Neighbours Attempts To Out-Gay Home & Away
I cannot help but feel it would be remiss of Defamer Australia to miss out on covering Channel Ten soap Neighbours’ attempt to compete with rival Home & Away’s pink cred just because it is an obvious and slightly pathetic grab for attention that makes me a little sad inside. So here we go!
Regular readers would be up to date with the goings on in Summer Bay of late. Although the acting could have been better at times, Home & Away actually made a decent effort to display a normal (by soap standards anyway) blossoming relationship between two people who just happened to be women. Sure, eventually one of the ladies slept with a man and the troubled couple are now on a three month break, but it was still rather ground breaking stuff for Australian television. Just ask the conservative family groups who complained loudly and bitterly about the storyline.
And whatever Summer Bay can do, Erinsborough can do better! Except probably not better.
Women locking lips is the new trend on G-rated television with Neighbours set to follow rival soap Home and Away with some girl-on-girl action.
Thanks to the controversy – and publicity – Home and Away garnered with the lesbian storyline between policewoman Charlie Buckton (Esther Anderson) and fisherwoman Joey Collins (Kate Bell), Channel 10’s soapie Neighbours is preparing to do the same.
Later this month Donna (Margot Robbie) and Sunny (Hany Lee Choi) share what producers bill as an “impulse kiss” after a love letter scandal is exposed.
Hmmm, Home & Away writers spend weeks (an eternity in TV land!) building up to the first kiss between Charlie and Joey, but the dudes from Neighbours are just going to bang an “impulse kiss” into the middle of a show? Oh lord.
Neighbours, I loved you SO MUCH for SO LONG, but this simply makes me sad. It’s like when everyone joined Facebook, and suddenly MySpace was all “Oh shit!” and then offered its users the ability to write a rubbish status update where the faulty “[Name] is in your extended network” used to be on a profile page.
Stop trying so hard! Or better yet, make a cast member a full-time gay on the show. Yes, have a homosexualist move to Ramsay Street. Don’t turn them straight. Don’t make them crazy. Don’t make them tormented (or if they are, it’s not about being gay). Give them a love interest. Allow them to stay on the screen for more than six weeks.
Then, and only then, will you have successfully out-gayed Home & Away. I wish you the best of luck, Neighbours.
Comments
But Neighbours already did this? Years ago with Skye and Lana?
Furthermore, it ALWAYS seems to be between two females, and they never remain gay either.
There needs to be a gay male on the show… or even have one of the young guys on the show start to go through what young boys do when going through their late teens and coming to the realization of their homosexuality, everything from the ecstasy of the first kiss to the social discrimination, to the coming out, possibly even temporary disbandment of their family (of course in which time they live with carl and susan) to the families acceptance, and ultimately love and the political problems with homosexual partnerships in Australia.
It’s the same tired love stories on that show over and over and over again for so long – with the occasional lesbian kiss – they need something out there!
More reasons why I have no telly.
Do I miss it? Never. Life is great without a box tying me to a couch! I don’t need this trash to make me feel good or interested. Most people are prisoners to the networks.
It’s invariably about girls kissing. Never about boys. Which means it’s not about ‘gay’ – it’s about s*x. Or tittilation.
I also think H&A did a decent job, it had faults but still felt like progress. So to hear that Neighbours will just phone in Katy Perry’s liner notes is disappointing. Also, one brief kissing scene doesn’t allow enough time for me to properly obsess and project my feelings onto fictional characters.
This is yet another sad indication of how Australia soaps are avoiding male-male kissing and going for the much safer female-female ones. As a gay man, I’ll avoid Neighbors.
Why is Neighbors and Home and Away not showing male-male kisses? Why are they only showing gay kisses if they’re female? Seems that there’s a double standard there. Hope the gay community notes the double standard.
Why do we need to have Gay characters anyway, the percentage of gay people in society is less than 10% but every show HAS to have a gay element. No im not a homophobe, i just think a show without gay people would be realistic.
Yes, just like a show without Aboriginals, or Asians, or Arabic people or Africans etc would be realistic. We are supposed to be a fully integrated, multi-cultural melting pot. These shows should be representing Australian society, not straight, white Australian, middle class suburbanites exclusively.
Hey, really think they need a gay male character on the show. Seriously, I’m sick of random girl-girl kissing. They need a teen boy, that’s coming into his homosexuality. And they need him on the show for more then a little guest period. <3