ever Be A Gay 'Bachelor'

According to Chris Harrison, it’s up to the television audiences to decide if there will ever be a gay “Bachelor.”

“That’s really who dictates where shows go on television — where we go socially [in] television, entertainment, everywhere,” the host of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” told HuffPost Live in an interview this week. “They will dictate when it’s time, if we’re ready for that, if it would be successful, if it would be a good business move — the audience always dictates where we go in reality television.”

Viewers, he added, were at the heart of all entertainment-related business ventures: “Believe me, when you stop watching a show … it’s off the air, or it will change.”

Harrison, who supports same-sex marriage, previously said he wasn’t sure if a gay “Bachelor” would be a good fit for the ABC reality series.

“Look, if you’ve been making pizzas for 12 years and you’ve made millions of dollars and everybody loves your pizzas and someone comes and says, ‘Hey, you should make hamburgers.’ Why? I have a great business model,” he told the New York Times Magazine last year. “I don’t know if hamburgers are going to sell.”

He added, “Is our job to break barriers, or is it a business? That’s not for me to answer.”

Watch more from Chris Harrison’s conversation with HuffPost Live here.

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