Soapy! Brit soap gets a gay wedding and four days of "Nuke" kisses

While we're enjoying the first gay male kiss on As the World Turns, soap viewers in the UK have a gay wedding to anticipate on Emmerdale. It's not even the first gay wedding on a soap (as it is being reported): that honor belongs to BBC soap Doctors last April. Interestingly, from the sounds of it, Emmerdale's wedding isn't a sweet event, but one of those soapy weddings where the audience is screaming at their TVs screens "Don't do it!" One of them is falling for another guy and the wedding proposal comes as a desperate attempt to keep the relationship together.

It's interesting to see how much further UK soaps are in terms of gay visibility. From across the pond, it looks like gay relationships are pretty common in soaps like EastEnders, Coronation Street or Hollyoaks. Gay relationships have gone past being part of envelope-pushing storylines to being just as complicated and flawed as their opposite-sex romances.

However, watching the "Nuke" relationship on As the World Turns this week gives me hope. Not only did we get the fourth episode in a row to show the kiss between Luke and Noah (a nice way to signal — at the least — that our worries that the relationship would be buried didn't pan out) but the kiss has had the kind of aftermath that is the hallmark of good soap writing. After breaking from the kiss, Noah raced to meet his father and Maddie for a lunch, where he suggested that he and Maddie move in together. Maddie, who recently decided to stay in Oakdale for college so that she could stay near Noah, was quick to accept the idea. Noah, meanwhile, is noticing how his father's attitude has changed — since meeting his girlfriend, Col. Mayer has stopped pushing for Noah to join the Army where they could "make him a man," as he put it.

Yesterday, we saw a Noah confess to Luke that wanted to kiss him and that it wasn't a joke, as Noah initially tried to claim. It was another powerful scene for Van Hansis and Jake Silbermann, with the two debating whether being out was a convenience Luke could pursue but Noah couldn't. Luke is in a classic soap opera love triangle situation, where he knows that all the paths ahead of him will hurt his friend Maddie, just as he faces heartbreak himself.

We also saw Maddie's brother Henry learn about her plans to move in with Noah, prompting a heart to heart talk asking if she was moving too quickly in the relationship. Scenes like that — where an event is explored through different perspectives as the news spreads — are a key element of soap opera writing and something that ATWT has been lacking until yesterday. It's nice to see ATWT come together around one of its better storylines.

Still, considering how excited we are to see the first gay male kiss on our soaps, it's interesting to see how much farther along things are (as ever) on UK television.