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“All My Children” Lesbian Wedding Storyline Makes History — and Mistakes

Eden Riegel departed All My Children (again) this week, and Tamara Braun is scheduled to take her leave next month. But many fans of the long-running ABC daytime drama checked out of this storyline a long time ago.

This might surprise those who have only followed the lesbian headlines from this storyline. It did include the first lesbian wedding on daytime television, after all, and Bianca was allowed to engage in much more on-screen physical affection with her girlfriend/wife this time than she ever has with her previous romantic partners – almost as much as the heterosexual couples this time.

But many queer and straight viewers began heading for the door when it became clear that the kisses and the wedding plans were just new ways to dress up the same old depressing and boring lesbian storylines about sperm donors, custody battles, and sexually confused lesbians. And we already get enough of that on primetime TV.

So what went wrong? And why?

WHAT HAPPENED

Bianca returned to Pine Valley in October, pregnant with her second child via sperm donated from her brother-in-law Zach (Thorsten Kaye). Her architect girlfriend Reese arrived a few days later, asked Bianca to marry her, and showed her the house she planned to build for them and their daughters in France.

Bianca said yes, Reese met the family, and everything was great until Bianca’s sister Kendall (Alicia Minshew) came out of her coma and discovered her husband was the father of her sister’s baby, and had developed a too-close-for-her-comfort friendship with Reese.

The night before her wedding to Bianca, Reese kissed Zach in a moment of drunken despair (after Kendall had dissed her in a toast). The two immediately broke it off, and agreed to treat it as a mistake that had never happened.

The next day, Bianca and Reese were married on All My Children, in daytime TV’s much-hyped first lesbian wedding.

Immediately after the wedding, all hell broke loose when Bianca was told of Reese’s moment of infidelity by someone who’d witnessed the kiss, and Kendall killed her best friend when she accidentally hit her with her car while she was arguing with Zach about Reese.

A devastated Bianca questioned whether Reese was even a lesbian (since she was previously engaged to a man), and then presented Reese with annulment papers and the announcement that Reese would no longer be allowed to see their children.

Reese steadfastly declared her love for Bianca, but vowed to fight her for custody, then finally gave up and told Bianca she was just going to hope that Bianca would forgive her some day.

On Tuesday’s episode, Bianca left for Paris with their children, while Reese chose to stay in Pine Valley a little while longer to tie up loose ends (and to annoy Erica and Kendall).

Bianca is set to return in a few weeks for a few days to tie up the storyline, which will most likely involve a reconciliation with Reese, and the two women deciding to return to France to raise their daughters, or something similar.

REACTIONS FROM VIEWERS

So, now that this much-hyped lesbian-storyline is almost over, how did it go over with lesbian/bi fans of the show? Not well, with some exceptions.

Here are a few comments from AfterEllen.com readers that seem to summarize the prevailing sentiments of lesbian/bi viewers.

Peachblossom720: “The writers never took the time to show us this relationship, and since Bianca will be gone for a month, so that Reese can prove how much she loves her and their family (this part is so stupid), again viewers won’t get to see their relationship…I can’t even say that I’m upset about this, because it is so obvious that this is how the writers and producers would do things. I knew that when they put so much promotion into Bianca and Reese making love that they had no intention of giving them a real storyline.”

SterlingMB: “When I got on this storyline I was just so excited to see a happy lesbian couple on TV… Then not only do they make Breese miserable they basically have a complete character assassination.”

Summersea: Check around on the general AMC boards, the longterm fans who are fans of the show itself and not just checking in when Bianca’s in town. They hate Reese and don’t think she deserves Bianca. They think this wedding is being badly done (no flashbacks, callbacks to history, vets returning, or real familial bonding since Bianca is on the outs with the relative most important to her) and is in no way deserving of what a legacy child of a daytime legend should have gotten for a first wedding. They hate the Zach/Reese angle. They don’t want Reese to be the woman Bianca marries … A tacked-on happy ending that was basically forced on the show by both actresses in the pairing opting to leave, as well as fan uproar over the Zach/Reese thing, doesn’t begin to make up for the way AMC’s botched the entire storyline.

Alisha: “I hate the situation the writers put these two characters in (can we say cliche?) but I have to admit….it’s good soap drama. I want them to reunite. I want Reese to find herself and then in that prove that she belongs with Bianca. I want Bianca to see that and then forgive her (and Reese to forgive Bianca for the things she’s said and try to take the children).”

AfterEllen.com blogger The Linster also expressed mixed emotions:

Like many of us, I only started watching again because of the promise of a good relationship for Binx at last. I have let myself be manipulated at every turn. I was thrilled when Bianca returned in a relationship, disgusted when they treated the sperm donor like daddy, thrilled at the proposal, disgusted at Reese’s conflict over Zach, thrilled at the prospect of a wedding, disgusted that Reese lip-locked with Zach the day before. The conversation between Bianca and Reese after Binx found out totally stressed me out because I expected that any minute, Bianca would fall into Reese’s arms and say she forgave her. That scene was well-played, I must say. Overall, the whole thing irritates me and I’m ticked off that I am so underrepresented on television that I get excited by any little scrap thrown my way.

