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

Best Lead Actor

Common logic in Hollywood is that an out gay actor can’t believably play a smoldering leading man because audiences won't buy it. But sixty foot tall talking robots that transform into sexy car commercials are within the realm of suspension of disbelief, but not a homo in the lead?

We don't buy it because they obviously haven’t been watching the same shows we have as our nominees run the gamut of sexual preferences in their characters they portray. And since they all got renewal notices for their series, I guess someone found them believable enough to watch them carry the show.

John Barrowman (Torchwood)

John Barrowman has been called cheeky before, and not just for his personality. He was probably mooning someone at the time.

As the omnisexual Captain Jack Harkness on Torchwood, he’s an action hero that from the future that will shag men, women, or even an alien equipped with parts that mesh. There’s no doubt that he makes men and ladies swoon, and he may be the only primetime lead that had a portmanteau with both his male and female costars.

Still, he’s just as busy saving the earth from utter disaster as he is playing naked hide-and-seek with his subordinates. And he proven he’s not afraid to make horrible sacrifices in the name of the greater good, sacrificing his own grandson to save the planet.

Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother)

Many of us actually watched NPH grow up on our TVs and at the movies. Who didn't have a crush on Doogie Howser, M.D., watching him pour his heart out into his text-based word processor. And who knew he was going to grow up to be such a hunk from those nerdy beginnings? As Barney Stinson, he’s the ultimate womanizer, and the keeper of the Bro Code. Barney literally wrote the book on masculinity.

If you keep track of the number of womenhe’s bedded on HIMYM, you’d be tempted to call the Center for Disease Control for a quarantine of his bedroom since there’s got to be a new species of STD living there. But lately, he’s fallen for his buddy’s ex, Robin, and millions of women across the country are rooting for the bad boy to settle down.

Matt Lucas (Little Britain, U.S.A.)

This chrome-dome comedy giant is a comedic force to be reckoned with. His characters range from the homoerotic bodybuilder (aren’t all body builders at least a little homoerotic?) to a crazed parent to a delinquent teenage girl. Creating laughter in the vein of Monty Python on methamphetamine, there’s no subject off limits to his quirky sense of humor.

Dividing his time between our shores and the Old Country, we have to share him, but fortunately he leaves you laughing so hard you’re still wiping the tears by the time he gets back.

Russell Tovey (Being Human)

Oh, those ears. There’s something just adorable about Tovey that convinces both men and women he’d make good husband material. In some ways, he's England’s answer to Neil Patrick Harris, in that he’s been gracing their television screens since he was fourteen. We first got to know him in this country in the movie The History Boys, where he was one of the only characters who didn’t fool around with other boys.

In Being Human, Tovey plays George, an innocent werewolf who just wants to spend time with his friends (a vampire and a ghost) and his girlfriend from the hospital. Often playing a muddled, innocent man child, Tovey manages here to be both dorkily adorable as well as the action hero who saved the day in the first season.

He also managed to be a sex symbol, since he spent part of many episodes naked.