What do you think about all the gay themed t.v. programs?

Great After we have control of the entertainment industry, the government will be next ; then, the

Why should I have a problem with these shows?

Why not have them. Gays have to put up with endless shows that show straight sex. Childless people have to watch shows about married people with kids. I think it's about time some bigotted heterosexual people get confronted for a change.

I don't watch TV anymore, so I haven't seen any of these shows. I can't imagine that I would go out of my way to see them if I did. But, while we're on the topic, I'll stroll down memory lane with a few gay characters from TV shows long past:

Barney Miller - There was a gay couple that appeared in a few episodes. I think that one of them was named "Marty". There was also a gay policeman "Zitelli".

Soap - Billy Crystal played a gay transvestite and was a regular cast member. Interestingly enough, he was the only "normal" cast member. Everyone else was pretty cuckoo!

Happy Days - For the first two seasons, Ritchie Cunningham has an older brother "Chuck". Chuck goes off to college, never to be seen or even mentioned again. This is purely speculation on my part, but what else could have caused a family to disown their first-born son like that in the 1950s?

Sesame Street - Ernie & Bert. Need I say more?

I don't know, because I haven't watched any of them. I certainly don't have a problem with their existence. I heard a radio commercial for a show called "Boy Meets Boy" and giggled.

I honestly don't care. I don't watch any of the shows above.

It's great. Society is finally waking up, but all too slowly. If I had cable I'd watch some or all.

The only one I ever watch is Will and Grace and I love that show. I crack up laughing all by myself when I watch that show, and I'm usually by myself watching it because Mike can't stand it. I haven't seen any of the others, I've only heard about boy meets boy and I'll probably watch that once or twice if I ever get the chance just to check it out. That one sounds like another dumb reality show, though. I don't care much for them.

I'm watching Will and Grace right now. It's pretty funny.

great although somewhat stereotypical at times!

I love Queer as Folk!

I used to watch Soap all the time. I remember when Richard Mulligan's character claimed he was kidnapped by a U.F.O.

I'm sure I must have watched it a few times, but I don't think it was regular. That bit sounds very familiar. I suspect that I just tuned in occasionally so that I might stare in awe at Katherine Helmond's bewbs.

I'm loving Queer Eye For The Straight Guy on Bravo... I wonder how long they can keep it up before it wears thin... for now it's great fun

No opinion, dont care. Hymm, how should I feel about stupid assed sit coms about gay people that will make me want me to vomit in my mouth and throw my tv out the window...

let me think here:

thinking, still thinking...

ok, got it...

About the same way I feel about stupid assed sit coms about straight people that will make me want me to vomit in my mouth and throw my tv out the window. Yeah, I guess I am real happy and delithed that our socitey has grown up and advanced in tolerance to the point that now gay people can too, be sterotyped on tv, placed in mind-numbing cliched, and un-realistic settings that dont represent real life in any shape way or form, just like the rest of us.

Queer As Folk: Too soap opera-y. Can't stnad it.
Will & Grace: First 2 seasons, pure comedic gold. Jumped the Shark big time when Grace got maried.
Queer Eye For The Straight Guy: Don't watch Bravo anymore; not sicne they cancelled The Awful Truth.
Boy Meets Boy: See above. Plus the fact that some of the potential suitors are straight actors playing gay just seems mean to me.

They're full of jerks! Yay!

I'm ok with them. I won't make a point to watch them but--just like any other show--if one catches my attention I might give it a go.

Balancing things out. If there is a market then go for it. Although some of them do pander to the lowest common stereotype and create a false impression of what it means to be gay.

I already know what shade of pantyhose look good on me.

They're OK.

Other:I couldn't care much,I almost don't watch TV,I'm sure some of the shows are good and other aren't,I think I would like to see not-gay themed shows where there are gay characters,it would be more like real life and open towards them.

Breath of fresh air. I've had a lot of good relationships with gay people - I love to see them represented properly on tv, etc.

I don't care either way. I don't watch many sitcoms anyway.
I have seen some while at the gym. They're way too sexual to be on that early. Personally, I like Andy Griffith and I Love Lucy.

I have an entire collection of gay programs...with Jeff Stryker, Casey Donavan, Al Parker...from ChiChi LaRue, Vivid, Falcon.....oh, you said television (never mind)

Are you top/bottom? 69, 3-ways, JO sessions (I think I kinda know the rest.. Hehehe)

I like them. Will & Grace is one of my favorites. I wish I had a gay bestfriend that was a guy. If I could marry a gay guy I would!

Top, 69, butt muncher to be sure .

You're sorely lacking in the Bel Ami area, you're aware of this aren't you?

Que dit-il?

Fine with me. Not an issue. I don't pick up these shows except W&G which I don't watch. Gays are just people too. They should up as often as grandmas, if not more since their lives are likely more diverse and interesting.

What about gay grandmas?

Mentionner tous les autres est à léger la meilleure!

