WHAT'S REALLY 'QUEER' HERE IS THE DIALOGUE.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

``Queer as Folk'' posits itself as America's Great Gay Hope, the TV series that will inure and educate our country to the gay experience, while providing gays with a groundbreaking program they can truly call their own. Think of it, its producers would tell us, as ``Will & Grace'' without that pesky Grace and with graphic nude scenes.

In reality, its true achievement is that it provides yet another mediocre show, though one aimed at an underappreciated audience. Really, ``Queer as Folk'' as depicted on Showtime, is just, say, ``The $treet'' set in a gay neighborhood instead of Wall Street. It's ``Sex and the City'' with gay characters, though many have long maintained ``Sex and the City'' is simply a gay show with surrogate female characters standing in for gay men.

Whatever one wants to call it, it's simply a pulpy soap headlined by gay characters, who - like the scores of heterosexual characters who have preceded them in previous prime-time soap operas - are largely concerned, if not utterly obsessed, with simply having sex. The main difference is that the gay love scenes are depicted lovingly, and with convincing eroticism.

The series, based on an acclaimed and controversial British miniseries (the title, basically, means that we're all odd in our own ways), focuses on a close-knit family of gay men in urban Pittsburgh. Where, apparently, entire city blocks are given over to flagrant displays of affection and copious neon-strewn gay bars that allow behavior that'd get you arrested in any straight bar. (A gay friend of mine, who noted that the show's neighborhood was more free-wheeling than any street in West Hollywood, observed, ``If Pittsburgh was that great, who'd ever want to leave it?'')

Michael (Hal Sparks) is the nominally normal lead character, whose narration draws us into his fairly promiscuous world; he's still a nerd whose comic-book fixation is the source of derision from his buddies, and he hasn't gotten lucky in months. His best friend (and unrequited love) Brian (Gale Harold) is a dangerously promiscuous heterophobe - he mixes drugs and sex indiscriminately between diatribes against misunderstanding straights - and has contributed his sperm to help conceive a child through a vaguely contentious lesbian couple (Thea Gill and Michelle Clunie). His latest conquest, Justin (Randy Harrison), a youthful innocent getting less innocent by the minute, attends a Catholic high school.

Showtime's ``Queer as Folk'' is what it is, setting up whatever dynamics it wishes to without regard for logic - one wishes the cable outlet BBC America would air the more character-driven original to let viewers know what they're missing. Brian has contempt for straight people, even though he manages to be quite successful at his job, even though he seduces semi-closeted clients in his company's men's room. Meanwhile, even though Michael's mother (Sharon Gless) is an outspoken gay-rights activist, Michael himself feels that he must remain closeted at a low-rent job.

The show - produced stateside by Ron Cowen, Daniel Lipman and Tony Jonas - is all too schematic by half, and more interested in glibly airing a laundry list of gay grievances toward straight society than cogently creating compelling characters or situations. Here's the kind of dialogue we get: When one character speaks of Venice, another responds, ``You go down the Grand Canal, I'll go down on him.'' Another tells a potential conquest, ``You mind if we skip the back story and cut to the chase'' (this in Pittsburgh, remember, not Hollywood).

``Queer as Folk'' does have a scene in which a character watches a moment from a campy, silly gay porn video, then snaps it off in disgust. He'd likely do the same thing watching the dopey dialogue that's pervasive in this series.

``QUEER AS FOLK''

What: Seriocomic series about gay men in urban Pittsburgh.

The stars: Hal Sparks, Gale Harold, Randy Harrison, Peter Paige, Thea Gill, Michelle Clunie, Scott Lowell, Sharon Gless.

Where: Showtime.

When: 10 p.m. Sundays.

Our rating: Two and one half stars

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Photo:

Randy Harrison, left, and Gale Harold star in Showtime's ``Queer as Folk.''