The following article appeared in the August 28, 1992 issue of
the New York Times,
accompanied by a photo of Roy Thinnes (ex-Sloan) and Wortham Krimmer
(Andrew). It
is reprinted exactly as it appeared there.
Strong
Dose of Reality for ABC's One Life To Live
by Connie Passalacqua
NEW YORK - One of TV's daytime soap operas, which daily feature
characters having
romances amid a backdrop of froth and fantasy, today injects a taste of
bitter reality.
Today and Monday, ABC's "One Life to Live" rolls out eight sections of
the Names
Project AIDS Quilt as a conclusion to a summer-long plot examining
homophobia and a
teen character's public declaration that he is gay. The AIDS quilt has
never been displayed
before in any kind of commerical or entertainment genre.
"I wanted a highly dramatic end for the homophobia story we've been doing
all summer,"
says "One Life To Live" executive producer Linda Gottlieb, who conceived
the idea of
featuring the quilt. "The quilt is a strong, powerful image. It's
visual; it's powerful; it's
easily dramatized. It's an abstraction against hatred."
But the Names Project, the San Francisco-based organization that owns the
quilt, didn't
exactly jump at the opportunity.
Andy Ilves, director of community relations for the Names Project, said
that the group
does not believe the quilt should be used commercially. There also was
concern because
the quilt is perishable, and Gottlieb wanted to shoot it outdoors, in the
yard of the Church
of Christ the King in New Vernon, NJ.
The quilt is made up of 20,000 individual cloth memorials that have been
sewn together,
each panel made by friends and family to commemorate a loved one who has
died from
AIDS. The whole quilt has only been displayed four times, in Washington,
since the
project was started in 1987. Small sections are sent throughout the
country for community
display, but only on request and only indoors, according to Ilves.
Negotiations between ABC and the Names Project finally produced
agreement. ABC
made what a network spokesman calls "a substantial contribution" to the
Names Project
and also promised on-air plugs for this year's display of the quilt in
Washington from Oct.
9-11. ABC also used 130 volunteers from the New Jersey chapter of the
Names Project as
extras during the taping.
"But what really persuaded us was when 'One Life to Live' offered us the
opportunity to
work with them on the story," Ilves said. "We didn't want [the quilt] to
be used as a
backdrop of some story that would be AIDS-phobic. And we're quite happy
with what
they've come up with."
Earlier this summer on the soap, 17-year-old Billy Douglas (Ryan
Philippe) confessed to
minister Andrew Carpenter (Wortham Krimmer) that he was gay. Billy's
parents and the
angry townspeople of Llanview, where the soap is set, charged Andrew with
having an
affair with the teenager. Stubbornly insisting on the right to privacy,
Andrew has refused
to disclose his sexual preference. Andrew has been beaten up and called
disparaging
names, and there have been several attempts to defrock him.
Simultaneously, Andrew's
father, Sloan (Roy Thinnes), has been refusing to believe that Andrew's
brother, William,
who died a year ago, was a victim of AIDS.
Two weeks ago, William's former lover came to Llanview to enlist Andrew
and Sloan's
help in adding a panel in William's memory to the AIDS quilt. Sloan
angrily refused at
first. Now, in the two-day sequence beginning today, the quilt becomes
"the means by
which Andrew and his father are reunited and the town confronts its fears
about gays,"
Gottlieb says.
Although homosexual characters have been featured previously on "All My
Children" and
"As the World Turns," neither was given as serious a spotlight as the
story of young Billy
(and the interlocking story of the minister) on "One Life To Live." "I
think this is a
breakthrough because it shows from the inside to my satisfaction what
it's like to be gay in
a hostile world," said Freeman Gunter, a managing editor of Soap Opera
Weekly and a 20-
year veteran of the gay press.
Gunter said that homosexuality is hardly ever dealt with in the soap work
because "it's
strictly a boy-girl, boy-girl world. Daytime sells romantic fantasies to
women ... The
networks are very uncomfortable with anything that upsets the audience in the
slightest."
Thus, Billy has come out, but he's yet to take a lover. His suspected
"lover," the Rev.
Andrew, has really been having a passionate affair all along with a
female character, Cassie
Callison (Laura Bonnarigo). William, the brother who is being
memorialized, was never an
on-screen character.
