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Gay Characters in US Soaps


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You mean JER completely botched his gay characters?  *I* *AM* *SHOCKED*

 

Ah right, the Tea and Sympathy storyline... 

 

 

Interestingly I just watched a 1983 AMC episode where Tad is in a cell with an older guy who was arrested basically for what anyone can see as soliciting--although he's very aggressive and not at all sympathetic.  He keeps going on about how pretty Tad is and trying to get physical--it's very strange and I know it didn't go anywhere, but along the lines of prison rape...

 

BTW VetSoapFan I owe you a PM!  Sorry about that.

 

 

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JER was a misogynistic fundamentalist bigot and soaps are better with him dead.

 

Chad constantly straightfaced and insisting he wasn't gay was endlessly hilarious. Every time they'd supercut him explaining this in clips from the show on The Soup I'd die laughing.

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As a gay male, I'd prefer if modern day soaps not feature gay characters because they either make them a joke, a walking PSA, or just write them as wall dressing instead of an actual 3-D character (of course, that same argument would fit every character on every soap nowaday).

 

 

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Agreed. It’s just too bad the genre’s great visionaries aren’t around for this cultural moment. Plus, the demographics of the soap audience won’t allow it. Folks in my extended family (black, Southern, Christian) stopped watching DAYS due to the gay stories, and they watched years of fornication and devil possession, amongst other iniquities. If the economics of soaps worked for a niche, urban audience and middle American Bible Belters didn’t matter, maybe things would be different.

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I never really get that attitude myself, though it seems common.  I mean I think Ron Carlivati mostly sucks at writing gay characters, but, maybe I'm just an optimist, that doesn't mean I wish he'd simply never try.  It strikes me as absolutely ridiculous that any modern soap now wouldn't have gay characters and, I mean my current issue about the writing applies to all of the characters gay and straight.  At this point I don't think poor writing for the gay characters is negatively affecting potentially bigotted viewers into thinking less of gay people in real life.  I get that audiences still will stop watching.  At the same time, say, "Nuke" on ATWT gave that show in some of its roughest, crappiest era some sort of zeitgeist moment and if they had just not had those characters on the show wouldn't have been any better.

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For me, I have a bee in my bonnet about soaps using characters in non-white communities or queer communities to tick a box when they really have no intention to flesh them out or give them juicy, soapy stories that actually impact the show beyond their bubble. I think RC *does* attempt that to an extent, but Sonny and Will are such laughable ciphers and they completely neutered Paul (both figuratively and eventually literally) before he left.

 

It’s complicated: as much as people love Leo on DAYS for being a flamboyant gay man with flaws and a sex life, many will brand him as a damaging stereotype. Of course, that’s a risk shows have to take (you can’t make everyone happy), but with the burden of representation, the few gay characters are scrutinized even more. (It helps that Leo is such a contrast to boring, beige Sonny and Will.)

 

A gay man fúcking around like Nick Newman or Brady Black means something really different in our society, and soaps never really wanted to wrestle with that. Plus soaps have been reluctant to cycle in other gay men to provide romantic intrigue. Instead they’ve relied on that old canard of giving gay men one-night stands with women resulting in babies or “Who’s the Daddy?” stories without really delving into bisexuality or sexual flexibility.

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This is the problem with limited representation.  When you only have one or two gay characters they have to be everything to everybody.  So they go bland with them to try to avoid more controversy and to not offend.  

 

If these shows had 3 or 4 LGBTQ contract players and then one or two more recurring ones, then we could see some nuance in how we get portrayed.

 

Add to the above problems the limitations of quality writing on soaps and it just makes it even worse.

 

I still applaud shows for trying though, I just wish it was better.

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I know we’re talking mostly about gay men in this thread, but what about lesbians/queer women? (And in a genre with a primarily female audience and a historically female focus, they deserve representation as well.) Trans people? (Has a soap featured a trans man *ever*? Grey’s Anatomy has one character now.) DAYS currently has three gay players in the mix, but no lesbians or female members of the LGBTQ community. GH is the show with the broadest spectrum of queer characters shown, with a gay male couple, one or two lesbian or bi women, and a trans woman. None of them are featured, even though the gay men are the center of a major baby switch plot.

