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Were "Expedition Impossible"'s Fab 3 Fabulous Enough to Win it All?

Ryan Carrillo, Kari Gibson, AJ Gibson

ABC’s Expedition Impossible might not have turned out to be the ratings juggernaut that is The Amazing Race, but when it comes to gay competitors with guts as well as heart, EI concedes nothing to TAR.

Credit for that goes to 36-year-old Ryan Carrillo and 30-year-old A.J. Gibson, former boyfriends who, along with AJ’s sister, 26-year-old Kari Gibson, came “oh so close” to wining the first season of Expedition Impossible. Alas, the team took a wrong turn at the very end and wound finishing third, disappointing themselves, but not their fans, friends and families who marveled at the Fab 3's toughness as they fought their way through injuries and illness, not to mention the mountains and deserts of Morocco.

AfterElton.com caught up with the Fab 3 (the name they gave themselves) to talk about their close call, representing the gay community, and much more.

AfterElton: So close. How disappointed were you to have not won?

Ryan Carrillo: My first response crossing the finish line was, “We’re disappointed, what can we say?” There are so many people who are rooting for us all over the world. We shot this in April, but this past week I have felt an extreme amount of pressure and disappointment knowing that we are letting down a lot of our family, friends and fans. I keep dreaming about it.

It is sort of weird. I guess I will never be over it. However I couldn’t be more proud of us, fighting major injuries. Soon as we crossed the finish line, we all went to the hospital. Kari had a fractured vertebra in her back. I had a severe knee injury and foot injury and a staph infection down my entire left leg.

AJ Gibson: I'm not going to lie. I've replayed that last day in Morocco over and over in my head a million times. We had a chance to win, but in all honesty, I just made a bad judgment call and it cost our team dearly. However, at the end of the day we could not be more grateful to ABC and Mark Burnett for giving us the adventure of a lifetime!

Kari Gibson: I hate losing more than I like winning. I have been in competition my entire life and every single time I've lost a big game, I get the same gross feeling.

AE: What would you do differently?

RC: By the time we got to the final, I literally couldn’t have competed the next day if there was an eleventh stage. My body was finished. The final three teams were literally neck and neck the entire last stage. We were out of our element in the city. The entire Expedition we were actually doing an expedition, using our compass and GPS to navigate in nature. We were not very good navigating in a foreign environment. We thought we made a smart decision to go our own route. That cost us the win.

AJ: I would stick to the game plan. We knew exactly what we needed to do in order to win, but strayed from the game plan as the final grew more intense. On a more personal level, I wish I had encouraged my teammates more. We were all pushed beyond our limits and I didn't always react in a way that was productive for Fab 3. I regret that.

KG: I would've done one thing differently that could've changed this entire outcome. In the finals, we were running around the city of Marrakech and our goal was to keep up with the Gypsies, which we did the entire time until we decided to take our own route. That was the worst decision we had made within the entire Expedition.

Ryan and AJ

AE: What was the best and worst part of the experience?

RC: The best part is just being able to push my body. I’ve accomplished things I never thought I could accomplish. I had this huge fear of heights going into this and the fact that we were rappelling down a 30 or 40 story building with the equipment, literally at this point it’s second nature.

The worst part of the whole thing for me was the camping. I’ve never camped in my life. I’m not a huge fan of sleeping outside. I don’t like bugs. That was definitely the challenging part. That and the food.

KG: The best part was working with a team and learning to maybe be a little less selfish and accomplishing things together, even through sicknesses and injuries and whatnot, because every sport I’ve ever played, you don’t play with people who are sick or injured, so it was cool to accomplish things with others. At the same time just pushing your body to the absolute limit, thinking you can’t take another step and always proving yourself wrong and you don’t know how you did it.

And the worst was no showering and the lack of sleep makes you literally crazy. The food was terrible. The bugs.

AJ: I would say by far the most rewarding part for me was seeing my sister learn how to trust her instincts and trust herself a little bit more. She’s had a tendency to rely on me most of her life and as the expedition progressed, she trusted herself more and more. And that’s fantastic. It’s all I ever wanted for her.

And also to learn how to be friends with Ryan again. After going through a breakup … and experiencing something like this together,, it definitely pushes you and tests you and it was probably the greatest gift we could have ever asked for. It would have been very easy to go our separate ways after a breakup if we were just living here in Los Angeles, but being put into such an extreme situation we were forced to get along.

I think for me the worst part was just being so so so sick. I mean, going to the bathroom on yourself in negative degrees while sleeping in the snow on the top of a mountain after not eating or drinking anything for three or four days was one of the most miserable moments of my life. I just wanted my mom and it was so difficult to be out there. I mean, I had two people that I loved very much that were with me but it was no comfort.

AE: How close did you ever come to quitting?

AJ: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think that quitting is anything any of us would consider. If we were to go out of the Expedition, it would have been against our own will. We never would have quit. Ryan would never have quit because his knee hurt. I would never have quit because I was sick. They would have forced us out. They would have had to take us out on stretchers to be honest. We never were going to quit.

RC: It crossed my mind, so you know. The day after I hurt my knee, I literally could not stand two hours before the Expedition began. I couldn’t stand up. I didn’t know what I was going to do. From the start, you have to run straight to the river, and I’m like I can’t even stand up right now. But somehow we got mentally through it.

