Shall we dance?

One Step Forward: The fan writing campaign was an astounding success, and Liz Hendrickson returned to the show only a couple of months later.  Mary Margaret “Maggie” Stone arrives in Pine Valley to find out who murdered her identical twin sister, “Frankie”.   Inevitably Bianca and Maggie run into each other in the small town, Bianca faints at the likeness to Frankie, and as a result they become fast friends, evidence that soaps can move quickly when they so desire.
One Step Back: Bianca brings champagne to celebrate Maggie and Frankie’s birthday.  The situation gets a little too close as a slightly intoxicated Bianca touches Maggie’s face.  Maggie runs to a neutral corner professing with frenzied anguish, “I am not gay, I am not gay.”   Me thinks she doth protest too much…just like Reverend Ted and the meth massages he used to pray away the gay.

One Step Forward: Bianca and Maggie mend their friendship as soap time has a way of accomplishing.  Maggie’s heart goes out to Bianca as she overhears the resident Pine Valley High “mean girls” verbally gay bashing Bianca.  As a result, Maggie asks Bianca to be her date to the prom.  Pining looks held just that much too long lends to foreshadowing…and angst.
One Step Back: Maggie kisses a boy and tells Bianca about it.  That’s the natural progression, don’t you think?

One Step Forward: BAM takes a playful midnight swim protecting each other from the fabled “monster of Willow Lake”.  Maggie asks Bianca why she swims away every time she touches her, was it because she freaked out at the champagne incident? Maggie also questions how Bianca knew she was gay…
One Step Back: Bianca confesses her romantic feelings to a “friend” once again, but this time she feels she has reciprocation.  Maggie says, (all together now) “I’m into guys”, a natural progression, don’t you think?   Enter Henry, the nearest escape hatch for Maggie, All My Children and ABC.

Bianca, with desires of her own and tired of riding the pine so to speak, becomes involved with another woman, a dark, smoldering eastern European, named Lena.  Daytime’s first same-sex kiss is a result of this pairing.  A media blitz by ABC did little to soften the effect as a warning label was slapped across the beginning of the opening sequence.  ABC, citing the often quoted, but never producible book of Network Standards and Practices, thought the kiss required a few moments warning for the housewives of the Midwest to lock the kids out of the room.

See a pattern, but wait, there is more.  You might want to take your Dramamine now.

One Step Forward: In one of the most heartfelt, yet vulnerable scenes ever, Bianca reveals to her best friend, Maggie, that Pine Valley’s resident evil monger had raped her.  Maggie lovingly holds Bianca all night and tells her she is safe.
One Step Back: The message of this particular part of the storyline was somewhat lost in the backlash of gay and lesbian groups accusing AMC of raping the lesbian as a statement.  Gay fans of this couple, with years of soap-watching experience, saw this for what it was, an act of violence and revenge, not the prescribed cure for lesbianism.  We are our own worst enemies at times.  Who knows, AMC’s reluctance to move forward could have been partly shaded by this incident.

One Step Forward: This part of the storyline is truly groundbreaking.  For the first time in daytime television history we have an all female love triangle as Maggie becomes jealous of Lena for taking her place in the acronym.  Maggie kisses Bianca, then freaks, and you guessed it, runs away screaming in her mind, “I am not gay, I am not gay!”
One Step Back: Maggie sleeps with the nearest Y chromosome to prove she is not in love with Bianca.

One Step Forward: Lena leaves town to care for her ailing mother.  Maggie confesses to a friend she has feelings for Bianca, or according to every soap magazine spoiler, Bianca and Maggie grow closer…
One Step Back: Even though Lena is off screen, it’s a very convenient device to avoid moving BAM forward.   Maggie confesses her love to Bianca, but Bianca reiterates her commitment to Lena…somewhere in the Balkans.  As a result, Maggie runs to the waiting arms of an abusive relationship with a man.

One Step Forward: Long distance relationships just don’t work, so Bianca breaks up with Lena over the phone (classy), giving Bianca the space she needs to save Maggie from her verbally and physically abusive boyfriend.   When Maggie said she needed Jonathan because no one else loved her, Bianca once again confessed her love as more than friendship and tenderly kissed Maggie on the lips.

