Creative control

Culture | Gay group’s media strategy has paid big dividends, even with daytime soap operas | Megan Basham

Steve Fenn/ABC

Another advance in the gay marriage movement was reached in February, this time not on the steps of a courthouse but in the world of steamy television melodrama known as soap operas. On Feb. 16, the long-running daytime program All My Children depicted the genre's most recognizable character, Erica Kane (played for 39 years by actress Susan Lucci), looking on in joy as her daughter wed another woman.

The ceremony was staged in full soap-opera lavishness, with two young brides, outfitted in flowing white designer gowns, pledging their commitment to one another in front of a collared clergyman. The event wrapped up with a convention borrowed from the traditional wedding: a bridal kiss.

While same-sex weddings on television are hardly new (a lesbian ceremony featured heavily in a Friends episode from 1996, for example), the real-life drama surrounding legal challenges to California's recently passed constitutional amendment against homosexual marriages has made the milestone all the more significant. By tying the episode to Proposition 8, those associated with All My Children have reaffirmed the perception that the entertainment industry is of a single mind on the issue.