Say goodbye to Llanview: Sealed with a Kish

Say hello and goodbye to what was once Llanview's resident gay couple, Kish. (Kyle + [Oliver] Fish = Kish.) They didn't last long (maybe a year, from 2009 to spring of 2010), but what a story, or a series of stories, as One Life to Live at the time gayed out in a pretty big way.

We had gotten to know Fish (Scott Evans) over time as a member of the Llanview Police Department. Later, Kyle (Brett Claywell) moved to town, as the brother of another character, crazy-woman-with-a-vendetta Rebecca Lewis. It took a while for the reveal that Kyle and Fish knew each other before, had known each other quite well in fact, in college. But by the time we figured all that out, Fish had already become involved with the feisty, gorgeous Layla Williamson, as well as the stripper-with-a-heart-of-brass, Stacy Morasco.

Meanwhile, Dorian Kramer (Robin Strasser) would run for the office of mayor of Llanview and would actively court Llanview's gay vote, conducting a mass "wedding-in" for local gay and lesbian couples, herself marrying her (fake) female lover. It's all in a day's politics in Llanview.

When thugs threatened the gay wedding, Fish would fight back and come out. Layla and he would break up, he'd learn that he was the baby daddy, he'd patch things up with Kyle, and together they would go off to raise their baby, after Stacy drowned. All in the space of a year or so. Certainly much quicker than the Luke and Noah (aka, "Nuke") relationship played out on As the World Turns. Man, it took Oakdale's resident gay boys forever to have kiss and have sex, while in Llanview we learned that Fish was a top within a year!

So where are they now? Somewhere in Llanview raising a baby, working the beat, and playing doctor (Kyle was a physician, if I recall correctly). Various rumors surround the denouement, that the ratings for the show dropped during this era, perhaps because of the front-burner gay storylines (and it was gay, gay, gay, front and center, there for a while, I'll admit), that the actors had crazy salary demands, or that they just started showing up late to the set, a serious no-no in budget-pressed daytime.

I have no idea where the truth lies. In her book, Afternoon Delight: Why Soaps Still Matter, Carolyn Hinsey argues all of this, plus the "hard fit" for gay couples, especially gay male couples, in a female-focused medium. That, essentially, no one wants to see gay men fall in love on daytime.

Hmmm, I just don't know. Here's one gay man who loves soaps, and I know a number of others who do, too. So there's one audience for this kind of love, and one that's been there for a long time, whether the shows acknowledged it or not. And I know a number of women that are comfortable with gay men, even as fantasy romantic heroes. They may all be in Japan, but they exist, nonetheless. Besides, Oliver Fish's coming-out story was dramatic and tortured (his family disowned him at one point, and Kyle and he were lovesick for one another for a long time), and he had a number of entanglements and friendships with Llanview residents to keep story moving along, in my opinion, for at least a while longer.

Plus, to me, in a medium that is currently "challenged" and likely to disappear from American screens altogether in the next couple of years, wouldn't you want to hook and keep viewers? Whether by acknowledging this particular, hidden minority in your audience or making your show more consistently inclusive toward all minority characters (which was a founding tenet of One Live to Live, a racially and economically diverse cast, with this diversity often playing out in the storylines, when it launched in 1968), the time would seem to be now (or more accurately, yesterday) to take action.

Or is that soap audiences (and the companies that own the shows) are too conservative and Kish was just too hot for daytime?

I guess we'll never know, because OLTL ends in just a couple more days.

So goodbye, Kish. You meant a lot to me while you were around. You touched my heart and stimulated my mind in a way that no other characters, no other show, has ever managed to do so deeply.