When my mother worked at the hometown Walmart when I was a boy in the 1970s, one rule was chiseled in granite: “Do not call me at work, ever — unless the house is on fire or somebody’s dying!”
Mom practiced what she preached, so it was a shock thirty years ago this month when I heard the click-click of my classroom intercom, followed by a message from the principal’s office: “Mr. Wilson, your mother called and asked that you call her back when you’re able.”
I assumed the worst, excused myself from Room 115 at my suburban St. Louis high school, and walked down the hall to the teachers’ lounge — which was not an actual lounge, but a workroom, mailroom, printer room, lunchroom, gossip room, where we took our aggravations with students and administrators, and where we made phone calls in pre-smartphone days when most classrooms didn’t even have a landline.
Mom’s phone rang. She answered with an abrupt exclamation: “Rodney, your story is on my soap opera!” It took a few minutes of lawyerly cross-examination to fully understand what she was saying and to confirm that what she thought was happening was indeed happening.
Screen image of Chris Bruno as AMC’s Michael Delaney during the coming-out episode, December 1995. (Original videotape screen capture AI enhanced for clarity only.)
In the spring of 1995, ABC’s All My Children introduced a character named Michael Delaney, a smart, thoughtful brother of Pine Valley resident Laurel Dillon. While daytime dramas are loaded with lawyers, doctors, nurses, backstabbers, liars, and adulterers, teachers are rarely on the canvas, but the new man in town was just that — a schoolteacher, hired at Pine Valley High School. Unknown to Pine Valley and unknown to the viewing audience, Mr. Delaney was also a gay man, a gay teacher not even twenty years after Anita Bryant in Florida and the Briggs Initiative in California piled all sorts of lies upon LGBT educators.
Mom was right that December day thirty years ago: Mr. Delaney’s coming out did share several threads with mine. The PVHS teacher (well, the actor who played him, Chris Bruno) was 29 years old in December 1995, as I was 29 when I came out in March 1994. Mr. Delaney was a high school history teacher, as was I. The history unit under discussion when he came out to his students was, as in my case, about the Holocaust. In Mr. Delaney’s classroom was a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum poster that included a pink triangle — the same poster I had in my classroom. Mr. Delaney pointed to that triangle, as I had, and identified himself with it, in front of his history students, as I had done. (A compilation of the AMC scenes involving Michael Delaney, beginning with the coming out episode, is available here.)
It was confirmed in a July 1996 Soap Opera Weekly story — “At Pine Valley High, Art Imitates Life: Meet the Man on Whom AMC’s Michael Delaney is Based” — that my 1994 coming out was an inspiration for Michael Delaney’s character. “We were familiar with Rodney Wilson’s case,” said AMC head writer Lorraine Broderick.
Screen image of appearance on “Northwest Afternoon,” ABC’s KOMO TV-4, Seattle, March 1996. (Original videotape screen capture AI enhanced for clarity only.)
Of course, Pine Valley was not suburban St. Louis, and the AMC aftermath was dramatized far beyond anything I experienced. While there were angry parents at a few district school board meetings and I did have a Missouri NEA-provided attorney to represent me, the Pine Valley School Board actively worked to fire Mr. Delaney, which required the filing of a pre-emptive lawsuit against the Board. A student of Mr. Delaney’s came out as gay, which enraged that student’s older brother, who blamed Mr. Delaney for his younger brother “turning gay.” At the taping of a daytime television talk show in Pine Valley, the older brother fired at Mr. Delaney. The bullet missed the gay teacher, but struck and killed Delaney’s sister. My situation, obviously (!), was nowhere near Pine Valley’s mayhem.
In an April 2022 interview on The Locher Room, Chris Bruno explained that before taking the role, producers informed him that his character would be played “straight” for several months, before coming out to his students as gay. They also had a second-choice actor, if Bruno was uncomfortable playing a gay role. They asked him to think about it, before committing. Bruno did have some initial trepidation about the part, until a friend told him point-blank: “Actors kill for roles like this!” Bruno noted in the 2022 interview that as the storyline played out, he received a lot of supportive mail with a few “death threats from the conservative right” sprinkled in. One writer called his character “an abomination.” But AMC remained steadfastly behind the story and the character: “This was Agnes [Nixon’s] story that she really wanted to tell,” Bruno recalled. (Nixon was the creator of All My Children and One Life to Live.)
All My Children won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Daytime Drama in 1996 and in 1997, an acknowledgement of how important the Michael Delaney story was to the LGBT community. AMC was also awarded a Daytime Emmy in 1996 for Outstanding Writing, with Mr. Delaney’s coming out the sample episode submitted for Emmy consideration. While AMC was only one of several daytime dramas and the Michael Delaney story was just one of dozens of concurrent AMC stories playing out in 1995-96, AMC and Chris Bruno/Michael Delaney helped move forward the national conversation about LGBT rights.
And what happened after the gay-teacher controversy settled down in Pine Valley?
Chris Bruno as homophobic father Adam Stevens in The Fosters, 2013.
Mr. Delaney returned to regular life, at least the Pine Valley version of regular, and even found an on-screen boyfriend, Brad. In the late spring of 1997, Chris Bruno fulfilled his two-year contract with AMC and moved on, leaving his character frozen in time, off-screen, still teaching, still with his boyfriend, and still living in Pine Valley. Bruno remained a busy actor, guest appearing in sitcoms like The Nanny and Suddenly Susan and playing Sheriff Bannerman for five seasons on USA Network’s The Dead Zone. He also played homophobic father Adam Stevens on several episodes of the magnificent series The Fosters: “I don’t care that your son’s gay. I just don’t want mine to be.” The irony was not unnoticed by Bruno who once remarked to me that while when on AMC he received letters blasting him for playing an openly gay teacher, when on The Fosters two decades later he received letters blasting him for not being supportive of his character’s gay son.
In 2011, to my mother’s great displeasure, AMC was canceled, after more than four decades of superb dysfunctional family drama. (Thankfully, not before Susan Lucci in 1999 won her first Emmy — on her nineteenth nomination.)
In my classroom, April 1996, photo by Carmen McDowell, for Soap Opera Weekly, July 9, 1996.
I left Mehlville High School on my own accord in 1997, the same year Chris Bruno left AMC, to start anew in Massachusetts, where I continued teaching — working with ex-offenders, incarcerated youth, teaching English to Spanish speakers, and managing an adult education program. In 2011, I returned to rural Missouri, where I continue to teach full-time, American history and world religions, at a southeast Missouri community college.
I like to think that Mr. Delaney is still out there somewhere. He’ll turn 60 in a few months. Perhaps he’s still with Brad. Maybe even married to him, after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling allowed it. He might be retired from the classroom and living in Palm Springs. Or perhaps he’s still teaching the kids of Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, as I’m still teaching the youth of southeast Missouri. The possibilities are endless, thanks in part to Michael Delaney and what he did thirty years ago this month.
Rodney Wilson has been a teacher since 1990. He is the subject of the doc-short Taboo Teaching: A Profile of Missouri Teacher Rodney Wilson.
