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A quick visit to Bravo's website reveals Andy's smiling face peeking out from around every corner (sometimes even while languishing provocatively across a red couch), giving him a front-and-center persona that most TV executives don't have.

"I think the fact that I am 38 and gay and kind of urban also happens to be kind of duplicative of a lot of our viewers," Cohen said, "or the sensibility of a lot of our viewers. So I think it's also sort of a nice fit. So if I worked for Lifetime, you know, they speak to women; or if I worked for Spike, they're more a straight guy thing, so maybe they wouldn't really want to hear me say that I thought Oprah had too much makeup on yesterday."

And what if he were working for a major broadcast network? "I think if I was writing for NBC," he admitted, "I would probably get in more trouble, and it probably wouldn't work as well." But high visibility as a gay network exec on a burgeoning cable channel with a few bona fide hits appears to be no problem for Cohen or for Bravo.

Considering the state of gay visibility on television in general, Cohen marveled, "It's amazing to me that 20 years ago I was graduating from high school, and I was so deeply in the closet in St. Louis , Missouri. You know, there was no gay guy on The Real World yet — we were four years away from that yet. So it was literally just some random episode of Donahue where a gay person would be on, and Donahue would be the only person saying 'It's OK to be gay' — it's really amazing."

But in recent months, rumors have suggested that several Project Runway contestants were disappointed with the way that their sexuality was represented on the show — an accusation that Cohen finds "hilarious."

"That's ridiculous," said Cohen, "because Santino [Rice, from Season 2] — if you read my interview with Santino, he is desperately unhappy if he is — Santino does not identify as being an out, gay man. Santino is bisexual according to everything Santino has told me and the producers. So that is not true. And in terms of Zulema [Griffin, also from Season 2], I had no idea she was — I think she has a different vision of how things went down."

Cohen shook his head and added, "I just think that the idea that Bravo would tell people to suppress their sexuality — Bravo, the network behind Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Boy Meets Boy, Project Runway, Work Out, three GLAAD nominations announced today — the idea that we would tell people to repress their sexuality to me is laughable."

Cohen feels that Bravo's shows create a forum where gay people are given an opportunity to excel in talent-based competitions that focus on their skills, not their sexuality. "They're not on because they're gay," he said. "They're on because they're amazing designers or they're amazing chefs or they're amazing interior designers. It's just, 'Oh yeah, this person's gay.' We don't make a big deal out of it, which I love — they're within the fabric of the community."

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