When Rickie Vasquez came out to his family on a 1994 episode of My So- Called Life, he ended up bruised, bloodied, and living in an abandoned warehouse full of homeless teens, afraid to tell even his closest friends why his uncle had kicked him out of the house just before Christmas. He didn’t even utter the word “gay” on screen until the season finale, which became the show’s final episode—and that was only to console a girl he’d rejected.
No wonder Rickie felt the need to keep his sexual orientation painfully tucked away—he was completely alone when it came to gay teens on television. He was the first on a primetime network show, and he’d be the only one for another five lonely years. In fact, there would be just a handful more in the next 10 years. “It was cathartic in some ways and painful in others,” says the man who played him, Wilson Cruz, now 37, whose real life inspired many of Rickie’s story lines. “The biggest part was the acknowledgment of our existence and our pain, which we hadn’t seen at all on television before that.”
If only Rickie could see Glee’s Kurt Hummel now. The breakout character (played by Chris Colfer) on TV’s most buzzed-about network show has won an Emmy nomination, a Golden Globe, and viewers’ hearts with an at times poignant, but often, well, gleeful depiction of a modern gay teen. It took Kurt only four episodes to say the words “I’m gay” to his dad, to which his father shrugged and said, “If that’s who you are, there’s nothing I can do about it. And I love you just as much.” He sealed it with a hug, and a new kind of gay hero was born: one who’s loved as much for his boa wearing as he is for fending off bullies and forming a touching stepbrotherly bond with his former crush.
Kurt, incidentally, spent his Christmas episode duetting on a wildly flirtatious version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with his new dreamy male idol, Blaine (Darren Criss). “That was by far the gayest thing that has ever been on TV, period,” Colfer says. “Forget AbFab, forget Beautiful People and Will & Grace.” The song became the most downloaded track off the Glee Christmas album—and ubiquitous on the radio during the holidays. “I was proud of that,” Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy says. “I think it pushed the envelope a bit.”
Unlike Rickie, Kurt and Blaine are far from alone in their boundary pushing this TV season. Gay characters have gone from one-time guest stars, whispered tragedies, and silly sidekicks to not just an accepted but an expected part of teen-centric television. The change reflects real teens’ lives: The percentage of schools with gay-straight alliance clubs is up from 25 percent in 2001 to 45 percent today, indicating the increasingly visible role that gay kids are playing in the high school landscape. With the average coming-out age now 16 (down from 19–23 in the ’80s), according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, it only makes sense for teens on TV to tackle the issue. “With our millennial audience, it’s what they expect to see,” says ABC Family exec VP of programming Kate Juergens. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was such a vestige of an older generation.”
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