Voting now open in 1st Annual AfterElton.com Primetime Visibility Awards

Hello, and welcome to the glamorous Friends of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the 1^st Annual Primetime Visibility Awards nominee ceremony. The staff at AfterElton.com spend a lot of time watching television. We also spend a lot of time watching awards shows – they don’t call the Oscars the Gay Superbowl for nothing.

Oddly, we realized that these two passions rarely intersect. Why do the two meet so infrequently? Because out gay actors and gay characters rarely get nominated for those fancy statues.

Sure, they let us hand them out. Ellen got to host the Emmy ceremony, and this year Neil Patrick Harris takes his turn at the podium, but really, that just makes us the party planners, doesn’t it? Hosts with the most?

We're going to change that this year.

We’ve pulled together our own nominees in the most important television categories (and maybe made up a few along the way), and we’re going to let the coolest, smartest, most attractive people we know do the voting – you! Think of it as the Gay Emmy Awards, and you're the voting academy.

Voting will be open until midnight September 15^th. Then Thursday September 17^th, we’ll let you know who you think the brightest TV stars in our gay universe are. This is all to get you excited for our Emmy livechat during the ceremony on September 20^th, where we see who those uncool folks in Hollywood picked for their less important awards – and then mock them for their bad taste.

After you cast your ballots we encourage you to lobby for particular nominees in the comments. And we’re sure you’ll also take time to tell us which of your favorites we failed to nominate. We’re cool with that – there are always special achievement awards that we can throw as bones.

So without further ado, let’s get to our first category…