| Before Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, Queer as Folk and Will & Grace helped draw so much attention to the visibility of gays and lesbians on US television, gay material had already become a remarkable programming trend. Throughout its first four decades, television virtually denied the existence of homosexuality. However, in 1990s, gay-themed episodes and references to homosexuality were everywhere. Hit sitcoms like Roseanne and Friends seemed to include gay jokes and references to homosexuality every week. American television seemed suddenly obsessed with gayness in 1990s.What does the emergence of this trend tell us about the changing politics of the culture that shaped it ? And what does it tell us about the changing anxieties and identities of the people who might have watched it ? Those questions are at the core of this paper.My primary goal is to show how such gay narratives relate to anxieties about America's deepening diversity, especially the sexual one. Though I refuse to believe that these narratives were in all ways negative, I do concede that on the one hand these narratives were attempts to balance the recognition of minority rights and the value of liberal pluralism. On the other hand, the faith in assimilationism and the value of national unity have never ever retreated. Thus, what I hope to provide is a useful perspective on the era's sitcom programming by asking what gay-themed sitcom episodes reveal about heterosexuality in 1990s America. Unlike much of the work that examines the politics of gay and lesbian televisibility, this project's central goal is not to describe or assess how lesbians, gays and bisexuals were or were not represented on television. Although such issues will be included in my argumentation, the main part of this thesis is about the analysis of how three most common gay narratives-the coming-out, the mistaken identity, and the affordable homos-were incorporated ,used, and consumed to soothe the straight panic in the 1990s.
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