Alina Adams has worked for ABC Daytime, Procter & Gamble Productions, and the Daytime Emmy Awards. Her tie-in novels, Oakdale Confidential (As the World Turns) and Jonathan’s Story (Guiding Light) were New York Times bestsellers, while The Man From Oakdale won a Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. She wrote the officially sanctioned continuations of Another World with Another World Today, and Guiding Light with Mindy’s Twitter. She currently writes for SoapHub.com, which originally serialized her May 2025 historical fiction novel, Go On Pretending, which is set in the 1950s world of radio soaps as they transition to television, and what that means for the show’s African-American leading man. Read more at AlinaAdams.com.
It was the summer of 1982 and on the ABC soap opera, All My Children, Jenny and Jesse had run away to New York City. Jenny was escaping the shame of being a rapist’s daughter. Jesse had been (wrongly and maliciously) accused of rape, himself. They moved in with the friendly Mrs. Gonzales, and struggled to make new lives for themselves, with little money but lots of dreams. Jenny was played by the unspeakably luminous 22-year-old Kim Delaney (later of NYPD Blue and CSI: Miami). Jesse was the ridiculously gorgeous Darnell Williams (later of Felicity). They were so beautiful, individually and together, the chemistry was so strong, and it was so obvious they cared deeply for each other, that then 11-year-old me patiently sat in front of the television set, chin on hands, waiting for them to fall in love.
They did not fall in love.
At the same time, on the other side of the country (I was in San Francisco, he was in New York City), my future husband also sat watching All My Children with his mom. He knew that Jenny and Jesse would not fall in love.
That’s because my husband was African-American. I was a newly arrived immigrant from the Soviet Union. I knew a lot of things about how the world worked. (Being a refugee is very educational on a variety of topics.) But I did not know that because Jenny was white and Jesse was Black, that romance couldn’t happen. Not in that place. Not in that time. Not in that genre.
Soaps had only hired their first African-American contract players less than two decades earlier. The record is murky on whether that would have been Rex Ingram in 1962 for the short-lived A Brighter Day, or Billy Dee Williams and Cicely Tyson in 1966 for the long-running Guiding Light. In either case, Black characters were kept to their own stories … and their own love interests.
In 1968, One Life to Live aired their groundbreaking story of light-skinned Carla (Ellen Holly) passing for white. Any suggestion of interracial romance with Ed (Emmy winner Al Freeman Jr.) was quickly squashed when it was revealed both were Black.
Days of Our Lives made a more genuine attempt in 1975 when the white son of the show’s heroine was presumed dead and ended up hiding out with an African-American family outside of town. David (Richard Guthrie) fell in love with Valerie (Tina Andrews). According to Andrews, once the characters hooked up, her fan mail went from “100 percent positive to largely negative and hostile,” prompting the romance to be kiboshed, and her firing.
This extreme viewer response cautioned soaps to steer clear of interracial relationships for the next decade. In 1987 on General Hospital, another legacy character, Tom (David Wallace), was keeping a secret from his family about his new wife, Simone (Laura Carrington). Surprise: Simone was Black! In 1992, when African-American attorney Jessica (Tamara Tunie) wed Scotsman Duncan (Michael Swan) on As the World Turns, their family and friends objected, including those who insisted they weren’t racist – they were just “worried about the children.”
The late Kristoff St. John claimed that when his The Young and the Restless character, African-American corporate executive Neil, was dating Victoria (Heather Tom), the white daughter of his boss, in 1998, Y&R was deluged with negative mail. He called it “the biggest horse pill in quite a while for this show.”
As an avid soap watcher, I’d followed all of these storylines, and a handful more, when I met my husband in 1997. Based on what I’d internalized, I understood that all interracial relationships suffered from a single conflict: Race.
That’s it. Whether from the inside, from the outside, from family, from workmates, from society at large, that was their exclusive source of strife.
I don’t think I’m doing interracial relationships right.
My husband and I have been married for 26 years. We’re pretty chill, most of the time. Which isn’t to say we don’t have disagreements. We have disagreements.
Our biggest one was about letting our middle child drop out of high school. More typically, we argue about whether a hood qualifies as a hat when it’s below freezing, about the right way to stack dirty dishes in the sink, and, most recently, whose fault was it that our broken stove was removed from the house with all of our baking pans and sheets still inside?
None of these issues have to do with race. (OK, one of my husband’s chief objections to our younger son dropping out of high school was, “Now you’ll just be another Black man with a GED. Great life choice!” But I didn’t disagree with him on that. I just thought we should allow him to do it, anyway, and face the consequences of his actions.) Soaps had led me to believe all our problems would be about race.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how I had great hopes for CBS’ newest soap opera, Beyond the Gates. It’s the first daytime drama in years to be both written and executive produced by women. It is also the only show to launch with a Black family at the center. As a result, the show features two prominent interracial couples: Vanessa (Lauren Buglioli) and Doug (Jason Graham), and Martin (Brandon Clayborn) and Smitty (Mike Manning).
Martin and Smitty’s central conflict is that Martin is a control freak who demands his investigative reporter husband stay home, do the laundry and take care of the kids, to the point where Martin turned down a job offer for Smitty without even telling him it came in. Martin is a congressman who wants to run for president, and thus he needs his picture perfect family to be just so. Martin is the worst. But not because of race.
Vanessa and Doug’s problem is that Doug is addicted to gambling. He spends all his nights at a mobster’s illegal casino, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars he neglects to tell his wife about. Doug’s lengthy absences – and his furtiveness – leave Vanessa with no choice but to sleep with her personal trainer, and to flirt with the mobster she doesn’t realize her husband is in hock to. Vanessa and Doug have problems. But they’re not about race.
And, in my opinion, that’s a good thing. We may be repeatedly told that to ignore a person’s race is to ignore their life experience and unique perspective. But a relationship isn’t a public policy paper. A relationship is its own one-of-a-kind, constantly evolving thing. Partners bring their lifetime of baggage into it. That baggage may include race. But it also includes so, so much more.
When I began watching soaps, I was advised that interracial relationships have only one thing to fear. Being in an interracial relationship has taught me that numerous things can go wrong, and to just brace myself for one of them is to risk missing pretty much everything else.
I still think Jenny and Jesse would have made a gorgeous couple, though. And if she’d stayed in NYC with him instead of going home to her boring high-school boyfriend, Greg, she might not have ended up dying in a jet-ski accident. A lesson I heed to this day.
