Titus's tart-tongued teen: a young lesbian becomes part of the big happy dysfunctional family on Fox's hit sitcom Titus. (television).

Fox's edgy sitcom Titus is based on the real life of its star, Christopher Titus. So when his 16-year-old niece, Amy, told him that she's a lesbian, there was no doubt her television equivalent would also eventually come out.

The episode, which aired in January, has Amy (played by Rachel Roth) threatening to kill herself over a lover's spat. Titus, as her guardian, tries to talk her out of it, then discovers that Charlie, the love of Amy's life, is a cute blond chick in a leather jacket.

Titus: "So that means that you're ..."

Amy: "A big dyke!"

His real-life niece's coming-out didn't involve a noose, but it was just as by-the-way casual, Titus recalls. "She just said, `Oh, yeah, I'm gay,'" he says. "I remember thinking, Wow, she's 16 years old, and she knows who she is."

Rachel Roth, the 20-year-old actor who plays Amy, points out that her character is also a drug dealer with couple of substance-abusing derelicts for parents. "Her life is such a mess that I think people will see it as a positive that she has someone who loves her," Roth says. "I don't think Christopher and Erin [Titus's on-air girlfriend] care as long as she's not killing anyone."

As with the Willow-and-Tara story line on Buffy the Vain Slayer, there are no plans to make Amy's sexual orientation a focal point of Titus, which is scheduled to return to Fox in June following a brief hiatus. Call it the anti-Will & Grace phenomenon, the show's executives say. "We wanted to bring a normalcy to this," says Jack Kenny, the out cocreator of the show, who directed the episode in which Amy comes out. "Titus and Erin are dealing with Amy's lesbianism the same way they would deal with Amy's heterosexuality."

The show's demographics skew toward young males who don't watch gay-themed shows, points out Sally Lapiduss, a gay writer for Titus: "If we can just matter-of-factly introduce a gay character to them, all the better." That means Amy's lesbianism will be treated with the same irreverence with which the show treats everything else. Titus has found humor in such topics as alcoholism, drug dealing, and A/DS and has no intention of going politically correct, its creators say.

Titus and his team are relishing the inevitable scene when his father, Ken, a modem-day Archie Bunker played by Stacy Keach, learns about Amy's preference for girls. "Ken essentially is an elitist and a racist and a homophobe, and we have him dealing with a strong, out young lesbian," says Kenny.

The show also deliberately opts for humor over sympathy in an upcoming episode (scheduled to air in June) in which Amy reveals she was sexually molested as a child. Titus admits that the episode might spark some angry reactions for its light treatment of a heavy theme, but he defends it as another "laughter and joy through pain" example of his dysfunctional family history.

Roth, who's straight, says she's up for whatever angst or joy the writers throw at Amy next season. "I'm just glad I've never had to play a whiny teenage girl who's obsessed with how her hair looks," she says.

Randall also writes for Glamour, the Philadelphia Daily News, and Sunset.