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Ellen was likely part of the reason why. As gay co-creator Max Mutchnick told The Advocate, “I would imagine that certainly for my show, Ellen [DeGeneres] was a help. I think she did only good.” (The show's other creator was the straight David Kohan.)

Also, as Entertainment Weekly noted, “the gay-man/hetero-gal duo” was “the pop-culture relationship du jour” when Will & Grace was set to air. My Best Friend's Wedding (released in June 1997), As Good As It Gets (released in December 1997), and The Object of My Affection (released in April 1998) helped prime America for Will & Grace's gay-male/straight-female relationship. In addition, the straight character made the show more palatable to some, as EW observed.

Having Will & Grace air on a different network made things easier as well. ABC put warnings on shows with queer content; NBC didn't. Warren Littlefield (who was, at that time, the entertainment president of NBC) told The Advocate he welcomed any controversy Will & Grace might bring. Since the network didn't make a big deal out of it, the public didn't either.

Will's pathetic love life kept some controversy away, too. Mutchnick told The Advocate, “… It's really hard to find an actor who can hold his own with Eric McCormack [Will] and play a gay character with the integrity he plays it with. … There [are] a lot of men on the cutting-room floor.”

Yeah. Not the most convincing reason. After all, Mutchnick wasn't exactly searching for Scarlett O'Hara here. But even if he really did have trouble finding the right actor, that wasn't the only reason Will was without a long-term boyfriend. Another reason (the main reason, in fact) was fear--fear that both the advertisers and the audience would go running for the hills.

I don't think too many (if any) advertisers would have pulled out. And the audience? "The audience would accept it," Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales told The Advocate.

Given Will's romantic track record, it's surprising Will & Grace managed to win seven GLAAD Media Awards over the course of its eight-season run (no doubt it did so due in part to the dearth of queer characters on television during that time).

Even before the show first aired, GLAAD was positive in its assessment of Will Truman. (To see quotes, go to glaad.org.) But later, GLAAD sometimes disapproved of the way the show handled Will's romantic life: Scott Seomin, who was GLAAD's entertainment media director, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “If Will doesn't [seriously] date this [second] season, the show isn't realistically representing the life of a gay man.”

But not everyone felt like Seomin. “I'm not one of those people who think Will & Grace is bad because they haven't gone far enough,” queer female sex columnist Tristan Taormino told The Advocate . “The truth is, they've made huge strides, because they are on a major network … I think it's a big deal to give him a boyfriend.”

Gay comedian Bruce Vilanch was hopeful Will's love life would change, but, like Taormino, he was realistic. In an article for The Advocate, he wrote, “With Will's home network, NBC, losing its two biggest comedies, Friends and Frasier, at the end of this [2003-2004] season, Will looks to be the last man standing on top of the network's pile of sitcoms. Think NBC is going to feel this is the right time to storm one of the strongest barricades of the sexual revolution?” Even Seomin recognized the pressure the show was under. “… It's a hit because it conforms to the sitcom format to make the majority of this country comfortable,” he told The Advocate.

Will was not the only queer man on Will & Grace. There was also Jack (Sean Hayes), who had an overdramatic nature; an overactive libido; an obsession with hot boys; an abundance of femininity; and a love of Cher. In other words, Jack was the stereotypical gay man. (However, Sean Hayes told EW, “When I think of a stereotypical gay guy, I think of In Living Color's ‘Men on Film,' [sketch] with the snapping and all that. That's completely different from Jack.”)

Besides being extremely stereotypical, Jack had some other negative qualities: he didn't always have common sense, and could be vengeful and irresponsible.

Gay writer John Lyttle was particularly offended by Jack's campiness. “In a few years' time, we will look back on [Queer Eye, Will & Grace and a UK version of Queer Eye called Fairy Godfathers] in the same way we look back on [the book] Uncle Tom's Cabin. People will cringe. …The thing about camping it up [is that] it's gone from being very subversive—without it we wouldn't have had gay liberation—to being the norm on TV. Gay culture is not all about that stereotype. It's like gay men are only acceptable if they play the court jester,” he told The Independent on Sunday.

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