Readers' Choice: The Top 25 Gay TV Characters Revealed!

Billy Crystal is probably best known for hosting the Oscars, and starring in When Harry Met Sally (1989) and City Slickers (1991). But the comedian really burst on the scene with his turn as gay son Jodie Dallas on the ABC sitcom, Soap, which ran from 1977 to 1981.

In a 2002 New York Times interview, Billy Crystal admitted to some early misgivings about taking a gay role:

"I was Jackie Robinson for a while.... you could feel people deal with you differently. They'd be playing to you like, 'Oh, you're the gay guy.' It was very creepy at the beginning."

"My skin would crawl sometimes,'' he said, remembering the derision studio audiences would direct at his character, Jodie, the gay son of a blue-collar Connecticut family. Like the time Jodie's ex-boyfriend told him, ''I love you and I want you back.'' ''The audience hears that and they go nuts,'' Mr. Crystal said. ''They start tittering and laughing.'' In such scenes, he said, ''If there was an isolated camera on me, you would have seen me getting red and sweaty, thinking, "What am I doing here?"

And yet, by the end of the series, audiences had warmed up significantly to Jodie Dallas. In the third season, Jodie is involved in a child custody battle. According to Crystal, "The mail was three to one that I should get the child, and I thought that was the biggest victory of all.''

Dr. George Huang joined Law & Order: SVU in 2002 and became a series regular soon thereafter. Huang is not only an FBI agent, but is also the Special Victims Unit's resident psychiatrist. Of all the characters included on our list, Huang is the only who has never explicitly been stated as being gay. But so many viewers have read the soft-spoken, even-tempered and brilliant agent as gay that he made our list of the best gay characters.

Part of the reason for that might be that Huang is played out actor B.D. Wong (Oz, M. Butterfly) making him one of the six out actors playing characters on our top twenty-five list. He is also one of the few out Asian actors on television, along with Rex Lee who plays Lloyd on Entourage. With any luck, NBC might see fit to make Huang explicitly gay, thereby helping to remedy the current dearth of gay characters on the Peacock Network.

While U.S. audiences were finding themselves finally enjoying a same-sex male relationship on a soap opera, U.K. audiences were already deep into the relationship on Hollyoaks between John Paul (James Sutton) and Craig (Guy Burnet). While the pairing didn't mark a breakthrough for British television, already having had a fairly extensive track record of gay representation on soaps, it did mark a breakthough for Hollyoaks, which didn't.

But what the show lacked in previous representations it more than made up with the relationship between John Paul and Craig, which quickly became a fan favorite. John Paul joined the show in the fall of '06 and while the character was conceived as gay from the very start, viewers didn't learn that fact until January when John Paul broke down and tearfully told Craig, his best friend, that he was in love with him.

What followed were a tumultuous seven months as Craig came to terms with his own feelings for John Paul, something that came to a head during a party to celebrate Craig's engagement to a woman. Ultimately the two broke up, but not before viewers saw that gay relationships were every bit as caring, complicated, and enjoyable as straight ones.