Now, finally, there is nothing, no antagonist, no unrequited love, nothing left unspoken to keep the powers that be from moving forward with this storyline.  Think again.

One Final Step: Bianca decides to leave Pine Valley and asks Maggie to go with her.  They fly off into the off-screen sunset together only after Maggie once again confesses her confusion and her inability to commit to Bianca.  Essentially, after three very long years and a myriad of  “growing closer spoilers”, we have BAM standing somewhat where they started…only the geography has changed.  True, the writing had to reflect the sudden decisions by the actresses to move on from daytime, but once again, we have to play pretend with characters off screen. Did they, or didn’t they, will they, or won’t they?  I don’t believe as committed fans, a mad rush into “the mile high club” was desired, either, but something other than the status quo would have been a more acceptable closure. However, as I pronounced in Part 1 of this posting, although fans would have preferred more network commitment to a more forward movement of the BAM storyline, at least the dance was begun with this pairing.  Being the first is never easy.  As a result of BAM’s success, soaps have dedicated more front-burner space to same sex couples.  Through a forward and back and forward again progression, BAM eventually sambaed down the daytime door allowing pairings such as Breese, Nuke, and now Otalia, to two-step through it.

An Aside
An article about BAM and how the couple became the first same-sex super couple cannot be written without acknowledging the fanbase that provided the support and the gentle network pressure required to move the storyline forward as much as it progressed.  The Bianca and Maggie pairing set the standard for which all other same-sex pairings would be compared.  The same can be said for the BAMfans, who danced that Sapphic samba with the network until the very end.

As I noted in Part 1 of this piece, there was a large contingency of viewers searching for any semblance of representation in the media.  Having seen little more than titillating exploitation from primetime television, AMC’s Bianca became a symbol of possibility.

A group of talented and creative individuals from across the nation became a network of concerted voices united in their desire to have BAM portray their own untold story. Until the Internet age, there was no way of organizing these voices.  Fan pages and forum boards became the party lines of the decades past.  A simple “Google” search connected you to a community welcoming your participation and your views.

Respectfully commenting on aspects of the BAM storyline that were sensitive to the ones it represented, the legion of BAMfans used letter writing campaigns, graphically designed materials, and themed giveaways to bring attention to the cause. The BAM brigade was given national mention in televised and written media across the county.  When was a fan group ever contacted by Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly for a quote used in production?  The BAMfans created a marketing campaign that rivaled anything Madison Avenue could produce.

Having the desire to be an effective force outside of the entertainment world, the BAMfans turned their attention toward charitable organizations.  Realizing its outreach numbered in the thousands, and having well placed contacts in the soap industry, the BAMfans began to make a difference in all parts of the county.  With the unselfish and unwavering help of Eden and Liz, the BAMfans have raised tens of thousands of dollars for such charitable organizations as RAINN, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the Pediatric Aids Foundation, and BCEFA.

Part 3 – AfterBAM, the present.  (to be continued)

Until the most recent history, gay and lesbian characters in daytime have been incarnated from script only a handful of times. Daytime’s first openly gay soap character bubbled up on All My Children twenty-six years ago. In 1983, AMC introduced psychologist, Lynne Carson, played by Saturday Night Fever alumnus and ABC prime time actress, Donna Pescow.  Dr. Carson was a short time psyche consult and full time lesbian used primarily to prove the heterosexuality of another character.  The good doctor was given no history in Pine Valley, no romantic pairing, and no future.  She moved her shingle to San Francisco after only two months.

Five years later, CBS and As the World Turns introduced the first gay male character, Hank Elliot, a women’s fashion designer…shock!  Hank appeared off and on over the next four years but left to attend to a never before seen partner who was suffering off-screen with AIDS.  Again, the storyline was not much of a creative stretch, but considering the times and the fact the President of the United States couldn’t muster up the courage to say the word, AIDS, it was groundbreaking.

