Why Are Male Soap Viewers Disproportionally Gay?

[EricMontreal22]

Can I ask what your line of work is? It is funny about straight guys and UFC, wrestling, etc. My twin sister lives in another city, and her boyfriend (who is a sweetheart and has always been fine with my sexual orientation) is as straight as they get, and for a long time probablyw as homophobic, growing up ina tiny town where no one, he says, was gay or admitted to it. Yet he LOVES UFC, so much so that when I went to stay with her my sister and I had a good time mocking him (reverse discrimination? ) for having calendars and magazines based around UFC, the magazines would even have centerfolds of the stars wearing next to nothing. But I guess the difference is they're trying to kill each other, not [!@#$%^&*] each other. Fine line

When I was younger and first into soaps--and I guess starting to question my sexuality though I was dating girls, I was embarassed to admit to watching AMC and Loving every day (well if I told anyone I watched Loving they probably would have no idea what I even meant, but I digress). I didn't really think of it at the time, but in hindsight maybe I thought people would think it meant I was gay (I was equally as nervous to mention liking theatre, etc). Part of it too, was the stereotype that only people with no grasp of reality, or who weren't educated, liked soaps (I remember when I did an application to a special high school, the application form asked lame questions--I guess to try to figure out how "smart" you were--about favorite music, books, tv show, etc--and my advisor firmly told me NOT to write AMC in my fave TV show, but by that point I had given up trying to hide my love for soaps).

Yeah, I have no doubt Eyespy meant no offence, but that's not true at all. I do think in some ways gay men tend to relate or sympathize with women more, and soaps do tend to be the rare form of entertainment (especially back in the day) that was done from the women's POV, down to seeing the men largely more as the sex objects, but "gay men have the same tendency for what women want" makes zero sense to me...

[MontyB]

I know! I'm thinking what the hell? Good lord.....

[EricMontreal22]

BTW the book Worlds Without End, an excellent coffee table book that accompanied the Paley Center's Soap exhibit in the late 90s, has a short essay about gay men and soaps that brings up a lot of interesting points (they also did a survey of male AMC viewers, which the article claimed at the time had the highest male soap viewership and thus, I suppose, was assumed to have the highest gay viewership, asking what appeled most to them about the show). Of course it doesn't actually talk about straight men, really.

[BKuzak]

Bascially someone already said it. there are probably almost as many straight people who watch soaps as their are gay people. I'm sure we've all heard stories from the soap stars about male atheletes, celebrities, and even political people who came up to them and knew every storyline on whatever show they were on. It's just so sterotypical that women and gay men are the majority that watch soaps.

Sally Feilds who did that movie "Soap Dish" once said that she could go anywhere in the world for a movie or whatever and turn on a television and watch her favorite soap every day at whatever time they are on to see her favorite characters. There is not another medium that you can do that too. I'm sure a lot of ball players who do "away games" do the same thing when they are in their hotel rooms or whatever. Can't be with your family so it's the next best thing. TV shows go off the air from May to september and also take long breaks during the winter months. Soaps don't do that. They are on five days a week, 52 weeks a year unless there is presidential speech or a breaking news story on. Straight people know that, they just won't admit it. Especially straight men.

[All My Shadows]

I started watching soaps hardcore right before going into the sixth grade, so yeah, I was definitely not flaunting that. By the time I was in junior high, I was much more comfortable with it because I felt confident enough to defend soap-watching as a straight guy's activity. By high school, I really didn't care and felt free to bring up my soap love whenever it was relevant. If anyone thought I was gay because of that, they never said anything. Had they just asked, I would have said yes, but they never asked, so...exactly. My little "catchphrase" that they announced at Senior Day was "Well, one time on All My Children..." because I'd always compare things to AMC storylines

Honestly, for me, and I know I probably stand very alone on this one, a man who will accept his attraction to other men is more likely to accept an interest in "feminine" things. If a guy can talk openly about liking other guys, then talking openly about liking...idk...needlepoint isn't that big of a deal. Plus, when men who are gay talk about their love of theatre/dance/etc, they don't have to prove their sexual orientation. Tons of straight guys like those "women's" things, but how many are willing to tell people about it when they know they'll have to convince people that those interests/hobbies have nothing to do with their sexual preference (especially, considering, no matter how much convincing they do, there will always be ass backwards people who have no interest in accepting it)? Many are willing to do that, and many don't really give a sh!t what others think about that, and we have some of those guys here at SON, but on the whole? I think the number is low.

