Trying to get the talk show, looking back on it, we had to beg a lot of station managers to pick up the show because people thought no one would watch it because I'm openly gay.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is a large group that's not represented on television - the group that falls somewhere in the middle of straight and gay. That group is looked down on, because people say, 'You can't be in-between. You have to pick one or the other.'
The writers have slowly taken the show, with subjects other gay shows have dived right into, slowly. It was over a year before Will even started to date.
If I don't get a TV show next year because someone looks up my Wikipedia and it says 'openly gay,' then it's worth the risk because I've had so many years being openly gay and proud of myself as a role model.
If you look at my life before I went into television, the struggle I went through coming out would be surprising to most people, given how comfortable and how out I am being the only late-night gay talk-show host.
But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
They might have a long way to go before truly accepting gay people into their lives, but they have accepted the show into their living rooms each and every week.
And I'd like to believe that's true, you know, kind of showing gay people in this kind of light and - where it's not about that, it's just about the characters for the first time, like those shows were.
I kind of cheer the presence of any gay characters at all - I think the more we can saturate television with any gay character or lesbian character or transgender character, I think that's a really great thing. We're kind of getting past the fact that they're the punchline or that they're the novelty.
We were so hungry for 'Sex and the City' that even though it was heightened and written by gay men, we just needed to see different women on television. Give us another movie.
There were times I was told, 'You are too gay.' I turned down a lot of things because producers said they wanted me to be different. I said, 'It's not going to happen.'
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