For Joey and Scott, the moment they realized they had won “What’s in the Box” unfolded in near silence, at least at first.
Speaking to Gayety, the gay couple opened up about their time on the show and winning the big prize at the end.
“That incredibly long pause after we called the final number: ‘8,’” Joey said. “It felt like an eternity, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘HOLY SH*T! WE JUST WON THIS GAME!’ Unbelievable.”
Scott’s reaction was quieter but just as intense. “The instant the confetti started to fall I felt like it was having an out-of-body experience,” he said. “My mind just went blank and everything for me was silent for a moment. Then, once it began to sink in I just had this overwhelming feeling of joy. I don’t know if I’ll ever quite feel that again. It was so…big.”
Throughout the game, the couple balanced confidence and nerves. “We knew we had a 50/50 shot,” they said, though starting first gave them a slight advantage. Finding a key early helped calm their nerves. Still, panic lingered until the reveal.
Only after watching the show did they notice how physically in sync they were. “We realized we were swaying together, hand in hand,” they said. “Apparently that’s how we support one another in stressful situations.”
When asked who screamed louder after the win, both laughed and agreed it was Joey. “Me. Definitely me,” Joey said. Scott didn’t argue. “Joey for sure,” he said, explaining that the surreal quiet in his head muted his reaction.
Once offstage, the reality of the moment began to settle in. “‘I can’t believe this happened’ was the gist of what we said,” they recalled. Back in their dressing room, they shut the door and embraced. “We just hugged for the longest time,” they said. “Eventually we began talking about our future, and how everything had just changed for us.”
The win felt real that night as contestants celebrated together at the hotel. But the deeper impact came later. “Coming back to our regular life and our home was when things really began to sink in,” they said. For about a week, the couple sat together with the TV off, trying to remember everything. “It went by so incredibly fast,” they said, as they talked through their plans and next steps.
Their calm approach during the game came from intentional preparation. With no past episodes to study, they focused on teamwork rather than trivia. “We decided to only spend a little time on that,” they said. “Instead we dove into ‘training’ for teamwork.”
At the time, Joey and Scott were living in the mountains rebuilding their home after Hurricane Helene. “We’d just come through a few months of almost isolation and working together through really difficult problems,” they said. Each day, they hiked to the top of the mountain, talking and learning how to read one another’s confidence — a skill that translated directly to the stage.
There was only one moment of near disagreement at the end, when Scott almost selected the wrong team. “Joey had to jump in and make the right choice,” they said.
The prizes, they noted, have already changed their lives. “This finally pushed us over the edge of recovery from the hurricane,” they said, giving them stability, savings and the chance to travel.
For LGBTQ audiences, the response has been deeply emotional. “We’ve received a lot of messages, from around the world,” they said. The ones that bring tears, however, come from parents. “The tears come, though, from the straight parents of gay or trans kids that tell us that they watched with them and how happy their kids were. Growing up neither Joey or I had any gay role models. None I knew personally or anyone to see on TV. We grew up believing marriage was reserved for others and not people like us. That we weren’t normal and our lives, if we chose to be who we were, wouldn’t be normal either.”
Neither Joey nor Scott grew up with gay role models. “We grew up believing marriage was reserved for others and not people like us,” they said. “If ONE kid can see – in us – that life is wonderful being exactly who they were born to be, then we would be over the moon.”
