Are you better off than you were four or eight years ago? It’s a question that politicians have been asking voters since Ronald Reagan first famously made the query in 1984.

But I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about gays on American television.

Where were we eight years ago? It was actually a very heady – and surprisingly inclusive — time on television. Will & Grace was busily shifting the cultural landscape in its third season on NBC. Queer as Folk, the first major American show with a primarily gay cast, was just premiering on Showtime. And while it’s not gay male-related, Ellen DeGeneres had made a huge cultural splash when she and her TV alter-ego had come out in 1997 (though in 2000, she was in something of a pre-Finding Nemo, lesbian-induced career lull).

The casts of Will & Grace (left) & Queer as Folk

Meanwhile, there were plenty of other regular characters on broadcast network television, on Spin City, Dawson’s Creek, and Oh, Grow Up, with reoccurring characters on ER, Chicago Hope, NYPD Blue, The Simpsons, Providence, The Profiler, and Grosse Point. On cable, there were gay characters on shows like Sex and the City and Rude Awakening. Six Feet Under, with a complicated gay man in one of the lead roles, would debut in early summer the very next year.

And where are we now? Well, GLAAD’s most recent report noted that gay (and lesbian, transgender, and bisexual) characters now make up 2.6% of all the speaking roles on the five broadcast networks—almost double than the year before, to a total of 16 regular or reoccurring such characters.

So are things even better now than they were eight years ago? That’s certainly the spin that the mainstream media took on the study, widely reporting that gay characters had “doubled” on television and making it sound like we’d entered some Great Gay Age.

But in reality, those headlines were a little misleading. The numbers themselves may be up, but most of those characters are what we at AfterElton.com call “barely there” gay characters: ones that appear only occasionally (and when they do appear, their storylines often ignore their gayness completely — see Andrew on Desperate Housewives). Additionally, Fox has already canceled the sitcom Do Not Disturb, doing away with one of the more prominent gay characters introduced this season.

I like My Name is Earl’s Gay Kenny as much as the next guy, but is it really a sign of much progress that he shows up with a line or two every six episodes?

The truth is, only a few shows on broadcast television, notably ABC’s Brothers & Sisters and Ugly Betty, now include prominent regularly occurring gay male characters. In terms of the significance of these characters, we might have been better off back in 2000.

So things on television are worse now than they were eight years ago?

No, that’s definitely not the case either.

While things are looking a little grim on the major broadcast networks of ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the CW, commercial and subscription cable television has seen a virtual explosion of gay characters — and diverse, unusual ones at that.

Back in 2000, we had the start of some racial diversity in the character of Michael Boatman’s Carter on Spin City. Now we have gay characters of color on Greek, The Office, Shirts & Skins, True Blood, Entourage, The Big Gay Sketch Show, Privileged, and Ugly Betty. There was even a gay Muslim man on the 2006 Showtime series Sleeper Cell, and another on Nurse Jackie, premiering on Showtime in early 2009. Racial diversity still isn’t where it should be, but it’s a start.

Nelsan Ellis on HBO's True Blood
Photo credit: HBO