What Took So Long?
by Duane Wells
365Gay.com

We’re here! We’re queer!…And now we’re all over television. Who woulda’ thunk it?

In the past year the number of gay-themed television shows to come out of the closet has been rivaled only by the number of reasons [Read: Excuses] offered by the U.S. government for its invasion of Iraq. And believe you me, there are a whole lot more (of both) on the horizon. Suddenly it’s all the rage to be queer and the networks are clamoring to get as much same-sex loving content as they can wrap their grubby little paws around onto the airwaves.

Just recently, DirecTV launched here! a pay-per-view channel offering programming specifically targeted to the GLBT community and in May of this year Viacom, home of MTV, VH1, Showtime and CBS, announced that it will launch Logo, an advertiser-supported basic cable network that will offer 100% gay programming 24 hours a day, 7 days a week beginning in February 2005. And that’s just the beginning.

Rainbow Media launched Divine HD on satellite in the not so distant past and hovering on the brink of fruition is Q Television, a satellite channel that will be offered on a subscription basis and promises to attract a diverse audience that goes beyond the gay and lesbian population, which is also expected to launch later this year. Not to be outdone or left out in the cold (no pun intended), Canada’s PrideVision is also planning an assault on the U.S. market vis-a-vis a distribution agreement with Time-Warner that is likely to hit any day now. So whether or not you even want your gay TV, you sure as hell are gonna get it!

However the thing that interests me most about this sudden obsession with gay programming actually has nothing to do with the fact that it’s happening. It has more to do with the fact it took television executives so long to figure out what fertile ground gay programming would provide. I’m no television executive, but I could have seen the potential of gay programming with my eyes closed and taped shut.

I mean let’s face it, long before the success of shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace, gays had already proven that they were bankable commodities on the small screen. Think about it for a second. Didn’t we all just live for Paul Lynde’s appearances on Bewitched? And wasn’t it Paul Lynde who made the original Hollywood Squares an over-the-top success as the center square? And could there have been a more obviously gay human being on the planet than the acerbically witty Mr. Lynde? Was Liberace’s weekly variety show not a must-see in American households from sea to shining sea? And just who did the networks think were giving the Sonny and Cher show such record ratings (not to mention doing Miss Thing’s hair and make up and designing her gowns)? Can anyone forget Jim J. Bullock’s limp-wristed Monroe who helped make Too Close For Comfort bearable for so many years or any of Truman Capote’s highly-rated television appearances? And what about the day that Stephen Carrington, Alexis and Blake Carrington’s beloved son on Aaron Spelling’s Dynasty came out of the closet and announced that he was gay? Who wasn’t glued to the television then? If you asked me, that was right about the time that Dynasty became a bonafide hit!

The reality is that gays have always been ratings winners. When in doubt or in ratings trouble, television writers have always gone to the gay well to keep a show alive and attract viewers because whether or not society wants to admit it, gay folks are imminently watchable and imminently entertaining. It’s not that we try to be, we were just born that way. It didn’t take the success of Queer As Folk or So Graham Norton to prove to me that gay programming would be a runaway hit. I knew it, just as sure as I knew that Tom Ford was a genius the moment I laid eyes on his first collection for Gucci. It wasn’t like the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which have managed to elude U.S. and Allied troops for so long. It was always sitting right there in plain sight.

So do I want my gay TV? You’re damn right I do because it is a thing whose time has come. And just like so many of the best things in life, it was sitting under our noses all along waiting to be discovered and thank God it finally has.