Why Are Male Soap Viewers Disproportionally Gay?

[Ryan Chamberlain]

It's nice to know that there's a mixture of straight and gay guys out there that like soaps. That way it's not all us chicks and there's something else in the demographic. I think anyone could get into soap operas. They're not just for straight women with kids and no job. Like the stereotype used to be. (Not that there's anything wrong with being that)

BTW, straight woman here. No children, no husband, no job (though I used to work before I was laid off...I still watched then too. Grew up with soaps)

There's something in them for everyone.

[All My Shadows]

Human drama can't take place in a living room?

[ER Tosh]

Yeah, im straight and i sort of did that also until this thread lol.

[Ryan Chamberlain]

I kind of did that too except for one I knew was straight.

[EricMontreal22]

And those marathons didn't cause you both to stare longingly into each other's eyes? I'm jealous--I wish I had had a friend who wanted to watch soap marathons as a teen.

[quartermainefan]

I didn't say that. You can have a kind of drama in a living room, and soaps have been having the same kind of drama in the same living rooms for 50 years and the type of drama you tend to find in the living rooms is not one people would associate with straight men. I guess it depends on how it is presented. I remember reading this fascinating and detailed analysis of Film Noir movies, which basically illustrated how they were melodramas for men. The film noirs and the melodramas of the 40s and 50s often had similar material and character types, but if you presented it one way it appealed to women, and another way it was suddenly a movie for a man. The perfect example of this was Mildred Pierce which starts out as a Noir, stops noiring it up to become a straight up melodrama, and then comes back to Noir for the end. You can take a scheming woman and give her a cigarette holder and a fur, and she can be Joan Collins trying to steal a man from her co-star. You could take the same character and just add in an element that she wants to steal the man because she wants him to do ____, and suddenly she is Joan Bennett.

[EricMontreal22]

I'll grant you some of that. Game of Thrones has wars and power, but strip it down and it could be told in living rooms (if castles have them?) and with narration, but I suppose that's your point, fair enough.

I do think soaps at their best do deal with the same issues of many Shakespearian dramas, not the historical plays certainly, but. Change the swords from Romeo and Juliet to guns, and there you are. Most of the action is narrated and off stage.

[EricMontreal22]

And Mildred Pierce, when filmed first in the 40s even with the added murder element, was seen as a woman's picture, so again you have a point. But that was also how it was marketed. Where I don't agree is when you say any straight man who claimed to find that a good movie is deceiving himself.

Tenn Williams loved Guiding Light, Edward Albee LOVED 70s Another World. Both are gay playwrights, but not ones who only appeal to gay male and female audiences at all.

(and True Blood, which you didn't mention, appeals almost evenly against gender and sexuality lines, but it does, again I admit, have the fantasy element which changes it--and as much female as male nudity, or almost)

[DaytimeFan]

I am, admittedly, pretty fabulous

[alexisfan07]

Another straight male viewer here! Mine started between middle and high school with Passions and I guess it was just hard to drop the habit essentially. I did stop watching it for a good year but started again once I heard it was canceled - and its last airdate was my birthday no less . Then I was roped back in and started watching AMC and OLTL regularly. I also watched DAYS during the Salem Stalker storyline in 2003. I'm a sucker for epic, canvas-wide storylines. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure why I watch but I think part of it is that it reminds me of my youth a bit. But I'm a huge TV watcher (or at least used to be), it's always been something I escape to pretty eagerly. Like others have said, I really appreciate sticking with characters and storylines for months and years at a time. It's just a unique form of storytelling that is extremely powerful and intriguing. And after I started learning more about film and TV and soaps got covered more in my college courses I realized just how hard these people work and how little respect there is out there for it so I think I just stuck with them out of respect for the genre.

Random thought, whatever DID happen to Cassie Brady from DAYS? I was head over heels in love with Alexis Thorpe who played her (hence my username that I created 8 years ago haha). Was the character even written off with any closure? I think Alexis has stopped acting which is a shame, she was so hot!

[alphanguy74]

you know, I was just the opposite, I never tried to hide my love for soaps.... and since I had my mother tape record the audio of Y&R every day, i would listen to it when I got home from school (though I was absent from school alot, and got to actually see it at elast once a week during the school year) i had a group of three girls at school who also watched, and every day before class, they would gather round and I would give them the complete rundown of what happened the day before. And like you mentioned, VERY close to my mother, and started watching at her knee. We always watched Y&R together while we ate lunch, after a morning of working together in the vegetable garden. Of course, my straight brother started watching as soon as Dickson started parading around in a bikini... he didn't take his eyes off that show on the days she was on.

[MontyB]

......and even when I hear otherwise. Just being honest.

Seriously, no one should give a damn about whose or gay or straight unless you're planning on getting into bed together. Even that doesn't mean I thing since I knew I was gay and so did she when my son was conceived.

[MontyB]

..........

[Soapsuds]

Someone mentioned about gay sons being closer to their mom and thus watching soaps with them. That's how I got started in soaps with my mom. We would watch all the CBS soaps...from Y&R to ATWT to Search For Tomorrow to Guiding Light. The only soap we didn't like on CBS was Capitol. So my mom hooked me to soaps way back in the 70's and I am still watching to this day.

[BKuzak]

For me, my mother worked a regular job so i started with my grandmother. Now that my mother's retired she watched General Hospital and i occasionally watch it with her and we talk about it because i've been occasionally watching it for years. But for the first 10 years, i either watched them myself or with my grandmother. Sometimes my father would watch when he picked me up from school but my mother only started watching the soaps about seven years ago when she retired. We always drive my step father crazy because we would talk about these amazing things that happend to Carly and Jason or whoever and he'd think we were talking about something in the news or real life people.