Jul 19, 2006  |  By: ZACK HUDSON  | COMMENTS     

Passions’ character Simone Russell hasn’t had it easy.

Now a young woman in her 20s, Simone (Cathy Jeneén Doe) spent the majority of her formative years seething at her parents and sister Whitney while trying to steal Chad, Whitney’s boyfriend, away from her seemingly perfect older sibling.

But in true soap opera fashion, once her family learned that Chad was possibly Simone and Whitney’s half brother, Simone’s skullduggery barely registered a blip on the family melodrama radar.

So what’s a sexy — but ignored — vixen like Simone to do? The answer is simple: Leave town and carry on an affair with a slightly older woman, then return home to come out as a lesbian to her mostly supportive family and friends, of course.

Welcome to Harmony. Population: Suffering.

“Passions” also throws together a 300-year-old witch, a mermaid and American daytime television’s very first African-American lesbian, Simone.

And you thought the Gay Pride floats were inclusive.

Viewers who tune into soap operas for a little “love in the afternoon” might get a different kind of love — one that dared not speak its name much on soaps for years — now that the well-appointed bedrooms and boardrooms of four shows regularly feature active, young — and hot — gay characters.

Since Bianca Montgomery (Emmy winner Eden Riegel), daughter of Susan Lucci’s Erika Kane on ABC’s “All My Children” came out to her mother in 2000, soap scribes began fiddling with the sexual identities of tortured teen characters. With four current openly gay characters, daytime soaps are stirring up more gay drama than during any other era in the genre’s 54-year history on television. 

Educational purposes

The soaps took their first shot at offering a gay character back in 1983 on “All My Children.” Dr. Lynn Carson, played by Donna Pescow, came out as a lesbian to a patient with a crush — and that’s about as sexual as the good doctor, or any other gay soap character, would get for quite some time. A gay man whose never-seen partner with AIDS came later, followed by a couple of gay teens who battled community homophobia in the 1990s.

Before and after the first wave of gay characters on daytime, “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” and “Melrose Place” fans would get to see the sexless suffering of gay men who would question their sexual orientation, confront familial pressures, homophobia and the growing AIDS crisis during primetime soaps.

“I think prime time did that first — integrating gay characters — and now daytime is playing catch-up,” says film and TV studies professor Stephen Tropiano, author of “The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV.”

Tropiano says that historically, one of the largest hurdles for gay characters on any show is interference from nervous television network executives.

The characters “would not only be denied fulfilling and lasting relationships with other men, but their identities as gay men would be filtered through their positioning as heterosexuals within their respective plot lines,” he says.

Before Bianca’s gay character was written into “All My Children,” the purpose of gay characters was to make a point or explain homosexuality for the audience, a task handled within the course of a few episodes. The distraught parents or angry bullies who caused the early gay characters so much turmoil would suddenly see the light. Then the story and the character would simply vanish.

Since the idea of making a central character on a soap gay wouldn’t fly with network brass, the secondary characters were simply too difficult to write. Daytime dramas are always set in close-knit communities where the characters know each other and are usually connected in some way.

“The gay person who has no family on a soap opera is a sitting duck. They’re there to suffer, teach us a lesson, and then go away,” says Daniel R. Coleridge, TVGuide.com soap columnist and author of  “The Q Guide to Soap Operas,” which hits bookstores in September.

A new era

The days of gay characters that exist simply to be thrown away appear to have slipped by like so much sand through the hour glass.

“Welcome to the real world,” says Jean Passanante, head writer of CBS’ “As the World Turns.” “Things have evolved enough now that we’re able to make Luke Snyder, the son of a central couple, gay, as opposed to a day player character that nobody really knows,” she explains.

Passanante has arguably created more gay characters for daytime television than any other writer. She was head writer on “All My Children” when Bianca came out and worked on ABC’s ...