From Billy Douglas to Will Horton: An Evolution of Gay and Lesbian Youth on American Soap Operas
Actor Ryan Phillippe (left) as Billy Douglas on ABC’s “One Life to Live” in 1993; actors Chandler Massey (center) and Freddie Smith (right) as Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis on NBC’s “Days of our Lives” in 2018.
Visibility for leading gay and lesbian characters on American television has increased to the point of ubiquity since the early 1990s, thanks in large part to daytime serials.
Generation X defining young adult nighttime serials of the early 2000s like “Queer as Folk” (2000-2005, Showtime), “The L Word,” (2004-2009, Showtime) and “Noah’s Arc” (2005-2006, Logo) only made it to television after the pioneering casting of openly gay Cuban-American HIV/AIDS advocate Pedro Zamora in 1994 as a member of MTV’s “The Real World: San Francisco.”
Zamora's brief life and public AIDS activism as he succumbed to complications earned him public recognition by 42nd U.S. President Bill Clinton when he died hours after the airing of its last episode at the age of 22.
Just one year before Pedro Zamora, 18-year-old Gen X actor Ryan Phillippe (born 1974) made his final regular appearance in what is considered to be the first well-rounded portrayal of gay youth on American television as Llanview High School senior and incoming Yale freshman Billy Douglas on Agnes Nixon’s “One Life to Live,” which premiered on ABC in 1968.
Actor Ryan Phillippe portrays Billy Douglas on ABC daytime series “One Life to Live” (1968-2013) in 1992.
In the nearly three decades since Phillippe’s Billy Douglas appeared on ABC, millennial actor Chandler Massey (born 1990) has earned three consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards playing legacy character role Will Horton on NBC’s “Days of our Lives,” created by the Corday family and first aired in 1965.
Will, who eventually comes out as gay, is born onscreen in 1995 as great-grandson to original series leads Tom and Alice Horton (Macdonald Carey, Frances Reid). He eventually marries in the genre’s first same-sex wedding and fathers a daughter, Arianna Horton, with best friend Gabi Hernandez (Camila Banus).
The groundbreaking nature of teen actor Phillippe’s Billy and the character’s age as a high school student presented difficulties for “One Life to Live” and its headwriter Michael Malone.
Malone and the show endured a prejudiced backlash from audience members in the form of hate mail and threats from national advertisers, even after the galvanizing 1990 HIV/AIDS death of 18-year-old Indiana high school student Ryan White, who contracted the illness from a blood transfusion at the age of 13. The reaction prompted the show to pull the character and never mention it onscreen again.
The cultural impact of the one-year story arc of “One Life to Live’s” Billy beginning in 1992 and nearly three-decade long evolution of “Days of our Lives’” Will through 2021 reflects the growing cultural acceptance of gay people and LGBT culture in American society since the late 20th century.
Following the notorious 1998 murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard and Hilary Swank’s Oscar-winning portrayal of a butch transman in the 1999 film “Boys Don’t Cry,” American television and film realized a renaissance in programming targeted to LGBT people.
Agnes Nixon’s “All My Children,” that premiered in 1970 on ABC and featured the first abortion storyline in broadcast American serials in Susan Lucci’s Erica Kane, by the early 2000s presented the first in a series of longrunning lesbian relationship storylines with Erica’s daughter and in actress Eden Riegel’s (born 1981) portrayal of Bianca Montgomery.
Actress Eden Riegel portrays Bianca Montgomery on ABC daytime series “All My Children” (1970-2013) in 2003.
“One Life to Live” would not feature another gay character for nearly 15 years, until the show’s headwriter Ron Carlivati introduced one named Oliver Fish in 2008, a Llanview police officer played by Scott Evans, brother to actor Chris Evans.
Evans’ Fish would last two years and produce what is considered to be the first prominent gay soap opera supercouple with Kyle Lewis (Brett Claywell), “Kish.”
After the cancellation of “One Life to Live” in 2012, Carlivati would be hired by the Cordays and NBC to lead scriptwriting efforts for the network’s longtime flagship daytime drama, a couple of years after a 19-year-old Massey was cast as Will and the character was aged to young adulthood to coincide with college and a coming out storyline, in a seeming continuance of the Billy Douglas storyline from 20 years earlier but as another character.
Actors Chandler Massey and Freddie Smith portray Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis on NBC daytime drama “Days of our Lives” (1965-present) in 2012.
Chandler Massey would go on to achieve critical acclaim for his portrayal of Will in a romance with Sonny Kiriakis, played by Freddie Smith, a pairing that would culminate in the characters’ onscreen wedding in April 2014, presented a year before the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision for marriage equality.
The role televised serial dramas like soap operas have played in accelerating acceptance of gay and lesbian people in society cannot be overstated.
The major story arcs of Phillippe’s Billy and Massey’s Will, spanning the early 1990s through the middle 2010s, both helped to manifest greater understandings of gay people and their lives to their audiences in America and abroad, while fostering positive, accurate, and life-affirming representations of well-adjusted people, regardless of their sexual orientations.
