THE DYNASTY DECADE
Daytime soap operas traditionally feature middle to upper middle-class characters, most of whom are white-collar professionals (doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, etc.). In addition, there are typically one or two super rich families under the thumb of a ruthless patriarchal figure, like
All My Children’s
Palmer Cortlandt and Adam Chandler, Sr.;
One Life to Live’s
Victor Lord and Asa Buchanan;
General Hospital’s
Edward Quartermaine; and
Days of Our Lives’s
Victor Kirakis. These men wield their power over the other characters because they control the family fortune. They have
some
good qualities, like loyalty when it comes to their families and an occasional pang of philanthropy when the local hospital needs a new wing. Still, most of the rich white old men who reside in TV towns like Pine Valley, Llanview, Port Charles, and Salem usually act out of their own self-interest or misguided paternalism, which frequently puts them at odds with their loved ones.
In the 1980s, the effects of wealth and power on the nuclear family became a familiar theme on daytime soap operas as well as the decade’s new crop of prime time soaps. The “fun” was put back into dysfunctional with the premiere of Dallas in April of 1978, and continued with the success
of Dynasty
and
Falcon
Crest. All three series benefitted from the change in America’s economic climate during the 1980s, a period of prosperity the country hadn’t seen since the Eisenhower era. As middle and upper-middle class Americans were transformed into a race of conspicuous consumers, those who were really, truly rich became even richer. As for the rest of us, who were denied the luxury of driving up the stock market to the breaking point (on October 17, 1987, a.k.a. Black Monday), we could live tele-vicariously through the Ewings and the Carringtons.
As on daytime soaps, the patriarchs who resided over prime time had the family’s fortune and good name to protect. Even the slightest blemish on the family name could put the family’s reputation and social standing in jeopardy. So what better blemish on the family name than a son who’s not exactly “the marrying kind?” (Though, as we’ll see, that’s never enough to prevent a guy on a soap opera from getting married.)
Gay characters were conspicuously absent during
Dallas’s
14-season run, but a plotline during the show’s first season (1978-1979) did feature a minor gay character, the very handsome Kit Mainwaring (Mark Wheeler), who was briefly engaged to Lucy Ewing (Charlene Tilton), niece of the nasty J.R. (Larry, Hagman). J.R. approves of the marriage, which he regards as more of a merger, because it will unite two of the city’s most powerful oil families (“Royal Marriage”). Unfortunately, Kit is a closeted homosexual, a tidbit J.R. ironically uses to blackmail him into marrying his niece. Kit decides to come out to Lucy, who protects him from J.R. by pretending to break off the engagement because of Kit’s insane jealousy. Much to J.R.’s dismay, the marriage and the merger are called off.
Although the situation is hardly original, both Lucy and J.R.’s brother Bobby (Patrick Duffy), who Kit turns to for help, are surprisingly sympathetic. When Kit tells Bobby he’s gay, Bobby is of course concerned about Lucy getting hurt. However, he makes it a point to tell Kit he respects him for having the courage to come out. (Lucy puts on a brave front, but she is so traumatized by the break-up she turns to pills.) Bobby confronts J.R. about his scheme and tells him Kit has “a lot of guts” and is more of a man than him. Surprisingly, J.R. displays no signs of homophobia. His motives are, as always, purely financial; he is simply treating Kit the way he does anyone who stands between him and a fortune.
Kit is afraid to come out because he’s a member of a wealthy, prominent family that is unlikely to accept his homosexuality.
Dallas
fans never actually find out what happened to him, but there was another rich gay kid waiting in the wings, ready to disgrace his family’s name. When
Dynasty
premiered on January 12, 1981, with a three-hour episode, America received their first introduction to the Carringtons, another rich and powerful TV family who reside in a modest 48-room mansion in Denver, Colorado.
