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apocalypsosI've been thinking about this a lot since yesterday, since I've been trying to work on the big gay supernatural novel and so all I've had in my head are boys staring at each other like they want to climb into one another's pants.
Anyway, I've been watching soaps since I was little. Like, really little. My grandmother used to babysit me when I was a kid and she watched the CBS soaps religiously. So I can pretty much pick up any of them at any time when I turn them on, regardless of how long it's been since I last watched. I also used to watch Passions the first year or so, and I got hooked on Days in college, right about the time of the Jensen years. (Perfect timing. Heh.)
So, yeah, I love soaps. I feel a lot like the Smart Bitches do about romance novels sometimes, because if you say you watch soaps people give you this look like, "Ugh, how can you watch that trash?" The thing is, sometimes that trash is REALLY good. There are storylines from years ago that I can remember being into a lot. I can still remember tearing up over Amber crying on her son's grave on Bold and the Beautiful. And sometimes it's even better when it's written badly -- I think that pretty much describes the entirety of the run of Passions. It was SO DUMB, but hey, sometimes you just need a witch and a talking doll and incest pairings. Passions LOVED incest pairings. It was really hilarious, especially for me because Guiding Light was always my main soap fandom and I couldn't stop laughing when they had Jonathan and Tammy fall in love and after a while just casually stopped mentioning they were first cousins. (Of course, now that show's turned into preachy treacle and Josh is a fucking reverend, which is fucking hysterical if you know anything about his past and know that now at least he's getting paid to be moralistic and condescending rather than just doing it as a hobby. ANYWAY.)
The thing is, I don't have a high standard as it is for soaps, but I know they're capable of good writing and research. And all of this just ... isn't.
Point #1: LET'S TOUCH WILLIES. OR NOT.
On some level, I do understand why the show is hesitating with showing two gay men kissing on daytime television on a regular basis. If they show it often, people are more likely to stumble upon it without warning, think, "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!" and promptly spazz right the hell out and deluge them with letters. Fucking AFA.
The problem is, I might not be so hard on them if they'd never had Luke and Noah say, "Let's start dating!" Noah had just discovered he was attracted to guys. Or at least, to Luke. It wouldn't have been outside the realm of possibility for Luke, who's generally a sweet rational guy, to say, "Look, I do have a crush on you, but you just had a huge falling out with your dad, he paralyzed me, and maybe it's a bad idea for the two of us to date right now. How about you get more comfortable with your sexuality first and we see what happens?" And I know the fandom would have had a HUGE problem with that because it would be seen as not allowing two gay men to enter into a committed relationship.
But as much as I love the fact that the two of them do more talking than any other couple of this show, saving themselves half of the heartache everybody else is going through by actually TELLING EACH OTHER SHIT (Henry and Vienna right now, anyone?), that's ALL they do. It might be one thing if they were saving themselves for marriage -- HA! -- but they're not. They are kissing and making out. We're just not allowed to see it.
Look at the instances when the boys have been allowed to kiss that we've either seen or have been hinted at. Their first kiss was when Noah was still dating Maddie, when he was still claiming he was straight and his conservative controlling father was in town. This was a bad time for him to be kissing anyone, much less another boy. Their second kiss took place when Noah thought his father had left town -- except he hadn't. They're interrupted and verbally torn to pieces by Col. Mayer. They try to kiss under the mistletoe, and the camera cuts away. In fact, the last person Noah genuinely kissed onscreen was a woman, Maddie.
ATWT has gone on the record in articles regarding the uproar over the two not being allowed to kiss as trying to be fair to all of their audience, including presumably the homophobic portion. What they're saying, and have been quietly saying since the very beginning of Noah and Luke's relationship, is simple: Gays kissing is BAD! It may not be what they intended -- I'm sure they're all sitting around a writer's room somewhere patting themselves on the back for being bastions of tolerance or something, which just makes me think of the writers from Soapdish all behaving like idiots -- but they have yet to be allowed to be able to kiss onscreen without any stigma attached to what they've just done.
