Television

Sapphic Soap

Lesbian wedding bells are ringing on ‘All My Children.’

By Steven Foster.

RiegelandTamara
Eden Riegel (l) and and Tamara Braun

While primetime has embraced gay characters for years, daytime television was a notoriously sturdy holdout. The conventional programming wisdom seemed to be that the Proctor & Gamble-purchasing, middle-American housefrau could not handle a homo in the hood. Thus, the zip codes surrounding Pine Valley and Port Charles and other fictional towns lush with fake greenery, bleached-out lighting, abundant makeup, and often abhorrent acting, were neighborhoods no gays could enter. Well, no gay characters, at least. All that changed with All My Children.

 Over the years, ratings behemoth ABC has made great strides in representing the GLBT community. And when they decided to introduce a gay character, it was none other than Erica Kane’s own daughter Bianca. (Playing Bianca’s mother, Susan Lucci finally broke her punchline-staple Emmy-losing streak shortly thereafter. Coincidence? You decide.) And while it did take a few years for Bianca to have her first lesbian liplock, remember this is daytime TV, not Showtime. They made up for lost time, however, when they accelerated Bianca’s storyline to give her a transgender friend Zoe, another daytime first.

 Well, hold on to your Soap Digest s because the first lesbian wedding is happening in Pine Valley when Bianca will at last marry her long-term girlfriend Reese on February 16, just in time for Valentine’s Day. Expect high drama, high fashion, and, this being a soap, some dirty dealing surrounding the nuptials. It’ll be a happy occasion, naturally, but if Bianca’s anything like her mother, this marriage has about as much chance lasting as a bar of Dove left in the bathwater.

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Ste7en Foster

Steven Foster is a regular contributor to OutSmart Magazine.

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