Queer as Folk

Show premise

The series follows the lives of five gay men living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Brian (Gale Harold), Justin (Randy Harrison), Michael (Hal Sparks), Emmett (Peter Paige), and Ted (Scott Lowell); a lesbian couple, Lindsay (Thea Gill) and Melanie (Michelle Clunie); and Michael's mother Debbie (Sharon Gless) and his uncle Vic (Jack Wetherall). Another main character, Ben (Robert Gant), was added in the second season.

Cast and characters

Main

Gale Harold as Brian Kinney (British version: Aidan Gillen as Stuart Alan Jones)

Brian Kinney: a veritable sex-machine. At 29 years old, he is living life for the now. He is his own man and believes in having sex for the sheer joy of doing it. While he and Justin have an on-and-off-again relationship, Justin is the only one of his sexual encounters that Brian finds himself falling in love with and the only one he continues to have sex with after the first night.

He makes his living as an advertising executive for Vangard, and later on builds his own company, Kinnetik, which was named by Justin. While he purports not to be part of the gay and lesbian community, he will do what he can to protect his fellow gay men and women. His motto when it comes to straight people: "There are two kinds of straight people in the world, those that hate you to your face and those who hate you behind your back."

Randy Harrison as Justin Taylor (British version: Charlie Hunnam as Nathan Maloney)

Justin loses his virginity to Brian at the age of seventeen and falls in love with him. He runs away from home after coming out of the closet, primarily because his father is not accepting of his sexuality. Nicknamed "Sunshine" by Debbie because of his bright smile and cheery disposition, Justin is queer-bashed at the end of Season 1, resulting in Brian taking him in during Season 2. A talented artist, Justin briefly contemplates attending business school to appease his father but ultimately decides to attend art school to become a visual artist. He and Brian further their relationship over the five seasons, which eventually ends in a marriage proposal. Justin says yes, but Brian tells him to go to New York to pursue his art because he would be more successful there than he would be in Pittsburgh.

Hal Sparks as Michael Novotny (British version: Craig Kelly as Vince Tyler)

Brian's best friend since adolescence, Michael secretly harbors feelings for him. He enjoys reading comic books, particularly Captain Astro adventures. He starts the series as a manager at a Kmart-like department store, the Big Q, but eventually follows his dream of opening a comic book store. From Season 2, he and Justin create the comic book Rage, based on Brian as the character Rage, Justin as JT (Justin Taylor), who is Rage's lover/sidekick, and Michael as Zephyr, Rage's best friend/sidekick. After a somewhat stormy relationship with older Dr. David Cameron during season 1, Michael finds himself in a long-term relationship with Ben Bruckner, an HIV-positive college professor, beginning in season 2; Michael and Ben eventually marry near the end of season 4.

Recurring

Harris Allan as James "Hunter" Montgomery (seasons 3–5)

Hunter is an HIV-positive teenage hustler who meets Ben and Michael while standing outside their apartment. Ben feels sorry for Hunter and takes him in. Eventually, he and Michael adopt him. Hunter initially has an unrequited crush on Brian but later falls in love with a girl named Callie Leeson.

Sherry Miller as Jennifer Taylor (British version: Caroline O'Neill as Janice Maloney)

Jennifer is Justin's mother and works as a real estate agent. After having difficulty with her son's coming out, with Debbie's help she embraces the fact that her son is gay, joining PFLAG. After divorcing Craig Taylor, she dates a younger man named Tucker (Lucas Bryant) in season 5, much to Justin's disapproval.

Peter MacNeill as Carl Horvath (British version: Dave Nicholls as PC Stroud) (seasons 2–5)

Debbie's boyfriend. He meets Debbie while working on a case involving the murder of a young gay man named Jason Kemp. He is slightly homophobic when Debbie first meets him, but she teaches him to be more accepting of homosexuals. He asks Debbie to marry him and she accepts, but she later decides that she cannot marry Horvath as long as Michael cannot legally marry. Instead, the couple decides to live together in a common-law relationship.

