Comic Amy Sedaris brings cult TV hit ‘Strangers With Candy’ to the big screen S... ‘All My Children’...

Now a young woman in her 20s, Simone (Cathy Jeneén Doe)she spent the majority of her formative years seething at her parents and sister Whitney while trying to steal Chad, Whitney’s boyfriend, away from her seemingly perfect older sibling.

But in true soap opera fashion, once her family learned that Chad was possibly Simone and Whitney’s half brother, Simone’s skullduggery barely registered a blip on the family melodrama radar.

So what’s a sexy — but ignored— vixen like Simone to do? The answer is simple: Leave town and carry on an affair with a slightly older woman, then come home to come out as a lesbian to her mostly supportive family and friends, of course.

“Passions” also throws together a 300 year old witch, a mermaid and American daytime television’s very first African-American lesbian in Simone.

Viewers who tune into soap operas for a little “love in the afternoon” might get a different kind of love — one that dared not speak its name much on soaps for years — now that the well appointed bedrooms and boardrooms of four shows regularly feature active, young — and hot — gay characters.

The soaps took their first shot at offering a gay character back in 1983 on “All My Children.” Dr. Lynn Carson, played by Donna Pescow, came out as a lesbian to a patient with a crush — and that’s about as sexual as the good doctor, or any other gay soap character, would get for quite some time. A gay man whose never-seen partner with AIDS came later, followed by a couple of gay teens who battled community homophobia in the 1990s.

Before and after the first wave of gay characters on daytime, “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” and “Melrose Place” fans would get to see the steamy — albeit sexless — suffering of gay men who would question their sexuality, confront familial pressures, homophobia, and the growing AIDS crisis during primetime soaps.

“I think prime time did that first — integrating gay characters — and now daytime is playing catch-up,” says Film and TV Studies professor Stephen Tropiano, author of “The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV” (Applause Books).

Tropiano says that historically, one of the largest hurdles for gay characters on any show is interference from nervous television network executives.

The characters “would not only be denied fulfilling and lasting relationships with other men, but their identities as gay men would be filtered through their positioning as heterosexuals within their respective plot lines,” he says.

Before Bianca's gay character was written into "All My Children," the purpose of gay characters was to make a point or explain homosexuality for the audience — a task handled within the course of a few episodes. The distraught parents or angry bullies who caused the early gay characters so much turmoil would suddenly see the light. Then the story — and the character - would simply vanish.

Since the idea of making a central character on a soap gay wouldn’t fly with network brass, the secondary characters were simply too difficult to write. Daytime dramas are always set in close-knit communities where the characters know each other and are usually connected in some way.

“The gay person who has no family on a soap opera is a sitting duck. They’re there to suffer, teach us a lesson, and then go away,” says Daniel R. Coleridge, TVGuide.com soap columnist and author of “The Q Guide to Soap Operas (Alyson), which hits bookstores in September.

“Welcome to the real world,” says Jean Passanante, head writer of “As the World Turns.” “Things have evolved enough now that we’re able to make Luke Snyder, the son of a central couple, gay, as opposed to a day player character that nobody really knows,” she explains.

Even the priest became the target of an anti-gay witchhunt. Billy’s most significant connection to anyone in Llanview was to Joey Buchanan, the teenage son of the show’s main character. When the story culminated, so did Billy’s presence in Llanview.

Damon Romine, media entertainment director for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says that the newest batch of gay characters make soaps worth tuning in.

Since soaps are all about telling stories, the gay kids get into their share of hijinks. On “As the World Turns,” 17 year old Luke Snyder, scion of super couple Lily and Holden, is grappling with a crush on his straight best friend, being blackmailed for being gay, coming out to his parents, and avoiding the sticky tentacles of a stream of “ex-gay” counselors ready to whisk him off to aversion therapy camps — and perhaps most troubling — just being a teenager.

That said, Van Hansis, the actor who plays Luke, appeared alongside soap legend Martha Byrne, who plays his mother, in a Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Public Service Announcement that aired immediately after an “As the World Turns” episode in May.

The PSA itself caused some minor turbulence with the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative national political lobby, which asked its members to boycott the episode and fire off letters to the show’s producers.

Luke, the latest soap character to come out, joins Bianca, Simone, and Lucas Jones on “General Hospital.” The boys are garnering attention, but their female counterparts are, so far, garnering the most affection.

On “All My Children,” Bianca, who drops in from time to time for big stories, currently resides in Paris with best friend and longtime crush Maggie. The two left with a loving but strictly platonic relationship, but Bianca since revealed that they are very much in love and raising Bianca’s daughter, Miranda — don’t ask — together. In 2002, Bianca got lucky, sort of, by scoring a hot goodbye kiss with Lena, the corporate spy who was raiding Erika’s company.

Simone is currently without a girlfriend, but she shared several steamy onscreen kisses with Rae, her first girlfriend. She is enjoying a much better life since coming out.

Coming out hasn’t been easy for any of the characters, but the male characters seem to face the most danger when they do. A gay basher who tricked Lucas attacked him. It’s a device soap writers use to hedge bets about how fans will react to the characters, Coleridge says.

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