I wanted to take a moment to talk about the Kish phenomenon for a moment. You probably haven’t heard of them if you’re not a fan of American soap operas or a regular reader of After Elton but in their pop culture circles they have over a million strong in the Kish Army.

Okay, here’s the poop. Medical intern Kyle Lewis (Brett Claywell) and police officer Oliver Fish (Scott Evans) were two characters on the ABC Daytime soap opera One Life to Live. They had both been on a show for several months when they finally encountered one another and it took a few weeks after that to finally find out that they not only had a shared past, but it was something Oliver didn’t want to revisit. Turns out that they had gone to college together, been in the same fraternity and for at least one of the four years they knew one another had been lovers – until Oliver’s mother walked in on them and Oliver was forced to choose between his Christian family and Kyle. Being the dutiful (and frightened) son, he pushed himself back into the closet and determined to live his life as a heterosexual. All of that came crashing down around him when Kyle unexpectedly reappeared in his life; Kyle who’d been going through a rough patch but trying to pull his own life back together.

The couple had an interesting back story giving fans plenty to speculate (and write fan fiction) about and in the approximately eight months that ABC allowed the couple to stay on the air they built a strong following as they jumped through the regular soap opera hoops that most soap couples go through. (FUN FACT: They were the first gay couple to have a sex scene on an American daytime soap opera.)

They took home the GLAAD Media Award two weeks after the two actors had been unceremoniously fired – Brett Claywell was called into the producers office after a day of filming and told he would no longer would be needed and Scott Evans found out about his termination via Twitter when fans were offering their condolences.

Fans are still making music videos, writing fan fiction, supporting the actors in their current search for work. The video I’ve selected for the week is an example of just how strong the love for the characters was and still remains. It covers most of the couple’s on-screen relationship and should give you an insight into the chemistry between the two men. In a brief period of time, they became a power couple in soapdom; it was only the bigotry of certain network executives and pressure from online trolls that removed them from our screens.

Nerdily, I’ve always harbored a hope that the characters could appear on another ABC series; they were more developed than your average soap characters and would be a fine addition to any of the police procedurals out there. (Plus, they’d bring their legion of fans right along with them.) That’s just me being a complete fan girl though.

If you’re curious about them, the Kish Army has you covered. ALL of their scenes have been archived on YouTube; eliminating the other characters so it doesn’t take that long to catch up with Kish, sadly. This page contains all of the Kish clips in HQ.