Faulkner

From Thailand 🇹🇭

From Cuba 🇨🇺

ATL: This Drew/Prophet Lott stuff is inane. Girl STFU.

Hmmm

I get that the BAFTAs have a bias toward Brits, but oh snap. Worth noting that BAFTA didn’t nominate Carey Mulligan (!), Viola Davis, or Andra Day for Best Actress, so grain of salt when it comes to the Oscars: The greatest of locks: Chloe Zhao won Best Director in addition:

Yuh-Jung Youn just won the Supporting Actress BAFTA, which is a boost for her Oscar prospects. Would be only the second actress of Asian descent (to my knowledge) to win an Oscar after Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara in 1958.

It’s hard. These shows just weren’t built with us in mind. I feel like there was a small window to tell really strong LGBTQ stories in the early-to-mid ‘90s when society had advanced enough to be somewhat inclusive and soaps had become more grounded after their ‘80s flights of fancy yet still had quality and budget. These remaining soaps are a lost cause. They are essentially zombies coasting on a mostly conservative audience born before the Kennedy administration. They can barely tell watchable stories about *anything.* Most primetime portrayals don’t even really do it for me. Ryan Murphy has been an absolute scourge. The best screen depictions of gay men for me have always been movies like “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Happy Together” and the rare TV series like the British version of “Queer As Folk.” (Hope the new one set in New Orleans can approach that quality.)

I suppose the premise of “LGBTQ” as this hodgepodge community is what I’m questioning. That one letter of the acronym is interchangeable with the other. I understand it from a political coalition standpoint—strength in numbers—and there’s certainly been overlap in term of cultural spaces, but for the most part, the only thing these letters have in common is that they transgress commonly accepted ideas of gender roles and identities. EDIT: I know they aren’t discrete, mutually exclusive groups. Trans people can be gay, lesbian, bi, etc. as well. But in general I agree. Soaps are broadcast TV vehicles and have to be as broadly appealing and narratively nimble as possible. It’s why streaming services (or smaller cable networks) that can nurture niche-oriented content are so groundbreaking. A gay-male soap on Netflix or Hulu wouldn’t have to cater to a mass audience and could take more risks.

I totally agree. The season is forced and overproduced. TBH I feel like RPDR has been trending this way for several seasons, although COVID may have exacerbated this particular season’s issues. Usually the charisma (and uniqueness, etc.) of the queens would save the show, but it’s just not there this year. Even folks I enjoy like Symone would be middling queens in any other season.

OT: the chart on people with disabilities reminded me of how often soaps have used temporary paralysis or blindness as a plot point only for the character to miraculously recover.

I wonder if that’s part of the problem: how do you cater to a “hidden” audience that can’t (or won’t) be measured? I also wonder, re: LGBTQIA, if soaps simply pick one letter of that acronym and then say, ok, we’ve got it covered? AMC may have said we have Bianca as a lesbian, why do we need a gay male character? (I know they briefly brought on transgender Zarf, who was tied to Bianca.) Or conversely, why would ATWT need a contract lesbian character when they had Luke and Noah? Which seems crazy but often happens when you see a broad, diverse community as one thing.

Gay men are stereotypical soap viewers, and there is certainly a preponderance of gay men on this board, but has there ever been a reliable study on how much of the daytime soap audience is LGBTQ or specifically gay men? Google is turning up nada... Speaking of which, the LGBTQ community has a lot of shared experiences and cultural spaces, yet there are a lot of different communities represented in that acronym. Sort of like “Asian-American” has a connotation, yet could mean everything from Chinese- and Korean-American to Indian-, Pakistani-, Filipino-, Malay-, or Vietnamese-American. There are so many different experiences within LGBTQIA+, that it’s hard to imagine a daytime soap having the scope to truly represent all of it with more than mere lip service. That’s not to say they couldn’t have done a much better job...after all, they’ve have years to do it (in reality about 40 since portrayals of LGBTQ have been reasonably mainstream).

From the United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Political commentator and gamer Hasan Piker 🇺🇸

This season has been draaaaagging, no pun intended.

An interesting link I stumbled upon that I haven’t explored in its entirety—a resource for writers on how to be responsibly inclusive and “authentic” in their portrayals of various marginalized communities: https://www.writeinclusion.org/factsheets

Yes, it appears so! How did you scroll to that so quickly?

The full Michael Delaney story on AMC, which is an amazing resource:

Clip of her at 4:49: Hank Eliot coming out on ATWT (not allowed to embed this clip): https://youtu.be/V7jWHWLBEnI Billy Douglas comes out to his parents on OLTL. (I loved Wortham Krimmer as Andrew so much.)

Tragic. Anorexia.

Oh you checked now?

Chandler needs to step his p*ssy up too. Way too checked out on his most recent returns. Again, I’d love to see some gay men and women with a few gray hairs. I suppose there’s a feeling that women only like gay men when they are cuddly and cute. (Plus, I’m assuming that the reason why these soaps even attempt to do gay stories is to appeal to a younger demo. Hence all the gays are 30-ish or younger.)