ABC’s One Life to Live attempted in 1992 to establish the first gay core character, rumored to be Joey Buchanan, the youngest son of Llandview’s matriarch, Victoria Lord Buchanan.  Coming on the heels of Pat Buchanan’s 1992, battle cry, Republican Convention address where he stated, “and we stand with him [George H.W. Bush] against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women,” backlash from network executives led to the compromise storyline of a friend of Joey Buchanan, Billy Douglas, and his struggle with coming out to friends and family.  Though critically acclaimed, once the storyline passed the anti-homophobic  message of which it was intended, Billy faded into the background and was gone within the next year.

Taking One Life’s lead, All My Children again came back to the gay table in 1995 and created a storyline for a character with a small, but vested fan base.  Michael Delaney was a decorated veteran in the Marines and Pine Valley High School’s basketball coach and history teacher.  Michael came out to his class and found anything but acceptance from the upstanding citizens of Pine Valley.  The school board soon filed suit stating Michael was teaching his “gayness” to impressionable young minds.  Though he won the anti-discrimination lawsuit, the victory for gay work rights was a hollow one in that Michael slipped quietly into an off screen existence and the storyline did little for establishing long-term gay characters on television.

The year 2000 produced Y2K and the return of Erica Kane’s daughter.  Neither one brought an end to the universe, but the resolution Bianca delivered to her mother on New Year’s Eve completed what eight (nine?) husbands could never do, render Erica Kane speechless…for at least a few hours.   AMC’s choice to develop the daughter of uber-diva, Erica Kane, into an openly lesbian character transformed the soap opera landscape forever.   For the first time a character with a well worn history and roots in the community was gay.  This wasn’t a character just off the jumbo jetway that all small soap towns have.  This was a character whose tenure began in 1988 (though they soap-aged her a bit) and was recurring as the daughter of the most recognizable character on daytime television.

The familial tension rose as Bianca began to revel in the newfound freedom truth provides.  Who knew Pine Valley had a gay bar?  We certainly never saw Michael Delaney there in 1995.  To publicly establish Bianca had the gay gene, we found out that she had an affair with another patient while in rehab.  No, not gay rehab; that would be too easy even for soaps.  Anorexia rehab because Bianca IS the daughter of a super model.  Of course we never saw this affair either as that would require some kind of physical, on-screen, contact not allowed by the House of Mouse.  It didn’t really matter; the girl left Bianca to get married to a man, a contract legal in all fifty states.  Bianca then, of course, falls in obligatory crush with the blonde straight girl.  It played out with the same kind of impact as a low budget, single camera coming out flick that plays late nights on the Logo channel.  Was this it?  Just a whole lot of want and covet.  This storyline, billed as original, seemed to be running on a full complement of platitude.  It was evident the powers that be couldn’t see the forest for all that pine.

Mary Frances Stone came into Bianca’s life after Erika ran over “Frankie” with her car.  From road kill to potential girlfriend in one, long, knowing stare.  Though disapproving of Bianca’s “lifestyle”, Erica was still fiercely protective, no boy…or girl…would ever be good enough for Erica Kane’s daughter.  The struggle for Bianca’s affection began.  Frankie was also struggling with her own sexuality demons.  She ended up breaking Bianca’s heart as she went one toke over the line with the local rich boy.  Erica vowed to kill her for what she did to Bianca…and you guessed it, Frankie ended up face down and dead in her bedroom.

Was this it?  Was this just another network cave in to a controversial storyline? The old courage meter of the past was looking quite anemic.  Of course, the romance was purely off camera, but the actresses, Eden Riegel and Liz Hendrickson, and their own personal commitment to the storyline, made you buy into it and want more. Women of all ages were searching for their story to be told, and through this storyline found themselves looking into some kind of magic mirror with a reflection of their own returned and not society’s idea of what is acceptable. This worldwide network of women organized through message boards and forums found themselves otherwise marginalized by mainstream media programming. Just as calling the bucket brigade to a four-alarm fire, mass emotional mailings were sent to the daytime network and the national soap media in hopes that AMC would reconsider killing off Frankie and the storyline and somehow move forward.  It could be done; people come back from the dead on soaps all the time.  Organized fan numbers and potential laundry soap consumers of this size could not be ignored, not this time.  So, on February 4, 2002, Frankie’s twin sister, Mary Margaret Stone (played by Liz Hendrickson), arrived in Pine Valley…

BAM! (to be continued…)