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The Gays Go All the Way in Daytime
As the World Turns took an unexpected turn this week and went where no soap opera—and few primetime shows—has dared: showing two post-coital men.
On June 1, 2007, the character of Noah Mayer made his first appearance on As the World Turns, the daytime drama that has aired daily since 1956. He was a military brat turned heartthrob, who quickly hooked up with a fellow intern at the local television station. She fell for him—and so did her openly gay best friend, Luke Snyder.
It took a while for Noah (played by Jake Silberman) to admit his own attraction to Luke (Van Hansis), who had come out the previous summer. On August 17, 2007, Noah and Luke shared a groundbreaking kiss—the first gay male kiss in the history of American daytime dramas. Overnight, the clip went viral and still stands as one of the most-viewed videos on YouTube.
This Christmas, Noah presented Luke with a watch that was engraved, "Worth the wait."
Since that fateful exchange of spit, the characters have naturally faced countless obstacles. At first, their mutual friend was caught in the crossfire of Noah's sexual identity crisis. Noah had to come out to his homophobic father, who (after killing his wife) soon conned Luke and Noah on a fishing trip where he shot Luke, paralyzing him from the waist down. But since this is daytime, where characters are known to have seven lives, it wasn't a surprise when Luke walked again thanks to the devotion and optimism of Noah's steadfast support. Even more twisted: Noah briefly married an Iraqi refugee to keep her in the country after she claimed his father saved her family. Luke and Noah stole kisses but fear of being discovered by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency drove their otherwise openly gay rapport back into the 1950s.
As the months wore on, the sexual tension between Luke and Noah (affectionately dubbed Nuke and Loah) grew. They kissed increasingly frequently and with decreasingly little fanfare from blogs, but they never went all the way. They did talk about sex—and what their first time would be like—but it never came anywhere near their horizon. Like everything in their relationship, intimacy was shown through incredibly compelling dialogue.
The inseparable pair talked about everything. Their feelings were always expressed (thanks in large part to head writer Jean Passanante, who happens to be responsible for two other gay characters in soap history) if not physically acted on.
Luke and Noah's dynamic escalated on New Year's Eve, when the night finally seemed right. Except for one elephant in the room: Luke's step-grandfather, who had kissed him during Thanksgiving. To make a convoluted story short, Luke got drunk (not a good thing when you've had a kidney transplant, too) after seeing Noah console his ex-girlfriend, and then he kissed his step-grandfather. Of course, Noah was a witness and threw a punch to protect "his love." When Luke confessed to initiating the kiss, Noah walked out, leaving Luke alone to read a note written from Noah, which was meant to be read the next morning, when they would have been together in bed.
For fans, it appeared, as usual, as if Luke and Noah had gone a few steps forward and many more steps back. Sure, they would recover over time. Like most soap "supercouples," they were meant to be. I was prepared for the long haul of relationship rebuilding.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Henry Seltzer is a homepage editor for The Daily Beast. He previously worked at UsMagazine.com and The Huffington Post and filed for Gawker and Wonkette under the moniker of "Henry the Intern." He occasionally contributes to Project.ioni.st and once published Press Gaggle, a blog about the White House press briefings.
How soon before we have anal intercourse discreetly depicted? Then perhaps not so discreetly as the gay culture flattens the remaining standards of decency . It has captured Hollywood -- see former power agent Michael Ovitz on the gay mafia that rules there -- so why not daytime TV?
The above comment is exactly the ridiculous, heteronormative banter the US is getting sick of. We are constantly subjected to heterosexual activity on television, in the news, and discrimination based on orientation throughout the governmental sector. And as for "gay mafia"... I wish! maybe then we could get some muscle together to shut this guy up... :-)
oh Banjo1, we have gay porn for that silly!
"Heteronormative." Like that word, 2882! Does it have roots in "normal"? What's with gays wanting to shut up people who disagree with them? First anyone who is a Christian and now Banjo1. Where does it stop?
Decency in an American context means essentially nothing. We have things that are illegal and we have things that are legal. We have behavior and property the laws protect and we have behavior and property the laws do not protect. Decency in a democracy is a matter of taste unless it is referred to by statute and even then - it is entirely interpretable by the judiciary who is responsible for taking the temperature of the public will.
There's remaining standards of decency?
Christians and other arbiters of What's Right are learning every day how much they now stand on shifting sand in our society - and thank God heh
For 30 yrs, politicians have traded for power and money, by making these folks feel like God's little soldiers, at the expense of the 4th Amendment's establishment of Separation of Church and State.
Hello! Test for a False Idol: do they exhort you to live a pious life, or do they degrade the meaning of religion by exhorting you to hate?
Really, Banjo1 - how hating on gaydom (and every other person freedom quashed by Faith-Based Initiatives imposed upon the Citizenry) bring you closer to God? It can't, because God is love. QED dude
ghettosavant: Moral relativism has taken you down a strange and twisted road.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
Just as long as they were playing safe... I'm sick of the glorification of, and lies surrounding, unsafe sex in the gay community these days.