"Mention all the others is at light the better one!" Hmmmmmm..... This sounds like something you would say to me! You have such an international flare!!

I even know what's typically included in a Continental breakfast!

They should show up once in a while too.

C'est les mots qui qui vont trés bien ensemble.

Did you tell him, "Besides, three go well together?" (And for shame, Kristal!)

Or maybe "Besides, the three words(?) go well together"...?

Will & Grace seems really phony to me.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is really funny and entertaining.
Queer as Folk is OK/good, but too much of a soap-opera for me.
Haven't seen Boy Meets Boy and I'm not interested in seeing it. I turned off by the callous undertones in reality dating shows (it degrades the value of Love).

Beatles - Michelle (ma belle) 'these are the words which go VERY well together'. Sure some allusion was there, towards locals, towards seeing the light in others. Is that croissant fresh?
Deco cubist, sheesh.

I couldn't care less, I don't watch any of these.

Est-ce que ce frais est croissant?

Which language is it that uses upturned question marks--well, "upturned" from our perspective anyway? ¿

'Is the strawberry a croissant'?
Spanish. ¿how can you live here and not know that? I wish we had that feature in english so one doesn't have to read half the sentence before seeing how to inflect it. French has a cool trick too; they have two 'yes's. If one asks 'You aren't going to the store?' one could answer 'Oui (yes), that is correct, I am not going to the store.'; or they can answer 'Si (but yes), I am going to the store!'. We're stuck using the grammer/syntax confusion for sit-com gags.

'callous undertones'. I'm amazed and worried that there's even an audience for that junk. I worry further that the programmers aren't responding to cost effective audience interests, but are actually pushing the stuff on us like some huxleyian or orwellian that wishes to have manipulable swinging singles who would would rat on their soulmate for love of their flag.
I once cynically conceived of 'Simms Online' to illustrate the concept (alas no none would get it). After spending a couple years home alone creating some virtual hamster cage society with some unpredictability, you graduate to the online version where your existential 'hamsters' are even more unpredictable because other users program them. Eventually, you leave your home to go grocery shopping, looking at all these people as random barely manageable hamsters in your virtual universe.
My daughter is recently suffering from 'My virtual life is even more pathetic than my real life'. The issue I see here is that things evolved to a point where virtual life means more to people than real life. I suppose this evolution can be likened to caring more about peoples emotional reactions to events than actual events. Now it's reacting to contrived layers of persona with no connection to IRL events at all. I wonder if anyones been paying attention to just what sort of new society we have been allowing to breed. I saw a 'touched by an angel' episode where some kids decided to play death race in real life. I don't think it's nearly that whacked yet, but when people start as toddlers interacting with educational games, advertisements, and social education, (perhaps even mom actually driving grandma to her doctor via a remote simulator), that bridge the distinction between virtual and real-life, it's going to be tougher to discern which rules apply to which world. There may have to come a day when internet thought-crime becomes just as serious as real life. Add an internet brain-chip implant and 1984 will be an absolute reality. Are you following the TIA updates?

I think before that happens, we would see a 'backlash' of people sick of it all and wanting to get back to a simple life. Amish country sounds appealing these days.

Not really. Orwell back in the 30's painted a nightmarish vision of 1984 that had generations quite concerned, but now most of it has already happened and (as the book points out, part of the nighmarishness of it all) 'and no one will notice or care'. In my day, paranoid meant fearing that they might be watching you. For teens now, they've accepted those chains as normal, and paranoid now means 'caring about the fact that they watch you'. You live in alaska. You don't have cameras that take flash photos through your windows connected to software created back in '93 that recognizes people in photos. (that used to be my research specialty. stuff selling at tech shows was nearly a million fold more intense than the general public had on their desktop)

That would be cool to see.

I'm practically the poster-boy for the shift to choosing virtual interactions over in-person ones. I'm sure I chose it myself and was not coersed. It's simply easier for me to connect with people online, than in person.

You don't think there will be very many people wanting to get away from it? I think that attitude would be pretty big.

You try to convey existing reality through your online connections though, not create an alternative, correct? or do you live though roleplaying too? (in which case I'd like to know how real that feels on a psycho-social level).

No I don't because as I said, by a 1930's standard, we have mind-boggingly fully immersed ourselves in such a society condition already, and no one is trying to escape yet. There was the woodstock era and communes, but that didn't last. People who think about it take it for granted that our minds will be interconnected on the internet one day. In 1988 cloning was generally considered a preposterous abomination. By 1988 it had widespread acceptance too. Tact by the bio-tech industry and the Clinton administration made that change possible. He put out a moratorium on human cloning for 5 years to set our minds at ease while meanwhile the NIH had cloned every human brain cell and sensory receptor and was offering the patents free to the bio-tech industry. People go along with most anything as long as they can still buy pizzas and videos.

I think a lot of people find that technology-free life appealing. I've heard stories of people who drive through the farms and want to stay there. I am attatched to our family property and in the process of buying it, otherwise I would find the idea tempting.