Alec McClure as Chris Hobbs (British version: Ben Maguire as Christian Hobbs) (seasons 1, 2, and 4)

Bully from Justin's school. Justin gives him a hand job early in the series, but he is then revealed to be homophobic. After assaulting Justin with a baseball bat, he is charged with assault and battery and sentenced to community service and probation. He is later shown working in construction, not expressing remorse for his actions until Justin, at Cody's urging, forces him at gunpoint to apologize. Justin plays into Chris's homophobia by claiming that Chris will not report them to the police for fear that people would know he was almost killed by "a couple of sissy fags".

Plot

The first episode finds the four friends ending a night at Babylon, a popular gay club. Brian picks up and has sex with Justin, who falls in love with him and eventually becomes more than a one-night stand. Brian also becomes a father that night, bearing a son with Lindsay through artificial insemination.

Michael's seemingly unrequited love for Brian fuels the story, which he occasionally narrates in voice-over. Justin's coming out and the budding relationship with Brian has unexpected effects on Brian and Michael's lives, much to Michael's dismay, as Justin is only 17 years old. Justin confides in his straight high-school friend Daphne while struggling to deal with homophobic classmates and his dismayed, divorcing parents, Craig and Jennifer. Later in the second season, Justin and Michael co-create the sexually explicit underground comic Rage, featuring a "Gay Crusader" superhero based on Brian.

Brian's son Gus, being raised by Lindsay and Melanie, becomes the focus of several episodes, as issues of parental rights come to the fore. Ted is Melanie's accountant who once harbored a long-standing crush on Michael. He and Emmett begin as best friends but briefly become lovers later in the series. Their relationship ends as Ted, unemployed and with a criminal record earned from running a legitimate porn website that was targeted by a chief of police running for mayor, becomes addicted to crystal meth.

In the fourth season, Brian, who has lost his job by assisting Justin in opposing an anti-gay political client, starts his own agency. He also discovers he has testicular cancer and hides his treatment from his friends. Michael marries Ben Bruckner, an HIV-positive college professor, and the couple adopts a teenage son, James "Hunter" Montgomery, who is also HIV-positive as a result of his experiences as a young hustler.

Ted's affair with a handsome crystal meth addict, Blake Wyzecki, sets the pattern for Ted's later tragic but ultimately redeeming experiences with drug addiction.

Melanie and Lindsay's relationship, while on the surface seeming to be stable, is actually quite tumultuous. Each cheats on the other at various points in the series; both partake in a threesome shortly after they marry but are separated for much of the fourth and fifth seasons. Melanie is impregnated by Michael (through artificial insemination, as Lindsay was) in the third season, and thus best friends Brian and Michael become co-fathers to Lindsay and Melanie's children.

Reception

Cultural implications

The American version of Queer as Folk quickly became the number one show on the Showtime roster. The network's initial marketing of the show was primarily targeted at gay male (and to some extent, lesbian) audiences, yet a sizable segment of the viewership turned out to be heterosexual women.

Groundbreaking scenes abounded in Queer as Folk beginning with the first episode, which depicts the first sex scene between two men shown on American television (including manual sex, anal sex, and anilingus), though not as graphically as the scene in the UK version that it was based on.

Despite the frank portrayals of drug use and casual sex in the gay club scene, the expected right-wing uproar (aside from some token opposition) never materialized. Cowen and Lipman, however, admitted in 2015 that they were surprised by a backlash from some quarters of the LGBT community, fearing negative implications that may result from the show.

Controversial storylines explored in Queer as Folk have included the following: coming out, same-sex marriage, ex-gay ministries, recreational drug use and abuse (cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, GHB, ketamine, cannabis); gay adoption, artificial insemination, vigilantism, autoerotic asphyxiation, gay-bashing, safe sex, HIV/AIDS, casual sex, cruising, "the baths", serodiscordancy in relationships, underage prostitution, actively gay Catholic priests, discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation, the internet pornography industry, and bug chasers (HIV-negative individuals who actively seek to become HIV-positive).

The series at times made humorous references to its image in the gay community. A few episodes featured the show-within-a-show Gay as Blazes, a cheesy, dull, badly acted, and abundantly politically correct drama which Brian particularly disagreed with, and which was eventually canceled.

