Survivor: Tocantins

* Premieres at 7 p.m. Thursday, CBS4

Spencer Duhm really, really wanted to compete on the 18th cycle of CBS' popular castaway competition, Survivor: Tocantins.

Sent to the Brazilian highlands in October as an alternate, the 19-year-old Lakeland, Fla., native made an agreement with his parents: If he made the show, they would withdraw him from classes at the University of Florida, forfeiting his fall tuition.

When a medical condition forced one cast member to drop out, Duhm became the youngest person ever to compete on Survivor, the culmination of his near-obsessive passion for the show since age 11.

"I was like a 5-year-old on Christmas morning . . . I basically said, '(forget) school,' " said Duhm, who is already back at classes in Gainesville, waiting for the show to debut Thursday.

"It's a mental game and a physical game, which made it one of the toughest things you could do. I really wanted to do it myself and see what I could do."

CBS paved the way for Duhm's success while casting Tocantins, lowering the age limit from 21 to 18.

Duhm is openly gay, but he admits his strategy was to avoid broadcasting it early on.

"A lot of people aren't OK with (homosexuality) in society," said Duhm, who was still encouraged that the show's first winner is also gay. "A lot of times, there's not an upside to telling people you're gay, but there's a definite downside, especially on a game where they can vote you out."

He worries about how fame will affect life at UF, where he studies sports journalism, and he's steeling himself for the fans who will make the same mistaken assumptions about him that he made about earlier Survivor contestants.

"I realized as TV viewers, you're always in the know. You see all the different perspectives of a situation," he said. "In the game, you don't always know that. So I feel bad about some of the things I've said about other people. But not too bad."