The premiere centers on the wedding of the Carrington family patriarch, Blake (John Forsythe), and his second wife, Krystle (Linda Evans). The pilot also introduces viewers to Blake’s 23-year-old son, Steven (Al Corley). When Steven returns home for the big event, Blake tells his globe trotting son he wants him to start working at Denver-Carrington. But Steven, a liberal Democrat, disapproves of his father’s business practices. (He accuses him of selling out the country by conspiring with the Arabs to fix oil prices.) Their ideological differences are not the real issue, however. Blake knows Steven is gay and, although at first he appears to have some insight into what he refers to as his son’s “sexual dysfunction,” it’s soon clear he’s not open to the possibility of having a gay son permanently.
BLAKE: Steven, I am about as Freudian as you can hope for in a capitalist, exploiter of the working classes. When I am not busy grinding the faces of the poor, I read a little. I understand about sublimation. I understand how you can try to hide sexual dysfunction behind hostility toward a father. I’m even prepared to say that I can find a little homosexual experimentation acceptable just as long as you didn’t bring home with you. But don’t you see son, I’m offering you the chance to straighten yourself out.
STEVEN:
Straighten myself out?
I’m not sure I know what that means. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to. And I’m not sure if I want to.
BLAKE: Of course, I forgot. The American Psychiatric Association have decided it’s no longer a disease. It’s too bad, we could have endowed a foundation. The Steven Carrington Institute for the Treatment and Study of Faggotry.
6
Blake’s disdain for his son’s lifestyle culminates in the accidental death of Steven’s lover, Ted Dinard (Mark Withers). Upon walking in on Steven giving Ted a goodbye hug, an outraged Blake pushes Ted, who hits his head on the fireplace and dies. The season concludes with Blake’s trial and the entrance of the prosecution’s star witness, whose identity is revealed in the second season opener as Blake’s ex-wife, Alexis Morrell Carrington Colby (Joan Collins).
In the second season, the producers proceeded to “soften” Blake, who receives two years probation for Ted’s “accidental” death. The senior Carrington is still a ruthless capitalist, but when the five o’clock whistle blows, he turns back into a loving, caring husband and father. Unfortunately, he still disapproves of his son’s “lifestyle,” so he has no choice but to do the right thing and cut him out of his will and take him to court to gain custody of his grandson, Steven’s son Danny. It would take the death of Steven’s lover, Luke Fuller (
Once and Again’s
Billy Campbell) — in the bloody massacre that put a crimp in sister Amanda’s (Catherine Oxenberg) Moldavian wedding — for Blake to start accepting his son’s homosexuality.
Steven had the potential to be TV’s first bisexual series regular, but instead of being sexually attracted to both sexes, he seems to be in a perpetual state of sexual confusion. Steven is also continually deceived, blackmailed, and victimized by his father, brother Adam (Gordon Thomson), and ex-wife Sammy Jo (Heather Locklear). While he is capable of committing the occasional act of heroism (like rescuing the family from Krystle’s ex-lover), his character, on the whole, is far too passive and bland to sustain viewers’ interest (including the gay ones).
If audiences, particularly gay men, continued to tune in to
Dynasty
(in the 1980s, Wednesday was
Dynasty
night in most gay bars around the country), it had more to do with Steven’s mother, America’s numero uno rich bitch, Alexis, deliciously played by Collins. Alexis became a bona-fide gay icon because everything about her was excessive and over-the-top, particulary her wealth, thirst for power, and wardrobe.
It’s not surprising the three networks tried to capitalize on the success of
Dallas
and
Dynasty
by adding more soaps onto their prime time line-up. Only two series found an audience:
Falcon
Crest (1981-1990), starring Oscar-winner Jane Wyman as the owner of a family vineyard; and
Knot’s Landing
(1979-1993), the long-running spin-off of
Dallas
about the lives of California suburbanites. Although neither series featured gay characters, several of the short-lived clones included a regular or recurring gay male character, typically a friend and confidante of the series’s heroine.
The success of the 1982 miniseries
Bare Essence
spawned a short-lived series in the spring of 1983 starring
General Hospital’s
Genie Francis as perfume maven and heiress Patricia “Tyger” Hayes. Every heiress needs a gay friend, and Tyger has Robert Spencer (played by Morgan Stevens in the miniseries, Ted LePlat in the series), who dates a professional football player named Tim (Jim Negele).
