The most important gay TV shows

After nearly a decade of rising ratings, more than 100 contestants, a switch to VH1 and scores of affiliated concerts and conventions, RuPaul’s drag competition has cemented itself as an institution akin to gay sports. There’s no antecedent in media for a safe space where dozens of queer people can share the camera—let alone express their gender identities, make art, build community and change their destinies. With a gay pop-culture lexicon that honors Paris is Burning, Mae West, Judith Butler and many more, Drag Race continues to educate young viewers and allies in the history and heritage of the community.

Yes, the series has been criticized as a gay minstrel show swishing about in Pinkface. Right or wrong, that is irrelevant to this conversation. Will & Grace placed gay characters in NBC’s “Must-See-TV” line-up, and its campy humor was a huge hit. Even if we never got the passionate kiss we wanted between Eric McCormack and Bobby Cannavale, Will & Grace was a prime time game-changer for queer representation on TV.

With an annual salary of over $75 million and a hit talk show 13 years running, the former oddball standup has successfully battled her way into the hearts of mainstream viewers across the globe. It may seem like another world in which DeGeneres risked her career and reputation by coming out on her ’90s sitcom, but that's because her visibility and outspokenness since then has changed the way Hollywood—and the rest of the country—perceives LGBT people.

Showtime’s millennium-era gay answer to Sex and the City often gets derided as sensationalist and pornographic, portraying the lives of gay men in Pittsburgh as a pop spectacle of sex and sweat centered around a dancefloor shrine. But in its unapologetic portrayals of same-sex love, tough conversations about HIV, and beautiful, earnestly-acted depictions of queer family, Queer as Folk built a world where no topic was taboo and gay life could be complex, messy and desirable. For a community in desperate need of a fantasy, its five-season run is quite an achievement.

After writing for Six Feet Under—another one of our favorites—Jill Solloway created her own family drama based on her experience of having a parent transition later in life. Anchored by Jeffrey Tambor’s portrayal of budding matriarch Maura Pfefferman, Transparent elegantly explores how identity and trauma pass through generations, and how coming out is always a lifelong process.

Spanning multiple continents and featuring a smoking hot polyglot cast thrown into orgies, car chases and set pieces more grand than most seen in the movies, the Wachowski sisters’ Netflix passion project may be the most ambitious queer project ever put to screen. The show’s basic premise—eight strangers from around the world connect psychically—presents a vision of universal compassion, support and love that defies gender, sexual and racial lines. There’s nothing else like it.

Few other shows could feature such a rich array of queer characters without being labeled a “gay” series, but Jenji Kohan’s masterpiece about the lives of women in a New York state penitentiary defies traditional definition. With flashback scenes granted to the least TV-ready characters, OITNB builds a mosaic that honors bodies, races, identities and classes often made invisible on TV.