Last night's premiere of So You Think You Can Dance featured the audition of a same-sex pair (one straight, one gay). Watch the clip (starts at 5:10), AFTER THE JUMP…

The audition is introduced by zooming in on a men's bathroom as "It's Raining Men" is cued up. After their introduction, the dancing begins. Judge Nigel Lythgoe is immediately uncomfortable and points out, "the hand's on the back of his neck."

While the dancing was certainly not in top form (they did make an error), it was the non-dancing critiques that are the problem here. Judge and producer Nigel Lythgoe has made homophobic remarks before. You may remember last year when Lythgoe told a dancer he looked like he'd been anally violated. Or in 2007 when he mocked a dancer for not being masculine enough. This was the first time Lythgoe had encountered a same-sex couple audition though.

Says Lythgoe: "I think you'd probably alienate a lot of our audience. We've always had the guys dance together on the show but they've never really done it in each other's arms before. I'm really one of those people that like to see guys be guys and girls be girls on stage. I don't think I liked it, to be frank."

Lythgoe tells them he'd like to see them dance with a woman, "You never know, you might enjoy that, too." The exit song that played as they walked off (2:09 in the second clip) was "It's a man world, but it would mean nothing, nothing without a woman."

AfterElton talked with one of the dancers, Misha, who filled in more of what went on at the audition:

"It was more offensive than what they showed. Nigel said that he'snot sure that the fathers watching this at home would be encouraged totake their sons to allow them to learn to dance. Nigel told me thatthey [the show] has spent all these seasons trying to build up the ideathat a male can dance and make it more acceptable, and we didn't reallyhelp the cause. I told him that I have a father, too, and I went throughthat. I told him that the country is already going through a lot ofchanges and could handle some more. Nigel didn't say anything to that. The judges kept going on about a man and a woman and I kept correcting them that it was a leader and a follower. "

Watch the clip (starting at 5:10), AFTER THE JUMP…