funnystrange.com

I wish I hadn't heard about the All My Children transgender storyline in advance, because I enjoy soaps a lot more when I don't know what's going to happen. I end up dreading the spoilers so much that it ruins the current episodes. I try to stay as spoiler-free as possible: if I can avoid them, I don't even watch the TV commercials which show teasers for the coming week or two (they give away a lot!). Although I do watch the "on the next episode" teaser at the end of each day. Those are usually misleading so I don't mind watching them.

In any case, I did hear about this storyline in advance and the basic outline is that an androgynous goth rock star named "Zarf" falls for the show's lesbian, Bianca, and realizes that he too is a lesbian, only the "trapped in a man's body" kind. My first reaction was, for crying out loud, Zarf? I'm used to soap characters having dumb names because they used up the normal names decades ago. But did it have to be "Zarf"? When I told Georg about it I misremembered his name as "Frick, or Frack, or something." Maybe I should start calling him "Frickafrack" instead of Zarf.

Georg pointed out that as described, the storyline seems guaranteed to piss off everybody. Which it probably will. Gay positive viewers will see it as a thinly veiled excuse to get Bianca in bed with a man, and people hostile to gays hate the show already.

I'm inclined to agree with the thought that, at least in some part, this is a convoluted route to converting Bianca from St. Bianca the Celibate Lesbian to a nominal bisexual whose relationships are all with men. I guess I have to give the show props for making a core character -- Erica Kane's daughter -- a lesbian at all. But it's frustrating that while the straight characters screw around like proverbial bunnies, Bianca's sexuality is limited to occasional innuendo, a few soulful looks and one kiss. Otherwise, in the years Bianca has been out, her few romances have been entirely off-screen. Her only physical relationship is with her sister, since I guess it's "safe" for them to touch each other. They hug, hold hands and kiss (on the cheek) so much that there are fans of the sisters as a subtextual romance. Actually I think the actresses playing the sisters have ramped up the physical affection in their scenes together, in response to those fans.

Anyway, a romance between a lesbian and a MTF transgender will be out there for daytime, but the "tab A into slot B" mechanics of the relationship will probably be purely heterosexual. I doubt they'll go so far as to show Zarf having hormone therapy, much less surgery. Daytime viewers may be ready for an androgynous man who says he feels like a woman, but they're definitely not ready for an androgynous man sprouting breasts.

I don't know what kind of press the storyline has gotten because, like I said, I try to avoid spoilers. But I did read an article about it at Slate.com The author admitted upfront that he had never watched the show before, and he made a few mistakes, like identifying Babe as Erica's daughter instead of Bianca. (Babe's staggering selfishness and sense of entitlement rivals Erica's, so I can understand the confusion.) The funny part was when he went to the SoapCentral.com board and found the main reaction was an expectation that since the writers fuck up everything else, they'll fuck this one up too. I can't argue with that.

The Slate.com guy also found that hostility towards Zarf was based not on his sexuality, but on his near-worship of Babe. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that. He said a character who incessantly praises another character to tell the viewers who we're supposed to like is called a "propper." Um .. on the board I used to read before I gave up spoilers, that was called a "fluffer." Babe is a hateful character who the writers decided to make into the show's big heroine, so she has a lot of fluffers.