I know there's an argument that this sort of passive relationship is meant to show the homophobes in the audience that the stereotype they think of when they imagine a gay man -- a simpering femme in short-shorts and sparkles making out with everything with a cock that crosses his path -- is exactly that ... a stereotype. (Not that there aren't guys out there who fully embrace that stereotype, but that guy's probably not the gay guy next door, you know what I mean?) The problem is that the homophobes in the audience don't even like THIS much. The fact that Noah and Luke go out in public holding hands, hugging, and telling everybody they're boyfriends while displaying all evidence that they're in some sort of chaste kindergarten playground relationship, and all of this without being publicly flogged or ostrasized, is that even this much is too much for some people. And when ATWT is trying to cater to that part of the audience without understanding that it's just not going to work, that's where their entire argument for Noah and Luke continuing in this vein falls apart.
Point #2: IN IRAQI WAR ZONE, GAY BOYS MARRY YOU.
I have to say before I get into this that the concept of an Iraqi or Afghani character coming to Oakdale is not that bad. Imagine what they could do with an Iraqi character who wasn't Ameera, who was sponsored and brought over here to work or something, who had a hell of a time getting here with the system the way it is and with their country of origin. The problem is that Ameera is not that character.
A refugee plotline is already carrying loads of baggage. They could do so many things with this character, or another victim of the unpopular wars this country is currently fighting, if it weren't for the fact that they're tying it to a plotline that already has HUGE piles of baggage to pick up from the luggage check. There are very few writers out there I would trust to tie these two plotlines together without a hitch and the ones we currently have working on ATWT? Well, these are the dumbasses who write Sophie, Cowboy Jim, and the Quartet of None Of You Idiots Should Be Fucking Anyone. I barely trust them with the issues they're already dealing with.
The heavy-handedness with which Ameera drops her "Back in Iraq ..." bon mots is one thing, but the fact that absolutely no research seems to have gone into them (save possibly one or two five-minute views of Fox News) is beyond annoying and irritates the hell out of me. Barely anything that they're currently having Ameera testify to in regards to her life in Iraq has had more than a grain of truth to it, and much of it can be disproven by a quick check of Wikipedia. (And I know it's Wikipedia, but the questionable information they'd get from there would be better than the bullshit they're giving us now.)
And don't even get me started on the inevitable green-card marriage we're being steered towards. Look, I've seen Green Card. It's very cute. It wasn't an accurate portrayal of INS proceedings even then, and that was eighteen years ago. Before 9/11, before the INS was dissolved and the USCIS came into being. And yet everything I read or see in regards to Noah marrying Ameera so she can stay in the country positively reeks of one of the writers watching that movie religiously. (It's really good on rainy Sundays. Just sayin'.)
What really bothers the hell out of me regarding this plotline (well, there is one thing that bothers me more, but I'll get to that in a minute) is that it's weak. If anyone involved in approving Ameera to stay in this country lets this shit slide I'll be writing a letter so fast it'll make your head spin. She hasn't been in the country all that long. They just met. Noah isn't Muslim. Noah's spent the past few months walking around Oakdale telling lots of people that Luke is his boyfriend. Hell, his father tried to kill Luke over it. Any investigation that goes into this sham of a marriage for longer than five minutes is no doubt going to find photos, police statements, medical records, eyewitness accounts, and newspaper articles stating that Col. Mayer is in prison for, among other things, repeatedly trying to kill Luke for being with his son.
Now, the only defense Noah probably has against the evidence of his being attracted to men is that he's also attracted to women. But would these current writers be smart enough to go that route? I doubt it. Hell, bisexuals don't exist, right? At least not on daytime.
