Pretty in prime time.

Probably no one expected American television to get quite so gay quite so fast. Sure, there's been Will & Grace (NBC even showed six episodes consecutively a few years ago) and the 900 or so gay sidekicks, wacky neighbors, and sassy receptionists that flit in and out of weekly series. But did you honestly think you would ever see a series called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Or another one called Boy Meets Boy? Did you evah? OK, so they're on Bravo, a cable channel with nothing to lose. Until the Queer Eye beamed down on it, Bravo's biggest star was James Lipton, whose weekly fawnfest, Inside the Actors Studio, was the only thing drawing an audience.

Then NBC acquired Bravo and began spending some money on promotion, and suddenly the channel that had become famous for double-teaming Cirque du Soleil specials with Cher concerts burst through its closet door with a ferocious splintering worthy of the Hulk in a mood swing. Queer Eye even got so much of a sampling that NBC threw a truncated version of the show on its regular schedule one summer night, seamlessly following Will & Grace. (You thought they would put it on after Who Wants to Marry My Dad?)

In my mind, Queer Eye's biggest triumph is that it has effectively neutralized the word queer for the foreseeable future. It can't really work anymore as an insult because it's a TV word and therefore middle-class and commercial. So we can use it if we feel like it, but it can't effectively be used against us.

The show might as well have been called Queen Eye for the Straight Guy, for all of the "lifestyle experts" on the show are straight out of the network sitcom gay assembly kit. Part of this is no doubt the old television argument that audiences want to look at pretty people. And yet the straight guys are all fairly unappetizing, even to the women who claim to love them. Likewise, on Boy Meets Boy everybody is gorgeous to just-missing-gorgeous. Of course, it is a dating show, and who wants to watch trolls date, unless you're watching Shrek? I suppose it's indelicate to bellyache that gay people are being mainstreamed just the way black people and Latin people have been: The conventional beauties make it to prime time; the "real people" don't even qualify for reality shows.

The same week that Queer Eye debuted, I watched dozens of tributes to the just-deceased Celia Cruz, the venerated salsa star who could not get arrested on American television during her lifetime but whose passing was being mourned as a cultural benchmark by the very same networks that wouldn't show her.

In August, AMC aired a new documentary called Gay Hollywood, in which I appeared, that followed the travails of five more or less blond cuties (even the Filipino had blond hair) on their quest for stardom. One wants to act--or host a reality show; one or two want to direct; one wants to write; and one, a drag queen, wants to do stand-up comedy. We see them schlepping around town, attempting to make contacts, sell their services, and enlist various mentors. Much is made of being openly gay in Hollywood and whether that can help or hurt a budding career. When Gay Hollywood's not-yet-fab five get together to eat pizza (worked off religiously the next day, I feel certain) and compare notes, there's an American Idol meets That Girl conversational template at work. Everybody is perky and ambitious and determined, but they are almost all cut from a certain circuit-party mold. The openly gay professionals they meet who have had some success in Hollywood are their exact opposites--nonblond, nonbuff, no-nonsense, and, I suspect, a much fairer representation of who Makes It than the packaged TV-product people who are the focus of much of the new gay mainstream.

Maybe we're seeing ourselves on TV the way Madison Avenue sees us. Or maybe that's just the way Madison Avenue sees everybody and we're finally being included. Either way, do try to keep your head above the mainstream water.