The postings on this blog thus far have been fairly utilitarian, highlighting NewFest filmmakers and announcements about our programs. That's all well and good, but we also want to offer something different at times. So this post is only tangentially related to NewFest programs... it's mostly about my guilty pleasure... Passions.

Ok, I admit it. I have watched NBC's supernatural soap opera since it began in July 1999. For awhile, I hid the fact that I videotaped the show daily, but soon owned up to enjoying the sheer ridiculousness of it all - after all, what I really liked about Passions were the elements that were fairly atypical for soap operas - namely, beyond the usual trappings of the genre - small New England town (Harmony), the evil rich white family (the Cranes), the poor ethnic family (the Lopez-Fitzgeralds - yes, the Lopez-Fitzgeralds, don't ask), the middle-class white family (the Bennetts), their best-friend African-American family (the Russells), and the various secrets, lies, and affairs among them - there was also next door neighbor Tabitha Lenox, secretly a 300-year old witch, and Timmy, her doll given life who spoke in the third person and drank "martimmys." I mean, what other show features a storyline where a doorway to Hell appears in one of the main character's closets, which eventually sucks the entire house into the infernal pits? The New York Times has even written about the show in the past, extolling its warped, post-modern sensibilities. Ah, but Passions' best days are long behind, and NBC is dropping the lowest-rated of daytime dramas from its regular programming after next month - with new episodes only available on Direct TV beginning in the fall. It's not a big loss, to be honest - I feel like I've been watching out of sheer inertia in recent months.

To get to the point of why this is on this blog, one aspect that has intrigued me about the show, and about the soap genre - since Passions is one of only two daytime soaps that I have ever watched (Santa Barbara in the late 80s was the other) - is the odd juxtaposition of salaciousness and "traditional family values." The characters in Harmony espouse incredibly conservative if not absolutely dated perspectives on just about everything - ostensibly to mirror the opinions and values of the perceived audience, ignoring the younger college-aged fans and focusing on the imagined stay-at-home middle-American housewives. So, everyone, except for the really EVIL characters are Catholic, and they spend a lot of time in church with the blind yet preternaturally insightful priest, Father Lonegan. Characters express shock and outrage at the merest suggestion of abortion and drug use, but paradoxically engage in all sorts of other illicit activity, while reveling in pre- and extra-marital sex, divorces, children out of wedlock, etc.

So when the show started flirting with gay themes and characters, I was really intrigued if Passions would fall into a similar reactionary response, or actually try to do something interesting. Of course, this is a soap opera - I didn't expect much. But I have been really surprised at some questionable choices the writers have made.

I should note that a big part of what influenced me in writing about this stems from a couple of issues that arose from programming at NewFest this year - 1) a misperception that NewFest was being insensitive by placing the documentary On the Downlow in the same program with another documentary called Happy Hookers, and 2) an accusation that NewFest was aiding and abetting transphobic hate speech by showing a short satiric film called The Gendercator.

On the Downlow is a sensitive and balanced examination of African-American men who maintain secretive relationships with other men but do not publicly embrace a "gay" identity for complex socio-cultural reasons. Happy Hookers is about men in India who sleep with other men for money - some of the men are avowedly gay, while others are only "gay for pay" - but all express a divergent sexuality in a society in which homosexuality is still criminal. The two films were shown together because they were linked thematically, but some critics (who had not seen the films, it should be stated) thought that NewFest was suggesting that all DL men are prostitutes - which was absolutely not the case. On the Downlow's director, Abigail Child, attended the very well-received screening and agreed that the films' pairing made sense.

The Gendercator is a small film which generated much more attention than its director, Catherine Crouch, expected it to. A short science-fiction satire in which a butch woman in the summer of love crosses over with the Rip Van Winkle fable and awakens in a future where men must be butch and women must be femme, it reflects Crouch's anxieties about her own status as a butch lesbian given the growing visibility of transgender identities. Sight unseen, some activists called the film transphobic and demanded that film festivals pull it from our line-ups. NewFest decided to let audiences judge the film's merits or faults for themselves rather than censor a lesbian filmmaker's work. At our screenings, audiences were able to engage Crouch directly, challenge her on her assumptions, and gain a better understanding of why she made the film - whether they agreed with her views or not.

What does this have to do with Passions? Keep reading.

While a couple of zany recurring comic relief characters on Passions have been revealed as lesbians (Edna, an annoying psychotic crone prone to wetting herself, and Norma, an annoying psychotic ax-wielding Norman Bates wannabe), beyond these throwaways, the show has dealt with queer issues in a curious way - by linking them almost exclusively with race. The first regular cast member to reveal same-sex leanings: Simone, the younger daughter of the African-American Russell family, who spent most of her previous storylines acting the Ethel to white girl Kay Bennett's Lucy, pining mostly obliviously over older sister Whitney's beau, Chad, and generally living in Whitney's shadow. Simone leaves small-town Harmony to deal with her heartbreak over Chad, returning some time later to reveal that she didn't go far, having spent time on the wrong side of town with a vaguely Latina(?) lover, Rae. To be honest, despite the dubious suggestion of "turning-lesbian-after-being-screwed-over-by-a-man," Simone has been handled fairly well - she dealt with coming out to a hostile parent, worried about being rejected by her religion, and is actually a little more interesting than she ever was before - though she is still pretty much a second banana. The show even won a GLAAD award for Simone's storyline.

