Abstract
In this chapter, I assess the fraught cultural messages embedded in the trials and tribulations of daytime TV’s only leading gay character, Bianca Montgomery of All My Children (AMC). While I touch upon the responses of soap fans to the Bianca story line, I rely largely on narrative analysis. Such an analysis indicates that the investments and meanings generated by this experiment were uneven, ambiguous, and contradictory. The most intriguing aspect of that unevenness is that while Bianca’s sexuality was emphatically lesbian, her story lines were irredeemably and necessarily queer. Indeed I hypothesize that it is Bianca’s queer unmanageability within the conventions of serial narrative, rather than her sexuality per se, that led AMC’s producers to write the surprisingly popular Bianca out of the show in the spring of 2005.
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© 2011 Thomas Peele
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Leaker, C. (2011). All My (Queer) Children: Disrupting Daytime Desire in Pine Valley. In: Peele, T. (eds) Queer Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-29011-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-29011-6_4
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