My own opinion? From an entertainment perspective, some of the conflict between Reese and Bianca at the end was interesting, but overall, their storyline became boring and predictable pretty quickly.

From a visibility perspective, it was one step forward, two steps back: the storyline broke some barriers for lesbian couples on daytime TV, but it also reinforced a lot of negative stereotypes about lesbians and bisexual women.

REACTIONS FROM AMC

In a recent interview with The Advocate, All My Children executive producer Julie Hanan Carruthers insisted that Zach and Reese were never more than friends, and that Reese is just “a confused, insecure person at the moment” who has “never wavered in her commitment to Bianca.”

This statement is not supported by what we actually saw on TV every day – which was Reese struggling with her feelings for Zach, although it’s debatable to what degree – but according to Carruthers, we didn’t really see what we thought we saw:

That’s the audience rewriting what’s there. It’s not being written that way at all. Reese has never wavered in what she wants…I don’t know how to stress this more. Never has she played a moment of, “I want Zach more than I want Bianca,” or “I would leave Bianca for Zach.” He has literally just been a friend. Look, we tantalize in this genre. We do it whether we do it with heterosexual or homosexual couples. It’s what the genre is.

When pressed about why she didn’t consider using another woman to “tantalize” Reese, instead of a man, Carruthers admitted it was a decision born of pragmatism:

We are working within a canvas of people who are interrelated and connected. For our audience, it’s always more powerful if it is someone you know well and would least expect. If we brought in a character out of nowhere, they would worry about Bianca, but they would not be invested in Reese at all, particularly now with Zach being the donor (for Bianca’s baby with Reese). It complicates it in a delicious way.

There is validity to the argument Carruthers is making – that there simply aren’t enough romantic-pairing options for long-running lesbian characters unless you’re willing to change the general makeup of the established cast of characters. This logic is frequently used by TV writers and showrunners to justify minimal lesbian visibility, bad lesbian storylines, and the growing trend towards adding bisexual characters to their shows instead of lesbians, as I outlined in more detail in my November Visibility Matters column.

While this may be an understandable decision for an individual show, when it’s happening on every show, you’re left with a television landscape populated by lesbians who sleep with men, or no lesbians at all, only bisexual characters (who also primarily sleep with men).

All My Children fed right into that with this Bianca-Reese storyline, which is why so many viewers are left feeling disappointed and angry, even if they believe this storyline is in keeping with the other storylines on All My Children and on soaps in general.

Carruthers makes it clear she doesn’t understand this when she insists “we tantalize in this genre … whether we do it with heterosexual or homosexual couples.”

DESTINED TO FAIL

All My Children‘s first mistake was in choosing to make the romantic relationship between Bianca and Reese the focus of the conflict. Given the ongoing trend of lesbians on television sleeping with men, and the fact that unlike the heterosexual characters, Bianca has never been allowed to have a successful romantic relationship on screen, using sexual confusion as the basis of the storyline’s dramatic tension doomed it to failure, at least with queer viewers.

There are many other storylines the writers could have used that would have yielded the dramatic tension required, without reinforcing tired negative stereotypes – like a (non-romantic) secret in Reese’s past uncovered by Erica, for example, or Reese’s inability to fit in with Bianca’s close-knit family. Even just further exploiting the drama around Bianca using her sister’s husband sperm without talking to her sister first would have been enough (although I think we can all do without any more sperm-donor storylines for awhile).

Their second mistake was in choosing not to develop the relationship between Reese and Bianca on camera. The two women just dropped into Pine Valley as a fully formed couple, created havoc with the lives and relationships of other characters, and now will (probably) do most of their reconciliation off-camera.

That makes it difficult for viewers to care about this relationship, or this storyline.

Finally, the writers failed to take into account the particular protectiveness many fans of all sexual orientations feel for Bianca, a long-running and much-loved character.

She is not only one of the few truly good characters on All My Children, she is one that has been screwed over a lot.

Yes, bad things happen to soap characters all the time, but this character has seen more than her fair share of pain, and – owing to the double standard of how lesbians are portrayed on TV – far less than her share of good times.

Marrying Bianca off to someone the audience doesn’t know isn’t a smart move, but marrying her off to someone who cheats on her the night before their wedding feels like one punch in the gut too many.

In this way, Bianca is actually very representative of queer TV viewers in America – we’ve already suffered enough bad and boring representation on TV, thank you, we don’t need any more.

With such a bad setup, it’s no wonder audiences have reacted negatively to this storyline. No amount of lesbian wedding promos can make up for such glaring structural flaws.

As the old saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still just a pig. Even when it’s a lesbian pig.

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