By now, everyone knows that gay men have created many of the top-rated television shows of the last ten years. But not everyone knows that despite the fact that these shows feature mostly heterosexual characters, they have often introduced a very gay sensibility, and sometimes daring gay concepts, directly into the heart of Middle America.

Consider:

• Way too much has already been written about how Sex and the City is the thinly veiled story of four gay men finding their sexual awakening in the Big City. But more importantly, the show, like Golden Girls before it, championed to the world the truly radical notion of the “chosen family” — a rare occurrence among heterosexuals, but an almost universal one for out gay people.

• The central, and perhaps very “gay” premise of Swingtown is that the key to a healthy relationship isn’t monogamy or an adherence to any external codes of behavior, but rather a willingness to set your own rules in an environment of openness and honesty.

The cast of Swingtown

• In Six Feet Under, the mostly heterosexual members of a family all experience a gay-like journey of dealing with repressed emotion and “coming out” about each of their secret “shames.”

• Ugly Betty has a mostly positive take on the nuclear family, but it brings up interesting gay-related issues of class, race, and childhood sexuality.

The notion of the “chosen family,” the problems with the American family, and the quandary over non-monogamy: these aren’t solely “gay” issues, of course. But it’s hard to look at these shows, all created or co-created by gay men (except for Golden Girls, which was influenced by gay men on the creative team), and not see a strong gay sensibility.

More interesting still, heterosexual audiences have strongly embraced these shows and their often-revolutionary concepts. With the exception of Swingtown (which started strong, but has since faded in the ratings), all of these shows were or are breakout hits. More importantly, all these shows, including Swingtown, have been “water cooler” shows — the kind of programs that get the discussion boards humming and the zeitgeist shifting.

Take Sex and the City. The show features four heterosexual female characters (though, admittedly, they do seem to embody four classic gay archetypes: the innocent, the repressed professional, the slut, and the romantic).

But the show is really about how these four women have chosen each other as their own family. Indeed, the creators of the show are on record as saying they deliberately avoided showing parents or siblings, to reinforce this central theme of the chosen family.

How many heterosexual women, even professional feminist women in New York, are really this cut off from their relatives? How many spend Christmas with BFFs every year? Let’s face it: for the vast majority of heterosexuals, the most important people in their lives are usually other family members: their parents, their spouses, and their kids. The most important people in their lives are related by biology or marriage.

Not all gay men are cut off from their families, and some of us have kids of our own now; in two states, it’s even been possible for us to get married (though those marriages are not yet recognized by the federal government). But surely many more gay men than heterosexuals have strained relationships with their biological families. We haven’t always had any choice: even when our families don’t specifically reject us, they’ve made it clear in myriad ways that, while they’ll tolerate us, we’re not completely part of the fold. It’s one thing for a heterosexual bride to invite her gay sibling and his partner to her wedding; it’s another thing to expect them to dance.

In other words, for out gay men, unlike for heterosexual women, Sex and the City’s chosen family is the norm.

Next Page! Is Swingtown's open marriage "gay"?