I'd be very surprised if that organization would want to support the storylines that have stemmed from the second queer cast member, even though they apparently consulted with the writers when formulating his story: Chad "I'm not gay" Harris, the illegitimate offspring of evil white patriarch Alistair Crane and Liz, the crazy black half-sister of Eve Russell, Whitney and Simone's mom. Actually, poor Chad has had a rough time of it - he grew up on the streets of LA before heading to Harmony to seek out his unknown parents. He fell in love with wannabe Serena Williams tennis pro Whitney almost immediately, and had a baby with her before he was led to believe he was Whitney's long-lost half-brother, the son of sometimes reformed, sometimes evil Julian Crane (Alistair's son) and Eve Russell (Whitney's mom, the respected doctor who years ago used to be a drug addicted whore/nightclub singer). So, while he thought he had committed incest and was separated from Whitney (she temporarily became a nun to deal with her incest guilt), he was seduced by another man, Vincent, also African-American. Even after his true parentage was revealed, which allowed him to get back with his baby's mama, Whitney, Chad couldn't help himself from continuing his "down low" affair with Vincent. When this affair is revealed to the viewers and to the other characters (the show excruciatingly teased the identity of Chad's lover for months - slowly showing us that the lover was - gasp! - a man!, before finally revealing him as Vincent) Chad adamantly and repeatedly denies that he is gay - "it's just sex" - but Whitney won't have anything to do with him, though she's already pregnant with his second child (don't any of these characters believe in birth control?).

And that brings us to our third queer cast member: Vincent. Oh boy, Vincent. Where to even start with this one? First of all, Vincent is super ugly, with a really weird face and odd hairline. He is introduced as a smarmy tabloid journalist trying to break scandals about various Harmony residents. For awhile he is said to be dating Valerie, Chad's African-American executive assistant and former lover, but eventually what he really seems to want is Chad's body. It should come as no surprise that if a light-skinned black man like Vincent is running around Harmony, he is obviously the missing son of Eve Russell and Julian Crane. Oh, if it were only that easy...

For months, Harmony has been terrorized by an unnamed blackmailer who dresses as a masked half-man, half-woman sideshow freak, split right down the middle (wearing half male suit, half female dress). I must confess that I have probably fast forwarded through most of the episodes over the past few months, so I may have missed some information on this character, but to me, s/he was being presented as some kind of transgender or intersexed character. That other characters refer to the blackmailer as "it," "he/she freak," and even "thing" remains amazing to me - whether transphobia is even in the writers' limited vocabulary or not, their handling of this character seems incredibly insensitive given recent mainstreaming of trans identities in films like Transamerica and in shows like Ugly Betty. Despite this, I'm not aware of trans activists decrying the show like some have with The Gendercator.

Anyway, the blackmailer has been wreaking general havoc - sneaking around Harmony behind the scenes, getting our heroes framed for crimes s/he has committed, breaking up relationships, murdering people. S/he has seemed monomanically focused on winning the affections of Ethan Winthrop, the white boy hero with very little connection to the Russells, but who used to think he was Julian Crane's son with resident bitch, "Poison" Ivy Winthrop Crane. The blackmailer has been alternately menacing and a sniveling, pathetic whiner when confronted by other characters about his "sickness" and his bad childhood upbringing.

Very recently, the blackmailer reveals to Eve Russell that he is in fact Vincent, her son with Julian Crane, and that everything he has done as the blackmailer has been to get revenge on them - he seduced Chad to get back at Whitney for having the life as Eve's child that he didn't have, he killed Simone's lover Rae to punish Simone for the same reason, and he will continue to cause trouble to destroy the lives and families of both of his parents. No, it doesn't really make a lot of sense - like much about this show, it seems that the writers often make things up as they go along - who knows if this was the plan all along or not?

And, to make things even worse, there is a fairly blatant suggestion that Vincent is not just Vincent but also has a split personality/identity as Valerie, his supposed ex-girlfriend and Chad's ex-lover. While Valerie has apparently been attacked by Vincent a few times (she broke up with him after his DL affair with Chad was revealed), they have never been shown on-screen together, and I suppose this would somehow explain his half-man/half-woman disguise. Ugh. The writers will probably use this in some outlandish way to "straighten out" Chad's sexuality.

So, where am i going with all of this? I'm not sure, exactly, but i just find it curious that seemingly very little has been written about Passions' bizarre intermingling of race, queer sexuality, and miscegenation (both Chad and Vincent are the offspring of black mothers and white fathers), or about the incredibly backwards-thinking that has led to yet another example of a villainous transgender character that no one seems to have any trouble referring to with transphobic slurs. While the show doesn't do very well in the ratings, and is part of a denegrated genre that obviously doesn't engender a lot of criticism, it does appear on one of the major broadcast networks and reaches a hell of a lot more people than many of the films that appear at niche film festivals like NewFest. A show like Passions could arguably influence a lot more people's impressions of LGBT sexuality and identity, chiefly because, unlike an LGBT festival, it doesn't preach to the converted. The majority of the audience for gay festivals, or for a gay channel like Logo, are LGBT people - while the vast majority of the audience of a mainstream show like Passions will reflect the rest of the mainstream population and be overwhelmingly non-gay. What are audiences taking away from the confused presentation of Vincent's sexuality, gender, and identity? From Chad's DL dalliance and his sometimes blatantly homophobic comments, issued to defend his stated heterosexuality? And why aren't LGBT activists weighing in? Sure, it's not a very popular show, but someone has to have noted these goings on... If people were able to get up in arms about On the Downlow and The Gendercator, I wonder what they would make of Passions?