It really pisses me off that even if the immigration officials in charge of approving this whole thing just rubber-stamp the sham marriage and have done with it, we're probably going to be stuck with months of, "Well, now we have to share a house for appearance's sake!", during which Noah will get drunk or something and they'll sleep together, and then we get Drunken Gay Boy Sex baby. And of course Noah will be obligated to stay now, and during this whole time I don't doubt for a minute that he and Luke will secretly be having an affair, because apparently the rule is that they're not allowed to kiss and have sex unless one of them is cheating on someone or they're caught in a compromising position. Because gay sex is BAD.
Ahem.
Point #3: OKAY, SO MAYBE WHEN I SAID, "IRAQ," I MEANT, "DETROIT."
Of course, all of this is contingent on Ameera not being a con artist sent by Col. Mayer to de-gayify his son.
I can't begin to describe how much it will offend me if they bring on an Iraqi character we're all supposed to sympathize with only for her to being a liar and a con artist. Look, an Iraqi! Isn't she cute? Too bad she's SECRETLY EVIL. For fuck's sake.
Point #4: I MEANT TO DO THAT.
Here's a scary thought -- what if they didn't allow Noah and Luke to kiss onscreen because they were planning ahead for this dumb storyline from day fucking one?
If immigration goes to check out this story about Noah being gay, what are they going to find? Yeah, they'll find a lot of circumstantial evidence but are they going to find any pictures of them two of them kissing? Are they going to find anyone in Oakdale who's seen them kiss? Col. Mayer has, but he wouldn't tell if it meant Noah married a girl. Holden has, but I can't see him saying anything if Luke asked him not to. For all that they've been together in the past few months, they've been quiet, they haven't made a splash about their relationship, and they haven't done more than hug in public. They could easily lie about their sexuality, or at least Noah.
And that's what pisses me off the most about this storyline. I'm sure that somewhere down the line they're going to have Noah look around at his house and his wife and his life and be all, "I can't live a lie!" and go running back to Luke. Which is really nice, after the writers have already made their kisses shameful by having them happen at the worst possible times, made them barely touch during their relationship, and will have used their inevitable extramarital affair to treat their relationship like a dirty secret. AGAIN.
So, yeah. Look at all the teal deer! *sigh*
I'm going to work on my big gay supernatural novel now. Hey, guess what? MY boys can make out all they want. Hmph.
Anyway, I've been watching soaps since I was little. Like, really little. My grandmother used to babysit me when I was a kid and she watched the CBS soaps religiously. So I can pretty much pick up any of them at any time when I turn them on, regardless of how long it's been since I last watched. I also used to watch Passions the first year or so, and I got hooked on Days in college, right about the time of the Jensen years. (Perfect timing. Heh.)
So, yeah, I love soaps. I feel a lot like the Smart Bitches do about romance novels sometimes, because if you say you watch soaps people give you this look like, "Ugh, how can you watch that trash?" The thing is, sometimes that trash is REALLY good. There are storylines from years ago that I can remember being into a lot. I can still remember tearing up over Amber crying on her son's grave on Bold and the Beautiful. And sometimes it's even better when it's written badly -- I think that pretty much describes the entirety of the run of Passions. It was SO DUMB, but hey, sometimes you just need a witch and a talking doll and incest pairings. Passions LOVED incest pairings. It was really hilarious, especially for me because Guiding Light was always my main soap fandom and I couldn't stop laughing when they had Jonathan and Tammy fall in love and after a while just casually stopped mentioning they were first cousins. (Of course, now that show's turned into preachy treacle and Josh is a fucking reverend, which is fucking hysterical if you know anything about his past and know that now at least he's getting paid to be moralistic and condescending rather than just doing it as a hobby. ANYWAY.)
The thing is, I don't have a high standard as it is for soaps, but I know they're capable of good writing and research. And all of this just ... isn't.
Point #1: LET'S TOUCH WILLIES. OR NOT.
On some level, I do understand why the show is hesitating with showing two gay men kissing on daytime television on a regular basis. If they show it often, people are more likely to stumble upon it without warning, think, "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!" and promptly spazz right the hell out and deluge them with letters. Fucking AFA.