And of course, a lot of straight guys probably don't have an interest in those "feminine things" because they know being interested in them would get them the gay label from others, and possibly even themselves.

Oh, and I think there's also a huge cultural factor. I know more straight black guys who watch soaps (and talk about them) than straight white guys. I will NEVER not laugh when I remember my uncle telling his wife that he was gonna feed her "some of them poison lemon bars like Pam off Bold 'n the Beautiful."

[marceline]

I agree that there isn't a real difference in the numbers of gay and straight who watch. At least there didn't used to be. Any difference probably goes back to the basic fact that there's more options. What you might have gotten from Y&R you can now get from Comedy Central's South Park reruns.

My father loved Y&R. Mom would bring him up to speed over dinner and at the end of the year when he had six weeks of personal time to burn you best believe he was tuned to the soaps. He wasn't the only one. I remember block parties where my dad and a group of our male neighbors would be laughing about the exploits of Victor Newmann.

[beebs]

Yea, definitely as a gay man I know more gay men are willing to admit to watching soaps (I have a few male friends on my Facebook who are crazy Y&R fans, one into DAYS, and another into OLTL), but having said that, the only other person in my TV Broadcasting college program who watches is a straight man whose parents allotted the siblings different hour-long blocks for the TV, and his just happened to fall across 1pm, so DAYS it is.

I started watching with my grandmother as a wee thing, but it was pretty much all just luck that my mom started taping GL in the early 90s, and I'd just watch alongside her and Gram while doing my homework. I'm sure if I were straight it would've probably been the same way, but I might not have gravitated towards it the same way over the years, possibly. Most likely for fear of social stigma, not necessarily because I suddenly didn't enjoy it.

[Adam]

Yeah, I agree with most that's been said here. I think its pretty evenly distributed between gay and straight as far as male soap viewers go. AMS alluded to it, about how society's neat little boxed-in gender roles make it rather taboo for men in general to admit they watch and enjoy soap operas. I'm a Seinfeld fan, and they devoted a subplot of an episode to this very thing. Jerry wouldn't admit to a woman he was interested in that he watched Melrose Place.

[Mr. Brightside]

I'm an online editor and also do TV coverage for one of our blogs.

[JaneAusten]

Interesting topic

I think its interesting if you look at the ratings for each week there is a breakdown of male viewers which is roughly overall 20 percent of the viewing audience. I admit its a higher number than I expected. I am wondering if that has increased, decreased or decreased proportionately over the years.

I also wonder if any shift in viewing over the past 10-12 years has had any bearing on the overly mysogny we have seen because it has been more prevalent on soaps the past 10-12 years than it was the 10 -15 years before then.

[Max]

According to Wikipedia, AMC's audience in the mid-70's was once estimated to be 30% male. Even if three-quarters of those males were gay (which is likely an overstatement), AMC still had a sizable number of straight men watching it.

This statistic really surprised me, because the only soaps that have/had the reputation as being "acceptable" for straight males to watch were EON, Dallas, and possibly Dark Shadows. Before I became a soap fan, my sterotypical perception of the ABC soaps (except EON) was that they were the most "feminine" of all (particularly AMC), because they champoined socially liberal storylines. (I'm ashmed to admit this, but there I went again with the stereotypes, with women being perceived as politically liberal and men as conservative.)

[EricMontreal22]

Actors who are away, say, in New York and their family is elsewhere have said the same thing--they can depend on watching their fave soap in their dressing room, or hotel, or wherever when they're doing a show.

WHen soaps boomed so hugely with college students in the mid 70s, Dan Wakefield in his book All her Children interviewed several college groups who would gather to watch AMC. He said they were nearly all 50/50 gender wise (with one group having MORE guys), and what he gathered about the appeal was two things--one that it was a shared communal experience, the same way going to a college football game probably would be for a lot of students who otherwise could care less about football. The other was that it did give them in some way a sense of family--they could depend on seeing their fave characters every day, and, back then especially, you'd also see grandparents on shows, families, etc--when so many were away from their families for the first time. I know when I first moved to Montreal for school--the other side of the country--AMC was at perhaps its absolute worse (the Passanante era), yet I relished watching it more than I had in a long time partly for this very reason.