I like to go back and forth myself, on occasion living a swiss-family-robinson lifestyle. Farms have a lot going for them. I've had the idea of turning every other boulevard in big cities into community farm strips. I also came up with a hanging-gardens-of-babylon self-sustaining community skyscraper design.

I think the solitude and slower pace is the most appealing thing about it.

Yeah, for me it's existing reality only. I haven't been attracted to the MMORPGs, maybe I'm a little afraid of them. If I wasn't married, perhaps I would spend a lot of time there.

i tink tehy r gay

Yeah, you totally feel nature and the weathar out there; you don't just incidentally notice or study it on occasion. It also grounds us in a sense of purpose rather than feeling our beings could be reduced to thoughts on a microchip floating through space and it wouldn't make any difference.

People can get depressed because someone zorched their scintillating ice aura yet not care that their car needs new ball joints. I have my doubts that this is good for society.

But, is it different than getting hooked on a fictional character in a TV series or a book? Are you saying that some mediums are perhaps too good/realistic and thus may need to be suppressed (like drugs)?

I guess people do discern books of fantasy from non-fiction, and tv news from sit-coms. People do get sucked into soap operas. The thing with the net is the distinctions are blurred, and in role playing there actually are people interacting with you, there are real people behind the characters expressing real emotional reactions, so there's some level of reality when your buddy helps you seek vengeance for the demise of your ice aura. For some people (like my kids and their friends), this is the primary way they relate to other people, so calamities in RPG's are more important than the other world they avoid relating to. It breeds sociopathy.
I can't imagine the medium being supressed. It's too inevitable. Rather, I foresee a continuing trend towards treating the net legally and socially like real life. Have you read the netscape screen identity contract? sign in blood. everything you say on chat is court record and their intellectual property. Teens, signing up, don't see a problem with this. I guess they go on the 'they will never enforce the contract' belief, or take for granted that they're screwed already. I wanted the unique net registered screen handle concept to exist, but when it did manifest, I couldn't agree to the terms.

20 years ago, parents likely complained that their kids watching TV would just stare at it; they wished for something their kids would have a more interactive experience with. So, now we have MMORPGs, but it's disturbing to us. I think it's possible that the kids are just having some fun, wonderfully interactive and life-like fun, but that they do understand that the real world is more important. I think we may need to give them more credit. Ball joints really aren't that exciting for most people, why shouldn't they have diversions? Why shouldn't the diversions be as real as possible? One some level, they are a form of training and I suspect some people can learn a lot about how to interact and get things done from a virtual world. I like the idea of a screen identity contract, I'd like for people to not see the Internet as a place to anonymously do cruel and illegal things, I want them to be responsible, as they would be in person.

I love Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I haven't seen the others.

It was the intellectual property rights part that got me. I'd like though to be able to say I use drugs or something without it being stacked up as evidence if they ever decide they don't like me.
I'm not calling the evolution better or worse, just a major evolution. People should, after all, consider their phone calls reality. Now reality is taking place on virtual terrains with virtual subject matter. If we reached some condition like 'matrix' where that was all we experienced, we'd pretty much hav to call our experience reality, no matter how ungrounded in any physical counterpart.

These communist liberal shows should be cancelled immediately. People should start listening to the pope and Dubya more.

I am very happy that society is being more accepting to those that are not part of the "norm". I would like to know why there are so many gay themed shows and no lesbian shows.

Will & Grace has got to be one of the greatest shows ever

Why do you want to see lesbian shows jenny

A sitcom with characters based on you and me would be hillarious! We could call it By The Bi or something cutsie like that. David Schwimmer could play me and Laura San Giacomo could play you.

An abomination - the only one I've seen is Will & Grace - tv for thick people (or people who want to mulch I suppose, sometimes I watch crap like Sex and the City because I just want some trash to zombie in front of....)

Every time I see Will & Grace, I have to wonder what happened to Debra Messing. Before Will & Grace, she had a vague semblance of a figure, and her real nose was a lot nicer than the one she has now.

I also hate Will & Grace because it's so sanitised. The gay men are basically celibate - they may have relationships hinted at but it's all so safe, and all so "we're Americans accepting the diversity of our society". I don't buy it.

Will & Grace is sooooo boring. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is lame. Boy Meets Boy is ok, but still suffers from the "reality show" format. Queer as Folk is pretty good.

Mr. Humphreys of Are You Being Served is the best gay tv character.

As a gay man, I enjoy seeing people similar to me represented. I also like the fact that gay guys are shown as both good and bad and the stereotype is dismissed that all gay men act a certain way. Although, Queer Eye certainly does reinforce some stereotypes about gay men being feminine, but that's okay...it's very funny.

Don't like the idea

rediculus to me, but i am sure they are great to some folks

I think it's great because it helps to dispell the negative myths that surround homosexuality.

> Great After we have control of the entertainment industry,
> the government will be next ; then, the

There's no need to take upon bizarre extremist assumptions.