The problem is, I might not be so hard on them if they'd never had Luke and Noah say, "Let's start dating!" Noah had just discovered he was attracted to guys. Or at least, to Luke. It wouldn't have been outside the realm of possibility for Luke, who's generally a sweet rational guy, to say, "Look, I do have a crush on you, but you just had a huge falling out with your dad, he paralyzed me, and maybe it's a bad idea for the two of us to date right now. How about you get more comfortable with your sexuality first and we see what happens?" And I know the fandom would have had a HUGE problem with that because it would be seen as not allowing two gay men to enter into a committed relationship.
But as much as I love the fact that the two of them do more talking than any other couple of this show, saving themselves half of the heartache everybody else is going through by actually TELLING EACH OTHER SHIT (Henry and Vienna right now, anyone?), that's ALL they do. It might be one thing if they were saving themselves for marriage -- HA! -- but they're not. They are kissing and making out. We're just not allowed to see it.
Look at the instances when the boys have been allowed to kiss that we've either seen or have been hinted at. Their first kiss was when Noah was still dating Maddie, when he was still claiming he was straight and his conservative controlling father was in town. This was a bad time for him to be kissing anyone, much less another boy. Their second kiss took place when Noah thought his father had left town -- except he hadn't. They're interrupted and verbally torn to pieces by Col. Mayer. They try to kiss under the mistletoe, and the camera cuts away. In fact, the last person Noah genuinely kissed onscreen was a woman, Maddie.
ATWT has gone on the record in articles regarding the uproar over the two not being allowed to kiss as trying to be fair to all of their audience, including presumably the homophobic portion. What they're saying, and have been quietly saying since the very beginning of Noah and Luke's relationship, is simple: Gays kissing is BAD! It may not be what they intended -- I'm sure they're all sitting around a writer's room somewhere patting themselves on the back for being bastions of tolerance or something, which just makes me think of the writers from Soapdish all behaving like idiots -- but they have yet to be allowed to be able to kiss onscreen without any stigma attached to what they've just done.
I know there's an argument that this sort of passive relationship is meant to show the homophobes in the audience that the stereotype they think of when they imagine a gay man -- a simpering femme in short-shorts and sparkles making out with everything with a cock that crosses his path -- is exactly that ... a stereotype. (Not that there aren't guys out there who fully embrace that stereotype, but that guy's probably not the gay guy next door, you know what I mean?) The problem is that the homophobes in the audience don't even like THIS much. The fact that Noah and Luke go out in public holding hands, hugging, and telling everybody they're boyfriends while displaying all evidence that they're in some sort of chaste kindergarten playground relationship, and all of this without being publicly flogged or ostrasized, is that even this much is too much for some people. And when ATWT is trying to cater to that part of the audience without understanding that it's just not going to work, that's where their entire argument for Noah and Luke continuing in this vein falls apart.
Point #2: IN IRAQI WAR ZONE, GAY BOYS MARRY YOU.
I have to say before I get into this that the concept of an Iraqi or Afghani character coming to Oakdale is not that bad. Imagine what they could do with an Iraqi character who wasn't Ameera, who was sponsored and brought over here to work or something, who had a hell of a time getting here with the system the way it is and with their country of origin. The problem is that Ameera is not that character.
A refugee plotline is already carrying loads of baggage. They could do so many things with this character, or another victim of the unpopular wars this country is currently fighting, if it weren't for the fact that they're tying it to a plotline that already has HUGE piles of baggage to pick up from the luggage check. There are very few writers out there I would trust to tie these two plotlines together without a hitch and the ones we currently have working on ATWT? Well, these are the dumbasses who write Sophie, Cowboy Jim, and the Quartet of None Of You Idiots Should Be Fucking Anyone. I barely trust them with the issues they're already dealing with.
The heavy-handedness with which Ameera drops her "Back in Iraq ..." bon mots is one thing, but the fact that absolutely no research seems to have gone into them (save possibly one or two five-minute views of Fox News) is beyond annoying and irritates the hell out of me. Barely anything that they're currently having Ameera testify to in regards to her life in Iraq has had more than a grain of truth to it, and much of it can be disproven by a quick check of Wikipedia. (And I know it's Wikipedia, but the questionable information they'd get from there would be better than the bullshit they're giving us now.)