......... OR Banjo1, maybe, just maybe, piety and/or bigotry has taken you down a strange and twisted road.
banjo1, closet case much? Why don't you stick to making comments on the drudge report or fox? Open minded people like to read the daily beast, smut and all. That's why Tina was born, and its not your place to ruin it for the rest of us. Go back to your man cave.
The Christian Taliban are gonna have a field day with this one!
Time is a funny thing. It's an inarguable fact that each generation of Americans, for over a century now, gets more liberal with each passing decade.
The more youth in our nation that get secondary educations and the more we become globalized by things like the internet and television; the more gay society is going to become a social norm.
Anti-progressive sentiment is always going to be around, but it does fizzle away a little bit more with each passing year. I mean, my grandfather voted for Barrack Obama. I'm sure someone else here has an old, racist, sometimes wildly inappropriate, immigrant in the family. I've heard him call a black people countless names and been ashamed but I was never more proud when he voted for a black man to be the most powerful man in the country.
As far as "standards of decency" decreasing in society goes, I think it's a joke. What a person thinks is "decent" is an individual's choice. And Banjo1 saying something like "What's with gays wanting to shut up people who disagree with them?", just makes him sounds ignorant. Straight people want to shut people like you up too.
I am 27 years old and have many gay friends, all of whom I consider to be some of the most "decent" human beings I've had the pleasure of knowing in my life.
Banjo, this quote's for you:
"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or to be acted out under the guise of virtue."
-Erich Fromm
And I think he was paraphrasing Mark Twain, who said something along the lines of, "Moral indignation is envy dressed in a tuxedo."
This is so long overdue. They've been putting off sex between those two in increasingly ridiculous ways. And it still wasn't everything it should have been. But it was a step in the right direction, and the show should definitely be commended for that.
liviapeacock: Jeez, I feel dirty just repeating your screen name, which is probably a practice best not discussed openly. But where did you get the idea this was a gay -- oops, "open-minded" -- site? The problem with you people (well, one of them anyhow) is the only opinions you hear are those in gay bars and bath houses. Something more than 95% of us never go near those places. This results in a detachment from reality not far from mental illness. Open your mind and let some clean air blow through.
This is so overdue. The soap opera thing has been so stale for so long, it's refreshing to hear, finally, about a new direction.
Gay and day time soaps would seem to go hand in hand. I'd like to see a soap opera with a gay/camp twist.
Thankx for this funny, affectionate article! I've been a Luke and Noah fan since discovering them on Youtube! Clips of "Nuke"are beautifully edited of by "anthonylangford" on his channel. I was also surprised they finally "did it." I half- expected the roof to cave in on them, as something ridiculous ALWAYS happened to prevent their consumation before! I thought it was well-done if a bit sterile compared to what they usually show on soaps. They're so sweet-so mild compared to most tv characters it's hard to imagine anyone having such a terrible problem with them-but I'm sure many will! Whatever! Give them a look and you'll see two very cute, very loving young men-good,kind and responsible.~You can't help but smile! In other words-as this is a soap-one of them will probably soon go blind.
I'll cop to it. Regardless of the pedigree of my typical NPR, PRI, APM media consumption, I got sucked into this daytime TV Noah and Luke thing on YouTube when it was starting to happen. No--actually, I lie--I got sucked in way back when Luke was still just coming out, as it happened just about the same time as I was doing the same (or starting to--or thinking about starting to).
Hey, everyone deserves some good old-fashioned brain candy, sometime doesn't he? And a bit of old-fashioned eye candy, too. Those guys are just too cute, especially together.
And whoever said it was right; despite the soap-opera-drama stuff, they are probably one of the most positive portrayals of a gay couple on any TV station that isn't Logo.
I am a devoted DOOL fan and with this news can only hope "my story" will get the very same kind of much needed zi-N-G!
If everyone was good, but then became EVEN better because diversity allowed them to be interesting; stories like this would become run-of-the-mill. Winning small battles are important, it certainly helps male up for having to drudge through and weather the longer ones.
Everything can always become better and no matter "who" doesn't like "what," we can always identify as a friend, of some other friend who could become your friend. In that absurd sentence the horrors of discrimination can finally end.
Interestingly enough, the entire modern male homosexual culture began as responsibility-free sex. Overwhelmingly, that was what being gay was about. Even now, in the day of 'gay marriage', the fact is that many gay male couples are adulterous, or practice infidelity at best.
I could quite happily live my life without ever watching sex on TV, regardless of gender. Once we started down that path, this was a logical step. I wish I could believe it's the last step, but it certainly is not. The people who are delighted with this and view it as progress may well find themselves appalled by the next step, whatever form it may take.
Sex with animals is my guess. Who's to say it's wrong?
How great is it that one site has both right-wing and left-wing readers. I'm so sick of the polarizing MSNBC's and Fox News. This is a good site.
Thank you.
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