Cultural implications in the Asian context

Acting as one of the pioneering dramas depicting gay characters from a complex perspective, alternative media and platforms within Asia had also adopted the drama. In South Korea the Queer film festivals (first labeled as a "scandal" in 1998) were slowly accepted and even popularised across South Korean society. Queer as Folk played a significant role when it was screened during the festival in 2000, providing the queer community with a way to challenge heteronormativity in Korean society.

Cast's real-life sexual orientation

The actors' real-life sexual orientation has been the subject of speculation by the public. In a 2015 Queer as Folk reunion, actors Gale Harold and Scott Lowell said they refused to discuss their own sexuality in the press, at least during the show's first season, in an effort to lessen distractions, which was corroborated by Lipman, who went on to say that during the show's first season, even he did not know their real-life sexuality.

In an interview on CNN's Larry King Live on April 24, 2002, show host Larry King described Randy Harrison and Peter Paige as gay, and Michelle Clunie, Robert Gant, Thea Gill, Gale Harold, Scott Lowell, and Hal Sparks as straight.

Three months after the interview on Larry King Live, Gant came out as gay in an article on The Advocate.

In 2004, Gill, married to director Brian Richmond at the time, came out as a bisexual in an interview with Windy City Times.

Meanwhile, Sharon Gless's life as a woman married to a man was already well known by the time Queer as Folk was in production, as she had married Barney Rosenzweig in 1991. She has been described as a straight woman.

In the years since Queer as Folk ended, Harold, Harrison, Lowell, Paige and Sparks have openly discussed their sexual orientation in gay publications.

Setting

The series was set in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is depicted with a good deal of creative license; one example is the numerous references made to the Susquehanna River, which flows in the eastern and central parts of Pennsylvania whereas Pittsburgh is in the west. Pittsburgh was chosen as the closest parallel to the UK series' industrial setting of Manchester, England. However, since Pittsburgh does not have a large gay district like San Francisco or New York City, almost all of the Liberty Avenue scenes were filmed in and around the Church and Wellesley area of Toronto, which is that city's gay village. In fact, not a single shot of the real Liberty Avenue was ever used in the series. Toronto was chosen as the production center of the series because of its lower cost of production and established mature television and film industry. And, as it happens, Toronto's gay village had the look the producers needed to bring their vision of Liberty Avenue alive.

Woody's, the central bar in this fantasy Pittsburgh, is the name of a leading gay bar in Toronto, whose real exterior was shot with only minor disguise. (In a Season 4 episode in which several characters traveled to Toronto, the real Woody's was dubbed "Moosie's".) Babylon was also the name of a real gay bar in Toronto, which was open during the show's run but subsequently closed, although the real establishment was a sitdown martini bar; the dance club scenes in the series were actually filmed at a different Toronto nightclub, Fly.

International and online release

United States

From February 1, 2014, to February 1, 2019, the entire series was available for online streaming via Netflix. Since 2020, it has been available on Paramount+.

Canada

In Canada, the series aired in first run on Showcase, and still airs in reruns on OutTV.

United Kingdom

Season 1 was broadcast by the BBC on its digital channel BBC Choice in 2002. Seasons 3 and 4 were broadcast by Channel 4's digital channel E4 in an unpromoted post-midnight slot (Channel 4 was the broadcaster of the British series). While the BBC still holds the rights to Season 2, it has never been broadcast since BBC Choice was rebranded BBC Three and its remit was changed. All five seasons have been released on DVD in the UK; Seasons 1 and 2 were first released exclusively through HMV, but are now also available as part of a boxed set and separately from Amazon.

Europe:

In Norway, the first season started on March 31, 2006, on Canal Digital.

In Romania the show started airing in late 2008 on a gay-themed network, Purple TV.

In Poland the show began airing on March 1, 2010, on nFilmHD at 11:00 pm.

In Greece, only the first season of the show was aired on Star Channel in 2002. The first season was repeated on the same channel in 2003, but the rest of the seasons were not broadcast in the country. The Greek title of the show was "Anamesa Mas" (Between Us).

Asia:

In Israel the show was aired on Channel 3 and yes stars channels. Currently the show reruns on HOT3. Owing to linguistic problems, it was renamed "הכי גאים שיש" ("Hachi Ge'im SheYesh"; lit. "Proud As Can Be").