Battle of the Network Gays: December 11, 2009

Every week we pick the gays who we think have made the biggest splash in television (or pop culture in general) and leave it to you, the keepers of the flame, to decide who will be crowned Gay of the Week.

Last week's results had soap opera character Oliver Fish beating out the real live Brendan Burke for the crown. Many, many people were frustrated by that result and felt it was unfair (and perhaps shallow) to pit frothy popular fictional characters against real world heroes. Well, we definitely heard you and are trying something a little different moving forward.

As you may have noticed, the Best Gay Week Ever column now contains a Hero of the Week poll, which allows us to recognize those real world individuals with more substantial contributions to the world at large. Moving forward, that's where we'll tip our hat to the Brendan Burkes, the Rachel Maddows, the Bea Arthurs, etc.

That leaves the weekly Battle of the Network Gays to cover much lighter pop culture fare: Gay TV characters, reality show contestants, pop singers, and the like.

A lot of people have also complained that voting for this poll doesn't remain open long enough, so moving forward we will announce the nominees on Friday, and we'll leave voting open until Monday evening. Winners will be announced on the blog on Tuesday.

Everybody cool with that? After the break check out this week's frothy, pop culturish contenders. (And again, if you're looking for nominees with gravitas and moral heft check out the Hero of the Week poll).

This week's contenders:

• OLTL's gay power couple of Kyle Lewis and Oliver Fish ("Kish") had quite possibly the most romantic gay love scene ever on U.S. television. Of course we had to nominate them!

• But they have some competition from fellow OLTL alum Nick Chavez (played by Nicholas Rodriguez). Poor Nick had a tough week, being the the victim of a violent gay bashing. Okay, so that doesn't exactly make him a "frothy, pop culturish nominee." But he is a soap opera character at least. And his attacker was a former Blues Clues host, so there's that.

• Adam Lambert. We were all set to leave him off the list of nominees this week, but then he went and did The View yesterday and had a remarkably lucid discussion with the ladies. Favorite exchange:

Joy: You're not exactly a nice Jewish boy.
Adam: No, a little different. My dreidel spins the other way.

• Finally, we have Sam and Dan McMillen of The Amazing Race. Sure, they didn't win, but their brotherly bickering amused us right to the end. Check out our interview with them here.

Vote for your favorite by 10 PM EDT Monday. And be sure to check back next Tuesday on the blog to see which network gay our readers have carried to glory!