I first watched Queer as Folk when the first season came out on DVD in 2002, over a year after the American version of the provocative British drama premiered on Showtime. But I was hooked from the first line of the first episode: “The thing you need to know is, it’s all about sex."

By the time Brian (Gale Harold) and Justin (Randy Harrison) got it on to the unforgettable sound of Full Frontal declaring “You think you’re a man / But you’re only a boy / You think you’re a man / You’re only a toy,” I knew that this show was going to change the landscape of television forever. For the first time, gay sex was not only okay to show, it was the norm, and that norm was a lip-smacking buffet of queer delights (and I’m not even a gay man).

After I inhaled the 22 episodes of that first season over about a week of intensive viewing, I remember going to the supermarket and feeling completely disoriented when the whole world wasn’t gay. That was the real contribution that Queer as Folk made: it normalized queerness, and made heterosexuality seem totally bizarre.

The show that everyone describes as “groundbreaking” returned for its fifth and final season last Sunday. Over the past four seasons the drama has evolved as it explored the many layers and facets of what it means to live as a gay man in Pittsburgh. Even the theme song has changed from the initial 28-second “Spunk” by Greek Buck, a frenetic, charged whirlwind of dancing go-go boys, to the slower, more relaxed “Cue the Pulse to Begin” by the Burnside Project.

That change is, in many ways, symbolic of the way QAF itself has changed.

No longer all about the nightlife at fictional nightclub Babylon and the exploits of Pittsburgh’s finest playboy Brian, QAF has developed into a somewhat earnest melodrama about gay life in a midsized industrial American city. Babylon and its buff gay boys still punctuate the show with moments of hard-partying merriment, but QAF has allowed its characters to grow to embrace all aspects of their lives.

When the drama began airing, lesbian couple Melanie (Michelle Clunie) and Lindsay (Thea Gill) were the stable couple of the ensemble, but during the fourth season their relationship crumbled after Lindsay had a brief sexual encounter with a man, and the fifth season opener revealed that Lindsay has moved out. Now the most stable relationship is between comic-book store owner Michael (Hal Sparks) and writer/professor Ben (openly gay Robert Gant), who got married in Toronto at the end of the fourth season.

Even Brian, who has been positioned from the beginning as an eternal bachelor, has begun to develop feelings resembling commitment for his boyfriend, Justin.

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