And don't even get me started on the inevitable green-card marriage we're being steered towards. Look, I've seen Green Card. It's very cute. It wasn't an accurate portrayal of INS proceedings even then, and that was eighteen years ago. Before 9/11, before the INS was dissolved and the USCIS came into being. And yet everything I read or see in regards to Noah marrying Ameera so she can stay in the country positively reeks of one of the writers watching that movie religiously. (It's really good on rainy Sundays. Just sayin'.)
What really bothers the hell out of me regarding this plotline (well, there is one thing that bothers me more, but I'll get to that in a minute) is that it's weak. If anyone involved in approving Ameera to stay in this country lets this shit slide I'll be writing a letter so fast it'll make your head spin. She hasn't been in the country all that long. They just met. Noah isn't Muslim. Noah's spent the past few months walking around Oakdale telling lots of people that Luke is his boyfriend. Hell, his father tried to kill Luke over it. Any investigation that goes into this sham of a marriage for longer than five minutes is no doubt going to find photos, police statements, medical records, eyewitness accounts, and newspaper articles stating that Col. Mayer is in prison for, among other things, repeatedly trying to kill Luke for being with his son.
Now, the only defense Noah probably has against the evidence of his being attracted to men is that he's also attracted to women. But would these current writers be smart enough to go that route? I doubt it. Hell, bisexuals don't exist, right? At least not on daytime.
It really pisses me off that even if the immigration officials in charge of approving this whole thing just rubber-stamp the sham marriage and have done with it, we're probably going to be stuck with months of, "Well, now we have to share a house for appearance's sake!", during which Noah will get drunk or something and they'll sleep together, and then we get Drunken Gay Boy Sex baby. And of course Noah will be obligated to stay now, and during this whole time I don't doubt for a minute that he and Luke will secretly be having an affair, because apparently the rule is that they're not allowed to kiss and have sex unless one of them is cheating on someone or they're caught in a compromising position. Because gay sex is BAD.
Ahem.
Point #3: OKAY, SO MAYBE WHEN I SAID, "IRAQ," I MEANT, "DETROIT."
Of course, all of this is contingent on Ameera not being a con artist sent by Col. Mayer to de-gayify his son.
I can't begin to describe how much it will offend me if they bring on an Iraqi character we're all supposed to sympathize with only for her to being a liar and a con artist. Look, an Iraqi! Isn't she cute? Too bad she's SECRETLY EVIL. For fuck's sake.
Point #4: I MEANT TO DO THAT.
Here's a scary thought -- what if they didn't allow Noah and Luke to kiss onscreen because they were planning ahead for this dumb storyline from day fucking one?
If immigration goes to check out this story about Noah being gay, what are they going to find? Yeah, they'll find a lot of circumstantial evidence but are they going to find any pictures of them two of them kissing? Are they going to find anyone in Oakdale who's seen them kiss? Col. Mayer has, but he wouldn't tell if it meant Noah married a girl. Holden has, but I can't see him saying anything if Luke asked him not to. For all that they've been together in the past few months, they've been quiet, they haven't made a splash about their relationship, and they haven't done more than hug in public. They could easily lie about their sexuality, or at least Noah.
And that's what pisses me off the most about this storyline. I'm sure that somewhere down the line they're going to have Noah look around at his house and his wife and his life and be all, "I can't live a lie!" and go running back to Luke. Which is really nice, after the writers have already made their kisses shameful by having them happen at the worst possible times, made them barely touch during their relationship, and will have used their inevitable extramarital affair to treat their relationship like a dirty secret. AGAIN.
So, yeah. Look at all the teal deer! *sigh*
I'm going to work on my big gay supernatural novel now. Hey, guess what? MY boys can make out all they want. Hmph.