AE: Kari, what’s it like being in between these two guys? They are a former couple, they are gay…

KG: Our normal lives are different. It doesn’t feel like I have to choose. I can be friends with Ryan, and AJ is my best friend and brother, so that’s easy. In the Expedition it was tough because sometimes AJ felt like I would gang up on him because I never really fight with Ryan. [Ryan] only snapped at me once [laughs] in the Expedition, but AJ and I would fight like cats and dog,s and then Ryan and AJ would fight, so I would get frustrated sometimes. Yeah, I kind of felt for AJ throughout the Expedition. We would kind of be a little hard on him.

RC: The reason that we’re fighting in the Expedition isn’t necessarily because we’re mad at someone’s character. It goes back to we’re not eating right, we’re getting no sleep and we’re doing an equivalent to a half marathon every single day for 30 days in Morocco, and the temperatures are from 110 degrees down to below freezing. It doesn’t put you in the nicest moods nor do you smell the greatest. I’m not going to yell at another team. I’m not generally going to start screaming at someone else, but you’re going to yell at the people closest to you because you’re frustrated.

AJ: Speak for yourself. I yelled at production all the time. There were so many times that I would yell at cameramen and production people off camera just because I was so frustrated. The grappling hook challenge, I was really sick on the side of a snowy mountain for a couple of hours trying to throw a grappling hook down the mountain trying to catch a cage. My fingers hurt, I had snot running down my face and literally I was going to the restroom on myself, and I was so miserable. But I didn’t want to take it out on them [Ryan and Kari] because it would affect the team dynamic. So I just screamed at every other person I saw. I didn’t scream at competitors because there was no reason to be upset with them.

RC: They were all crying, too. [laughs]

AJ: They were all crying, too. I screamed at every production person and every cameraman I could see. I’ve since apologized to them but it wasn’t my shining moment.

AE: Which of the other teams did you particularly like? Did you encounter any homophobia from anybody?

RC: I would say the team we were closest with were the football players, but going into it we stereotyped them as much as they stereotyped us. There were a couple of teams that had never met a gay person before. I can’t even tell you how many good conversations we had a night sitting around the campfire or in each other’s tents. Literally hours talking about, you know, is gay a choice? Is it not a choice? I definitely think we changed some opinions on the subject.

AJ: I think for me it brought a new sense of pride, especially with the people who had never met a gay person before. It made me very proud to have something so important to stand up for and to fight for. It gave us a different purpose then the other teams.

The Football Players

AE: Kari, what was motivating you?

KG: My biggest motivation was my family at home and making everyone proud. Especially my mom, because she’s the one who motivated me to get into every kind of physical activity competition, since I was five.

AE: In the very first episode it seemed like some of the other teams weren’t taking you very seriously.

RC: [Some of them] had a lot of preconceived notions about us. I think some people were making fun of us for what we were wearing, a lot of little digs against the gay boys. But what’s funny is when we finished second, and then we almost finished first in the first leg, people respected us.

AJ: There is a lesson to be learned in the way that we handled ourselves in stage one. We knew that people were judging us because we were gay and instead of lashing out and feeding into those judgments, we let our actions speak for us. I think that’s something I’m very proud of.

AE: Clearly a lot of this for you guys was about representing and busting stereotypes…

AJ: I grew up in Ohio, in a small small town in Ohio and Kari and I just went home for a festival. The big 50th anniversary of this festival in our small town…

RC: A town of 10,000 people.

AJ: 10,000 people. A farming community and it was mind-blowing to see the way that people have changed their opinions. At first I was like, it’s kind of sad that we had to do something like this, being on a network television show and doing so well for people to finally come around. But if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes. The love and affection we received from our hometown was indescribable.

AE: When did you guys come out?

AJ: I came out maybe ten years ago. I was 20 or 21.

AE: Did you get a negative reaction when you came out?

AJ: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. My mom, as great as she is, it took her a couple of months to talk to me again. She was scared more than anything. She was happy for me but she just wanted to make sure I was safe because that’s her biggest fear. Which is understandable. My dad, I literally didn’t have a conversation with him until this past Christmas. It put a lot of strain on our relationship, but now our relationship is finally growing in a way it never could have. It was kind of a blessing in disguise, for my dad’s relationship for sure.

AE: How about you Ryan?

RC: Mine is not a pretty story. We might have to go to therapy after.

AE: We don’t have to talk about it.

RC: No, no, no. My parents disowned me when I came out. I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family for 13 years. Except for my sister. My sister is my life and she’s disowned my parents for basically the same thing. I was raised Jehovah Witness and it’s been 13 years and it seems like such a long time. I don’t really remember what they look like and I don’t remember what their voices sound like.

It’s weird to not have contact with someone for such a long period of time. I think something like that could really destroy somebody, but I always took it with the attitude of I felt sorry for them. I took my pain and tried to help other people with it. A lot of people have gone through this and had worse, and at least I have one person, one blood relative. And I view these kids [AJ and Kari] as my family. It’s all about relationships. I have a core group of friends that I’ve literally known my whole life, so I feel loved. So don’t be crying on the page people.

AJ: I think also some people are lucky enough, like Kari and I, to have blood family that stick with us and some people, unfortunately or fortunately, get to chose their own family. And that’s fantastic. Whatever works works. There is no right or wrong way to create a family.

RC: A family’s a family’s a family.

AJ: A family is a family is a family.

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