A ripple raced across the cultural puddle that is daytime television drama this week as word emerged from the writer’s offices at ABC’s long-running tele-saga All My Children that the show would play host to a kiss between two female lovers on April 22. This would mark the first time that two members of the very same sex swapped spit in the history of the afternoon timeslot, long considered a haven for the most conservative television viewers. One of the members of this pioneering daytime duo is Harvard’s own Eden Riegel, former member of the class of 2002, who plays the character of Bianca Montgomery on the show.
The show’s tradition of thoughtful social commentary makes All My Children a fitting venue in which to make such daytime television history. According to an official statement from the show, All My Children has tackled many a controversial social issue in its 33-year history—such as “AIDS, abortion, drug abuse, racial bias and teenage alcoholism.” Lesbianism, it seems, was an obvious next step for the show’s producers. FM’s confidential sources high within the show’s internal party structure partly refute this claim, however, alleging that only after much heated debate did a lesbian kiss barely edge out an Ebola outbreak as the show’s next periodic extraordinary dramatic twist.
FM expects the news of the first daytime TV kiss, and Riegel’s role in it, to arouse a chorus of approval from various segments of the Harvard community. Gay rights activists will likely hail the kiss as progressive yet long overdue. Harvard men, for their part, also seem poised to welcome the historic television event—as an important first step in socializing their most private and cherished erotic fantasies, which until now have found an outlet only through illicit late night file transfers.
For those fearful of change, fear not. Unexercised sexual energies at Harvard should not dip from their fevered pitch for long. Excitement will no doubt ebb as Harvard men realize that they are actually statistically less likely to see booty on television than in their own social lives, for lack of cable or barely any reception on campus.
The kiss is also anticipated to set another milestone of sorts. While the lesbian kiss will not be a first for Harvard, which has long been on the vanguard of social tolerance, the exchange will be Harvard’s “most current” lesbian kiss, if only momentarily. Lesbians on campus plan to celebrate the occasion by going about their daily lives, which generally include not watching All My Children.