 

I think soaps will try, which is admirable, but they’ve always been scared to go so far because of their conservative audience who ultimately call the shots. Once shows start pushing past 3-4 LGBTQ characters, they risk being labeled a “gay soap,” especially now when budgets dictate that only a handful of characters garner story at a time. (I think Hollyoaks in the U.K. gets away with it, but they have a tiny audience.) And to have that many queer characters on a show, you’d need a network/EP/writer who were all committed to gender identity/sexual orientation diversity and not simply as issue-du-jour fodder. Also, they’d also need to represent racial diversity within that mix, a problem soaps have always struggled with even with the straight characters. Especially today, four gay white dudes swapping partners isn’t going to cut it. 

 

Also, they’d never pair an openly bi man with one of the show’s leading ladies, as soaps still privilege straight male masculinity. (Even though we’re all constantly noticing two “straight” characters with more chemistry together than with their female love interests.) But bi characters have more story opportunities by virtue of their increased romantic possibilities. 

 

Again, it’s sad that folks like Nixon, Marland, and Lemay never had opportunities to tell these stories in today’s moment. In any case, I don’t think the daytime lineup on a broadcast network is the place to advance queer stories with any satisfying depth (meaning without the feeling queer characters are one-dimensional, second-class citizens). The web is already doing it, but none of the offerings are that intriguing IMO.

 

Looking forward to the Tales of the City revival.

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I had no problem with Mike sleeping with an older woman to reassure himself about his heterosexuality, but Linda? That turned my stomach, considering she was in love with and had had sex with his "father" too. Like I said earlier: ewww.

 

All this talk about soap characters in prison made me remember that when Bill Horton and Doug Williams were locked up, there was an inmate who was supposedly gay too, as acknowledged by William J. Bell in an interview decades later, but of course the network would not let that go anywhere. Homosexuality was verboten, yet in 1976, there was a pedophile janitor in Trish Clayton's apartment building on DAYS, who openly confessed that, "I only like LITTLE girls." Ewww, part two, LOL.

 

And yes, you DO owe me a PM.

 

As I wait patiently, your late fees are accumulating. :)

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I'm a gay male and I have always wished they would have a gay character as a main villain, instead of them always trying to be understood, accepted, yadda yadda yadda.  Get past that and give one a main antagonistic "straight" husband stealing/affair role.  You know, the way things are in real life.  LOL!  I know, I've done it. 

 

I so want to be a head writer.  Can you imagine the press you could get if you had a Gay male character as a villain, sleeping with a couple of upstanding straight men around town and then sparring it out with their wives? 

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Reid was great.  Unfortunately Passanante and crew didn't seem to know what to do with him and were too scared to actually break up Nuke for good (though that's become a common problem with soaps and "supercouples" not just gay ones--it's always obvious to the audience who the writers are keeping as endgame). 

 

 

The UK soaps, at least in the past ten-fifteen years (even the more old fashioned ones like Corrie) have been much better at exactly this--they have their own issues with gay characters (and as much as I enjoy watching Hollyoaks--at least occasionally--sometimes it seems ridiculous how many gay/bi characters come and go there) but have been pretty good at getting to a place where the gay characters aren't defined primarily for being gay.

 

But I do definitely think we're well past the "honeymoon" period that all minorities seem to have to go through where, when they're finally accepted, they have to be saintly.  I get why often that sorta has to happen--if you introduced one of the first gay characters to a soap in the 1990s and they were a villainous slut it... well it would have done no one, especially gay people any favours.  But I mean that was ages ago.  (That said an aspect of the gay press *still* complains when gay characters are presented in a "poor" light, as do some gay people I know, most annoyingly). 

 

I don't have much faith in DAYS or Carlivati, but I agree and I also agree that even if it alienates some of the audience, it IS something that has to be risked at now.  Of course we all know that, as Michael Malone himself said in a recent interview, since the 2000s soaps, as ratings continue to plummet, soaps have oddly gotten increasingly conservative and less willing to take risks.

 

It's interesting while writing my AMC "gay" paper I was watching some Bianca episodes and I forgot that for a few weeks they brought in Kelli O'Hara of all people (who I don't think was much of a Broadway name at the time) as a one night stand who becomes a threat to whoever Binks was seeing at the time...  But they seem to chicken out very quickly and just drop it.

Yep yep, I pretty much agree with all of this.  And while it's easy to say "soaps are so crappy right now I don't even want to see them try" but, maybe I just can't be that cynical, I do think they should keep trying.  (And while I think the case for minorities--by which I pretty much mean black characters--on soaps right now is dire--they also went through decades of this where it simply wasn't considered that a black character could become romantic with a white one...)

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