It's here, it's Queer, get used to it. (notes from a blond).

There's a great old Gypsy curse--not from the musical, from an actual Gypsy--that, simply put, runs, "May you get what you want." For years we whined about being the supporting characters on television shows: the wacky neighbor, the snippy coworker, the world-weary yet worldly-wise florist, the dog walker, the minty banker. So now we've got a big-time TV series that's all about us and virtually nobody but us, and you can barely hear the sound track for the pissing and moaning of the gay populace. I'm speaking, of course, of Martha Stewart Living. We've gotta be her audience--who but a gay man has the will to wire a candelabra, make Faberge Easter eggs, and grow pumpkins in an apartment window box? But when Martha's not on, a show called Queer as Folk has been garnering attention and controversy--mostly from exactly the audience it was intended to attract.

There was an assumption afoot that once we had a show to call our own, we would unilaterally embrace it. This notion was good-hearted but naive. If the straight world ever needed an example of how diverse a group we are, it need only look at the rainbow of reaction to Queer as Folk--everything from passionate, addicted devotion to the kind of enflamed, self-righteous rejection that gay people usually get only from close relatives. No less a literary and show business icon than the venerable Arthur Laurents, who wrote Gypsy and West Side Story and The Way We Were, flatly dismissed the show in a curt letter to The New York Times. People not a part of the group of circuit party boys originally depicted in the show felt disenfranchised and angry. Others lamented that the straight world's view of gay life would forever be painted with the show's brush. And there was a precedent for such an idea: Many white people didn't know there were any middle-class black people until they saw them on TV. Perhaps bowing to this, Queer as Folk runs a disclaimer announcing that it is a depiction of only one facet of American (or Canadian, since it's filmed up there) gay life. But the fact that the series is on Showtime, a pay-cable service not dependent on commercial sponsorship, meant it was free of the strictures of fair play and political correctness that inform network television. Basically, if you don't like it, you can lump it. There's no soap or cereal to boycott. Go picket Touched by an Angel.

I found the first few episodes of Queer as Folk (which started as a traditionally short British series) fairly narrow in focus and Americanized to a degree that drained the show of much of the shock and profundity that had marked its progenitor. But it was still pretty riveting stuff, and a lot of people who had never seen the U.K. version were nicely jolted.

It's two years later now, and Queer as Folk has done more than twice as many episodes as its queen mother. Along the way, it has blazed quite a path for itself, working from a phrase that gave the show its title: "There's naught so queer as folk." It's a Yorkshire phrase, and I have a hard time understanding Yorkshire dialects or even Yorkshire terriers, but it means that of the many strange things on the planet, nothing is stranger than the planet's people. And Queer as Folk treats people as people, with all the maddening inconsistencies people have. It has also widened its net quite a bit from the original party-boy days, encompassing stories involving PFLAG moms, homophobic police, ageism, opera queens, discrimination against gay parents, social climbing, the rights of bereaved life partners, and, most importantly, AIDS awareness. Queer as Folk has made ripping a condom packet apart with your teeth into one of the sexiest images on-screen.

No doubt we will be seeing more transgendered, black, Latino, disabled, and Asian storylines as the show's Pittsburgh becomes a microcosm for the gay experience across the country, sooner or later including your gay experience. Meanwhile, enjoy everybody else's, and marvel that there's a show in which Sharon Gless can dress like me and still be taken seriously as an actress. Man of a thousand faces