A New Gay Character for Daytime

Soap reporter Nelson Branco recently broke the news that the top rated soap in daytime TV, The Young and the Restless, was finally going to be adding their very first LGBT character. There was a lot of speculation online as to who the character would be (many people seemed to suspect that Mac Browning, now played by out actress Clementine Ford, would be announcing that she was a lesbian after her recent return to town) or if Y&R would actually even go there at all.

Well, the news has finally been confirmed, along with the identity of Genoa City's first gay citizen: hunky lawyer Rafael Torres, played by Yani Gellman.

This is actually something of a throwback to the pre-Bianca era, when the few gay characters on daytime were written as stand alone individuals, not really connected to any of the show's core families, and could thus be easily written out of the show once they'd served their purpose (which usually just meant coming out and then fading away).

Since the groundbreaking character of Bianca on All My Children, LGBT characters on soaps have, for the most part, been members of core families: Luke on ATWT, the blink and you missed him Lucas on General Hospital, and even Olivia & Natalia on Guiding Light have their connections to the Spaulding family through marriages and a child. Non-connected LGBT characters these days are usually introduced to date the established gay characters: Noah on ATWT, Maggie & Reese on AMC.

Rafael, as far as I'm aware, is not connected to any of the other characters in Genoa City and isn't at this point expected to be dating anyone who is. This worries me a bit, since it would make him a very easy character to ignore or drop altogether.

While I'm very much in favor of LGBT characters in daytime being legacy characters (I'm still waiting impatiently for a gay Horton or Brady on Days of Our Lives), having this latest character unconnected to anyone doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I have to wonder, though, how far they're intending to go with Rafael. There hasn't been any mention of a love interest yet, for instance, which could be a bad sign. There's no indication of what kind of story the show is intending to tell with the character, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see how much praise Y&R truly deserves.

Rafael will be coming out soon on the show and I'll write more about it as the story progresses.