Everything I Know About Being Gay I Learned From Watching TV in the 00’s

Randy Harrison and Gale Harold in 'Queer as Folk' | Courtesy: Showtime

Sometimes I forget that I was fortunate enough to have been able to come to terms with my sexuality at such an early age. I was 12. The year was 1997. And for every year of my existence before then I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be like all the other boys I grew up with, though I could never quite figure out why. Then all of a sudden it hit me—thanks to a Blockbuster Video membership and a few hundred viewings of Leonardo DiCaprio in “Romeo and Juliet”—that there even was such a thing as being gay, that I might be it, and that that was why my eyes always lingered just a little too long at Mark Wahlberg’s Calvin Klein ads as a kid.

The only problem with this kind of discovery when you’re a middle school kid in Harlem, however, is that there isn’t really a bevvy of positive gay influences to count on despite the fact that you’re growing up smack dab in the middle of Manhattan. New York may be a hotbed of gay culture but you wouldn’t know that if you ever ventured north of 110th st. Hell, you wouldn’t really know it from going north of 14th Street in the early 9o’s. And so, when it came to learning about my newborn sexuality, I turned to the one friend who helped me through everything from learning the correct way to tie my shoes to how to properly cope with my parent’s divorce: Television.

The gay men of my generation were fortunate enough to have come of age around the millenium, and not just because we were culturally aware early enough to have been witness to the rise and fall of Britney Spears’ career. What we were able to experience over the course of the last decade was an explosion of gay men featured on various shows across the TV landscape. Sure, we may have been too young to have had a Pedro Zamora (”The Real World: San Francisco”) or Ricky Vasquez (”My So-Called Life”) help shape our views on sexuality and serve as role models, but unlike our Generation X predecessors we were lucky enough that these weren’t our only two options.

Ricky Vasquez, gay 90s icon—one of the few

For me, the gay characters I saw come alive on-screen weren’t always necessarily the ones that I identified with on anything more than a superficial level—you’re gay, I’m gay. But watching them always provided some small insight into a community that I was dying to explore and be a part of. For whatever reason, television executives and audiences alike began to welcome gay characters onto the casts of various shows in larger numbers, allowing for kids like me to start to see some real diversity. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always owe a debt of gratitude to Jack McPhee (”Dawson’s Creek”) for helping me navigate the treacherous waters of coming out; but once that was done with, and the process of learning what to do with my new-found sexuality began, it helped that the WB Network offered several options of gay men on-screen to emulate.

Would I be a Will or a Jack (Will and Grace)? Or should I scrap those two and model myself more like a David Fischer (”Six Feet Under”)? Then there’s always Danny, Chris, and Justin to consider (”The Real Worlds: New Orleans, Chicago, and Hawaii respectively”).

But, as much as I hate to admit it, between the ages of 14 and 17, the biggest TV influence on my sexual maturity had to be—yes, you guessed it—Showtime’s “Queer as Folk.” As soon as news came my way that this show was even being produced in the US, I could feel an innate desire to want to be a part it. A show that depicted graphic sexual acts between two men? That had a cast made up almost entirely of openly gay characters? Hot ones at that? How could any 14 year old gay boy resist? I’ll bet if one were so inclined to take a straw poll today of men between the ages of 24 and 30 and ask them about their earliest experiences of “Queer As Folk” they would probably all read something along the lines of “I used to always sneak into my basement/bedroom/rec room and watch it alone on my TV, sometimes on mute, while my family was in the other room.” Unlike the desexualized sitcom-style comedy of “Will and Grace” whose characters were gay in name only, “Queer as Folk” allowed us to see gay life through the eyes of a sexually active teen for all that its worth. HBO was tackling similar issues concerning the gay community on”Six Feet Under”—gay shame, drug abuse, various forms of homophobia—but “Queer as Folk” gave us a diverse group of gay men and women through which to see these unfold, not just one. Gay issues on “Queer as Folk” were treated as just regular headlining story-lines, not B-plots that revolved around a single gay character set apart from the rest. Justin Taylor found the man of his dreams, had sex with him, and even took him to the prom. Now that’s good TV! And, sure, there were plenty of “better” shows playing on every other channel, gay or otherwise, but I wouldn’t have had the courage to ask a boy to prom if Justin hadn’t asked Brian at his (true story)

"Mad Men"s Sal Romano and Joan Holloway

I’ll admit, as one of the only gay TV shows on a non-Gay network that gained any sort of popularity it’s easy to eulogize “Queer as Folk” in a way that makes it sound like it was the gold standard of gays on TV. The truth is, however, that there was value in every gay character I came across over the course of the last decade. All of them, no matter how funny or depressed or celibate or fucked up as they may have been made an impact just by being there. It may be naiive to say but, at least for me, any representation was better than none, and I feel fortunate to have come of age at a time when at least I had options across a wide variety of genres—comedy, drama, reality and back again—to relate to when I knew there was no one else I knew in real life who filled that role.

If we think back hard enough, I’m sure we can all find connections like these. The great thing about the power of television is that no matter how old we get or how comfortable we may feel in our own skin, the gays we see on TV even today—think “Mad Men,” “Glee,” “Modern Family”—continue to have that kind of an impact not just on us, but on an up and coming generation of gay men looking for their own characters to relate to and learn from. Here’s hoping they have as rewarding a viewing experience as I did.

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