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| The gay story became a story of other characters' reactions, as much as one man's homosexuality. From left: Paul (Andy Kavovit) had a very hard time dealing with Hank's (Brian Starcher) homosexuality, while Lien (Ming-Na Wen) was totally accepting |
"I was always told the same thing: that a male gay character would be a total turnoff for any female in the audience," says Douglas Marland, head writer of AS THE WORLD TURNS, and veteran writer of such shows as THE DOCTORS, GUIDING LIGHT and LOVING. "And I said, 'But I don't believe that.' I never believed that." Marland had the chance to test his beliefs his year when he created the character of Hank Eliot on AS THE WORLD TURNS.
While more and more social issues have become fodder for daytime serials, the one tory that continued to scare programmers, producers and writers was that of a homosexual man. This became painfully obvious when daytime had a spate of AIDS stories running at once (on ALL MY CHILDREN, THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS and ANOTHER WORLD) but not one of them involved a gay man. Clearly, soaps were terrified of audience reaction to an AIDS story involving a gay character, even though homosexual men constitute the largest group of AIDS victims. Doug Marland thought that was rubbish. He wanted to tell the story of a gay character and he wanted that character to have AIDS. And so Hank Elliot came to Oakdale as a caring, intelligent, talented fashion designer, who happened to be gay.
While Hank is currently out of the story line because the actor who played him, Brian Starcher, has opted to move to Los Angeles, Douglas Marland and his writing team were willing to talk about what it was like to create a story about a gay man and how that story changed.
Douglas Marland: "Around the time that I came on AS THE WORLD TURNS I decided that I wanted to write a gay story line. I've always felt that homosexuality was anarea of society that had been totally ignored or just kind of touched on and run away from. I actually wanted to introduce a gay character on THE DOCTORS in 1972.1 believed there was drama in such a story, there could be people's reactions to the gay character, and inter-reactions — that's what daytime is all about. NBC bought the idea but Colgate-Palmolive, the sponsor, said no way, so it was dropped.
"Because Procter and Gamble and CBS had been so supportive of most anything I wanted to do on AS THE WORLD TURNS I brought it up with Cal [Robert Calhoun, then executive producer]. Cal said, 'Yes, let's talk about it. How would you go about doing it?' I said the important thing to me in bringing the character on was to let the audience get to like him and know him before we knew anything about his homosexuality, because immediately, I thought, minds would turn off unless they liked the guy first. That's the way we did it. Then the writers' strike happened just as the character was coming on the air and thank God Cal and I had discussed enough of the character and how he should intermingle before anything aired. It had been outlined how he would get to know Iva; how she would become his first friend. There's a very real situation there: It's not unusual for so called 'normal' women to fall in love with gay men. I felt that was the way to first have Hank reveal his sexuality: once Iva was looking for more in a relationship than he was able to give her, it would be a very interesting and noble way for the revelation. Shortly after his revelation, the strike was over and we all came back to work.
"Originally, I wanted this character to have AIDS. There had never been an AIDS story told of a gay man. So I felt that once the character was established he might be right for the AIDS story. It was important for me to have the audience like him. I wanted to be able to say this is a gay man, an honorable man, a good man, a man with decent values who you have liked and suddenly he is dealing with this ugly, crippling disease. AIDS victims are not monsters. Have some compassion for him because a lot of people are dealing with AIDS in their families. That's where I felt we would be doing a great service. Then a strange thing happened in this story that never happened in anything else I'd written. The acceptance of the Hank character became so overwhelming from all segments of the population. What we learned from letters and focus groups was that what they liked about the story was that it was different, they had never seen it before on another soap."
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