LGBTQ Representation on Daytime Soaps

[Mitch]

I don't know..the guy answering the question kind of was acting like he has bodies buried in the basement!

 

[Marco Dane]

Wasn't the first gay character on Soaps "AMC" from the 80's?

[FrenchBug82]

 

Yep. 1982-1983 Dr. Lynn Carson played by Donna Pescow who you might remember if you grew up in the late 80s as the mom from "Out of This World". 
I may be wrong but I think the first gay man is ATWT's Hank Eliot although people usually credit Ryan Philipp's Billy on OLTL.
 

He didn't start out bad at all. I liked him when they were in separate tracks slowly building up to us wanting them together.
But yeah he was so wooden and unappealing by the end. I initially thought it was me because I didn't like what I was hearing of his off-screen activities but nope. It was him.

Chandler M. was tuned out by the end too but to be fair they were giving him nothing of interest. I think his charm and layers still peeked through.

On the list of BTS things I wish I could hear, the entire sage of GW, how he was cast, why his acting was so uneven, what his relationship with his costars really was like and why, etc is on my top 10.
Based on his post-Days choices ('em tattoos!), he was probably a... character. 

Edited April 10, 2021 by FrenchBug82

[Faulkner]

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.)

 

 

Edited April 10, 2021 by Faulkner

[FrenchBug82]

I suppose this is a question whose answer is probably going to be in the question but has there ever been any discussion for why all the AIDS stories soaps did impacted straight women (AW's Dawn, AMC's Cindy, Y&R's Jessica, GH's Robin) rather than gay men?
Did they think this would be more sympathetic to their audience than gay men who "might have deserved it" or something? 
What I mean is: I assume that's the case but has there ever been anybody who discussed this oddity openly?
 

[Faulkner]

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

 

 

[FrenchBug82]

Is that Ty Treadway at 3:06:25???????

[Faulkner]

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

[AbcNbc247]

I think it was more their way of educating people about how anybody could get it, regardless of anything. On AW, they even had it written in that Dawn was a virgin.

[FrenchBug82]

Complete randomness. How hilarious is that.

[j swift]

With all due respect, this is my pet peeve when it comes to audience responses of gay storylines.  It is all up to writing, directing, and producing.  Even the most wooden, (but handsome), actor would seem sexually alluring with the right lighting, music, and scenery.  While it would be good for the cause to hire more gay actors to play gay parts, we want out gay actors, not people who are don't take pride in being gay.

 

The opposite logic makes no sense.  Did anyone say that Maureen Garrett's sex scenes with Michael Zaslow were any less "intensely horny" because the actress was a lesbian?  Was Michael Corbett not a believable object of straight female lust on three different shows; SFT, RH, and Y&R (and appeared in Playgirl) because he was gay?  Has nobody ever heard that most adult gay media has used straight models for years in gay scenes?  

 

To suggest that an attractive actor can't turn an audience on while kissing another guy with dark lighting, sexy costumes, and some slow grooving music unless he is gay in real life is absurd, naive, and a bit narrow minded.   I used your comment as an example, but the same silly ideas are spewed on these forums, as well as gossip sites and other internet venues, and it never ceases to heighten my ire.

 

 

Also, (with even more respect of your opinions) I reject all arguments that the reason soaps don't produce well rounded LGBTQIA representation is because they are afraid of online criticism by gay fans.  Soaps have won GLAAD awards and gained popular media exposure for doing the least amount of representation possible.  The same argument would never hold water when applied to other types of minority representation.  Black and Latinx fans would not accept poor examples of their culture played out on screen and neither should gay soap watchers.  We should always strive for more respectful portrayals of our experiences and we should never accept the idea producers don't demand gay characters because they are afraid of backlash from the LGBTQIA community.  Gay fandom has never received the respect we deserve and our loyalty has never been rewarded with proper consideration of what we want in terms of plotlines.  60 years later, networks still only care about 18-34 women who buy laundry detergent, but that doesn't mean that the gay audience should just take the scraps that we're given because we still get some entertainment value out of the occasional shirtless hunk or bitch fight.

Edited April 11, 2021 by j swift

[Faulkner]

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).

Edited April 11, 2021 by Faulkner

[All My Shadows]

 

Would such a study really be reliable/accurate, though? Isn't it a thing that any studies on how many LGBTQ people there are (followed by any qualifier) can automatically be assumed to be lowballing numbers due to how many LGBTQ people are still in the closet? I'm interested in seeing what the numbers would be, then wondering what the numbers really are.

 

I agree with your second paragraph. That's always been the thing with minority representation, period, IMO. You will never be able to represent everyone who fits into a community if that community is the one main thing those people all have in common. The Cosby Show didn't represent all black Americans, and Queer as Folk didn't represent all gay men. Sh!t, it's been a very, very long time (if ever) since daytime attempted to represent straight, white Americans outside of basic archetypes.

 

I think, as viewers, we need to have that basic understanding before watching anything targeted at "our community." Just because the show/story is about gay men doesn't mean it's going to be entirely relatable to me...but it could be completely relatable to someone else. It's frustrating because if a soap insists on having one "gay storyline" running, each one of us will want it to be what we, individually, want it to be, and one storyline can't be all of those things.

[Faulkner]

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.

[titan1978]

This is so much the truth.  It’s almost comical how little character there is left in daytime, as opposed to a caricature of humans.