[R Sinclair]

I never gave much thought about the gay/straight aspect. The male aspect, sure. Ideally, we think of daytime dramas as being women's entertainment, purely because of the fact that at the height of their popularity, it was women who were home to view them. However, once I found out a couple of guys in my family (including my father) who had taken jobs in their 20's during the 1960's and 1970s working third shift factory jobs (11pm - 7am) were watching soaps, it made sense. You come in around 7:30am, go to sleep and wake up around 1 or 2 in the afternoon... what would be on, especially when there were only 3 networks? SOAPS! That's not saying that all men who work third shift jobs are straight, nor is it saying all men who watch soaps only do so because they worked third shift jobs. It's just stating an aspect that I know of yet haven't heard attributed to the question why a considerable portion of soaps viewing audiences were male in the pre-VCR days.

[EricMontreal22]

Great post! and that's cute. I started watching soaps right around the same time--Fall of grade 6, but it took me longer to publicly talk about them. One thing is by the time I did, for the most part nobody cared or found it all that odd. I guess I would get some friendly mocking but that's it. I had a female friend a few years back who I was close to for a while till we had a falling out (basically she was a psycho, but that's another story...) but she was a closet Y&R viewer, but openly knew I watched soaps. I remember once she was very upset at me and as a threat said that she'd tell people how much I loved All My Children (!). Which basically, as another friend said, was the weakest possible threat she could have given me--the sad thing is she was at least in her mid 30s, but still felt ashamed of what tv shows she watched.

I think this is spot on, and something I don't think any gay man should take offence at. The original comment implied that gay men were more feminine than straight men--and that's the cliche, but the way you phrase it is a lot cloer ot the more complex truth. It's easier for gay men (well, out gay men), to be ok with liking those things not seen as masculine, because we've already dealt with harder issues about sexuality and gender bla bla. Of course I do know some out gay men who still go on and on about how they like manly things like sports and rock and roll, as opposed to I guess ballet and Madonna or something, and just cuz they like to have sex with men doesn't mean anything else is "different". And of course that's true for a lot of gay men, but I do start to wonder when they feel the need to go on and on about that (you particularly see it in a lot of gay hook up and dating personals sites--not that I'd ever go to any of those of course--where I guess it is true that many of those guys haven't really come out or come to terms with their sexuality).

And for whatever reason there does seem to be less of a stigma about it among black men (which is kinda interesting seeing as some believe there's more of an issue about identifying as gay among black men, but I really can't comment much on that).

[EricMontreal22]

It seems that male soap viewership, at least that we know, really started in the mid70s, partly with all the college students, etc. Of course that'san exageration (and apparently Edge of Night, partly coming on later in the afternoon, apparently often had a decent percentage of male viewers--Dark Shadows, with its huge amount of audience being teens who would watch it after school, did as well). But I'm sure one of the main factors is until the 70s the only people home when soaps were on, really, were housewives and kids--and you couldn't record your soaps (in 1981 AMC was reportedly the most recorded tv show in all of the USA).

As for the misogyny I don't actually think it has much to do with a shift in viewership. I doubt most male soap fans find it any more appealing than female (in fact I'm sure some coud argue--and i'd find this questionable but have seen it mentioned--that such stories appeal more to women, I read an interesting article about the popularity of romance novels that were deemed particularly misogynistic among readers). I think it has to do with many things, but one is that with viewership dwindling, soaps have more and more forgotten abotu character instead to have sensationalistic story lines, which for some reason often writers and execs seem to think demand more weak women in peril being rescued, etc. Frankly I think it just shows the cluelessness of the writers, and more pointedly the execs, in what the appeal of soaps is, and them scrambling for ideas. It might be reflected too in the increased violence on tv in general, particularly directed at women (I know many here disagree with me, but I find Criminal minds more often than not, terribly misogynistic).