Paper Dolls
(1984), another miniseries spin-off set in the model and fashion industry came complete with its very own gay hairdresser, Conrad (Jeffrey Richman). Gay male characters fulfilled similar roles in other miniseries. In
Sins
(1986), Joan Collins plays Helen Junot, a French woman who runs a fashion magazine empire and seeks revenge on a man who destroyed her family during the Nazi occupation. Helen befriends a Black American photographer named Jacques “Jake” Danvers (William Allen Young), whose photography contributes to her success. As Keith Howes, author of
Broadcasting It,
observes, even though his main purpose is to help “set the heroine’s career in motion...it is rare for a black gay character — ‘escaping from a number of prejudices’ — to be presented in such a debonair, positive way.”
7
Howes also points out that Jake not only has his own theme music but an off-screen sex life, with a member of his laboratory staff and possibly with his “sexy assistant, played by Timothy Wood.”
8
TEN REASONS WHY GAY MEN LOVED
DYNASTY
1. Alexis vs. Krystle, particularly the cat fights involving mud or water.
2. Their gowns (and those shoulder pads!) designed by Nolan Miller.
3. The characters had names like Dex, Fallon, Caress, Kirby, and Dominique. Just like real people.
4. During its nine-season run, the cast featured Helmut Berger (Peter de Vilbis), Ali McGraw (Lady Ashley Mitchell), George Hamilton (Joel Abrigore), Diahann Carroll (Dominique Deveraux), and Rock Hudson (Daniel Reece) in supporting roles.
5. Even the producers were the first to admit when the show started to go too far (i.e., the Moldavian Massacre of 1985).
6. All imitations paled in comparison. (Remember
Bare Essence? Berrervger’s? Flamingo Road? The Colbys? King’s Crossing? The Hamptons
?)
7. The Carrington Mansion, the exteriors of which were shot in two different California locations (San Francisco and Pasadena).
8. When roles were recast, no one seemed to notice that Fallon (Pamela Sue Martin) disappeared and returned with a British accent (Emma Samms); Amanda lost her British accent when Catherine Oxenberg was replaced by Karen Cellini; and Steven (Al Corley) grew two feet when he had plastic surgery and was replaced by Jack Coleman, only to look again like Al Corley for
Dynasty
—
The Reunion,
the 1991 ABC miniseries.
9. The jewelry! The jewelry!
10. Big hair. Lots of it.
Lesbians were also included in the fun. One of the most provocative made-for-television movies of the 1970s,
In the Glitter Palace,
has enough decadence, vice, and violence for an entire season of
Dynasty.
The two-hour film stars
Medical Center’s
Chad Everett as Vincent Halloran, a lawyer hired by his ex-girlfriend, Ellen Lange (Barbara Hershey), to defend her lesbian lover, Casey Walker (Diana Scarwid). Casey is falsely accused of murdering Norma Addison (Gloria LeRoy), who is blackmailing Casey and several other lesbians. In addition to Ellen and Casey, the film contains an assortment of lesbian characters, including Daisy Dolon (Carole Cook), a gay-club entertainer; Ricky (Lynn Marta), a mother hiding a child she lost to her husband in a custody battle; Grace Mayo (Tisha Serling), who is paid by Norma to seduce her victims; and Kendis Winslow (Salome Jens), a judge also being blackmailed by Norma.
In a feature article in
The Advocate,
Newt Dieter, who consulted on the film with fellow Gay and Lesbian Media Task Force member Sheila Bob, outlined their role in working on the script from its initial conception to the production:
We point out things that are wrong. We try to put some life into a piece of work from a gay perspective. We try to help non-gay writers, producers, directors, actors and actresses understand a bit of what it means to be gay, to walk in our shoes...Our principal goal is our own elimination. There should be no need for a Gay Media Task Force. If we’re successful, there won’t be.
9
Los Angeles Times
critic Kevin Thomas was apparently impressed with the Task Force’s work. In his review, he described the lesbian characters in this “standard melodrama” as “recognizable humans.” They come from all walks of life and then range from saints to sinners, from the successful to the tragic — just like everyone else.“ He argues the film’s ”virtue” lies in the fact that ”it has the effect of raising consciousness about the plight of gay people without being unduly preachy.“
10