A word of introduction: for what concerns TV I’m rather picky and demanding. In fact, it’s impossible for anyone at my place to watch things like I Cesaroni (a sort of 7th Heaven with less Jesus and more football) or any Rai Uno fiction without having to listen to my sassy comments. Despite my addiction to TV shows, I’ve always maintained some quality standards even though I watch a lot of different things. I’ve always made fun of the predictable plots of products such as Don Matteo (think Murder, She Wrote, but with more Jesus this time) not to mention soap operas. The story of how I ended up watching soap operas at my computer late at nights is shown below.
It all started when work led me to do some research on soap opera actress Crystal Chappell, thus finding out that in her long career Ms Chappell played more than one gay(ish) role: first as part of the first lesbian pairing in Guiding Light, than in The Bold And The Beautiful, and later in two web soaps that she produced and starred in.
- Olivia and Natalia, the first homosexual couple on Guiding Light, the most long-running soap opera ever
It only took a few minutes on the Internet, and the scientific progress of our age (aka related videos on YouTube) showed me lots of cuts from soap opera episodes, edited so that it is possible to follow the story of one’s own favourite queer couple without having to go through the whole show. Hollyoaks, Verbotene Liebe, Los Hombres de Paco, Amar en Tiempos Revueltos, are just a few of the many names that show up.
Going through those clips, I felt like I grew up in Narnia. Our TV shows are mostly made of Carabinieri, priests, and doctors, but the surprising thing was to find out that those soaps and serial dramas were so similar to our shows. Nothing like OITNB, so to speak. Watching those soaps and seeing those queer couples kissing, or shown in intimate scenes in their bedrooms, as well as in fights and make-ups, I couldn’t help thinking about what Italian screenwriter Aaron Ariotti stated in his interview with Vice:
“Censorship in soap opera is disturbing. I worked in a daytime soap opera that aired at lunch time, and there couldn’t be homosexuals, for example. In that world they simply did not exist. It was a clear choice of the network, it kind of lets you down, it’s discouraging”
And because of that discouragement, it was a bit shocking for me to find out that those stories were getting ordinary and familiar, not just in those big TV shows praised and worshiped by fans and critics, but also in that average, laid-back kind of entertainment. Fascinated, I looked for information about the story of the genre and I tried to get to know some of the storylines of those characters. If Crystal Chappell’s roles were ground-breaking for the American daytime (still prone to censorship, as it is shown in the chastity of the relationship between Olivia and Natalia), Europe has always been one step ahead: LGBTQ characters are everything but rare in nowadays soap opera, and chastity has been left overseas.
- Oliver and Christopher, Miriam and Rebecca (Verbotene Liebe) and Brendan and Ste (Hollyoaks)
Sure, when they first started to pop up in soap opera (during the 80’s), their sexuality was still the prerogative of those characters, their only feature. Gay characters started to be written in to promote liberal values and educate the audience, but this main aim was also their limit, and they often ended up being confined in educational plots, not allowed to experience the signature drama and passion that define soap opera characters. Conflict revolves almost exclusively around their diversity. Their relationships, if existing, are definitely a minor concern, more like casualties in a narration aimed at something else, that is, the acceptance of their diversity within the community. The ritual of acceptance strengthens that community after the turmoil caused by the character. Alongside, the goodness of the good characters is also reinforced thanks to the lenience shown towards the gay character. This asexual, reassuring and educational representation of the queer person is all I had ever got to see on mainstream TV, but these characters are finally beyond it. They are also gay. They earned the right to a normal existence, or rather to the normally irrational, melodramatic, engorged existence of soap opera characters.
Curiosity killed the cat, they say, and clip after clip I ended up caring about those characters, in spite of me. The fangirl in me took charge, and forced me to follow the unlikely storylines of the love story between police officer Pepa Miranda and forensic scientist Silvia Lo Castro until the very end.
- Pepa and Silvia (Los Hombres de Paco)
Why did I keep watching a show whose nonsense and overall inadequacy to my standards of TV entertainment resulted in several eye-rolls and headshakes? Maybe it’s because my mum is right when she says I have too much time on my hands, or maybe it’s because of that cute way in which Pepa used to call Silvia princesa or pelliroja all the time. In other words, it was because in those ridiculous situations, in those sappy and overdramatic scenes I could see someone that had never been there before and that deserved to be. Quoting a comment to an article on Gawker, “Isn’t equal rights about everyone being able to be caricatured, stereotyped and misrepresented equally?” My answer is yes, obviously, because this is a piece of equality as well. Soap opera characters are naturally unrealistic, and so are their stories. But then, why there shouldn’t be a gay character involved in ridiculous, unreasonable circumstances, as well as a straight one? These new characters can fall in love and get their hearts broken, cheat, split up, get back together and die for love. In their stories the soap opera poetry lives and rules, and so does its baggage of banalities and drama. It’s all the same, just more queer-ish, as it happens to my favourites, Pepa y Silvia, that keep getting together and breaking up in a loop, until (spoiler alert) someone accidentally dies, just when the happy ending seemed so close. The scenes are so overdramatic and soapy that is more like watching an actual melodrama.
- That’s what I’m talking about
So given the fact that gay characters are just as much of a nutcase as their straight counterparts, it is still our duty to demand an increasingly accurate and equal representation. And it looks like we’re working to reach this target. Queer relationships still keep that subversive potential that soap operas and the like were so clever to exploit to the benefit of their ratings, often lacking to reciprocate the favour with equal screen time and PDA policy. Yet, despite the differences in regard to production country, daytime vs primetime television, and so on, what I saw was definitely encouraging and it shows the will of this kind of television to represent same-sex couples just as any couple. And if what I said about the “subversive potential” stays particularly true for transgender people, it’s undeniable that soap opera tried hard to properly represent those people as well, with characters like Hayley Cropper – first transgender woman to become a regular character in a British soap opera and whose “sensitive and realistic” representation was also praised by a British MP – or like the transgender boy Jason Costello, whose relationship with another boy is also explored in the show.
- Hayley Cropper (Coronation Street) and Jason Costello (Hollyoaks)
Since they first entered the world of soap opera, LGBTQ characters came a long way, forcing the public opinion to deal with them, and taking part to those big changes that our society experienced and that it still experiences today. LGBTQ characters’ conquest of the genre – that moved through audience protests, fan-mail that begs for the fan-favourite lesbian pairing to become canon, debates in talk-shows and questions in Parliament – shows once again how media are still so central in our society. Even here in Italy, it’s time to realize how important it is to be represented not as some sort of educational plot point, but as people, with feelings, passions and instincts. Good or evil, petty or gracious. And it’s sad to see that none of the pairings whose stories are reconstructed through edited videos on YouTube is Italian. Television is still a mirror we look at to see the image of our society. Sometimes the reflection might be distorted or grotesque, but it is still better than nothing at all. No reflection means that that something is invisible in everyday reality. Being represented means existing, therefore never underestimate the need to see oneself on the visual medias, and the need to be seen by others.
Chiara Baroni
