“Queer as Folk” ran for five seasons on Showtime, from December 3, 2000, to August 7, 2005. It made 83 episodes about a group of gay men and women on Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh. It was brash, it was sometimes racy, and it was always straight to the heart.
Trailer, via SHOWTIME.
Brian Kinney and the Babylon Crowd
The first episode ends a night at Babylon, a popular gay club. Brian Kinney, played by Gale Harold, picks up Justin Taylor, played by Randy Harrison. Justin is 17. He falls in love with Brian, and what starts as a one-night stand becomes the spine of the series. That same night, Brian becomes a father. He has a son, Gus, with Lindsay Peterson through artificial insemination. Lindsay is played by Thea Gill, and she is raising Gus with her partner Melanie Marcus, played by Michelle Clunie.
Michael Novotny, played by Hal Sparks, loves Brian in a way that never quite gets returned. That unrequited love fuels the story, and Michael sometimes narrates it in voice-over. Justin’s coming out lands hard on Brian and Michael both. Michael does not hide his dismay. Justin is only 17.
“Queer as Folk” was developed and written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, who were the showrunners and executive producers along with Tony Jonas. It is based on the British series created by Russell T Davies. Cowlip Productions, Tony Jonas Productions, Temple Street Productions, and Showtime Networks produced it, in association with Crowe Entertainment and Warner Bros. Television.
Rage, Crystal Meth and a Police Chief
The second season brings Rage, a sexually explicit underground comic that Justin and Michael co-create. Its hero is a “Gay Crusader” superhero based on Brian. Later, Ted Schmidt, Melanie’s accountant and a man who once carried a long crush on Michael, becomes addicted to crystal meth. Ted, played by Scott Lowell, is unemployed and has a criminal record from running a legitimate porn website that was targeted by a chief of police running for mayor. He and Emmett Honeycutt, played by Peter Paige, start as best friends and briefly become lovers. That relationship ends.
In the fourth season, Brian loses his job for helping Justin oppose an anti-gay political client, then starts his own agency. He also learns he has testicular cancer and hides the treatment from his friends. Michael marries Ben Bruckner, an HIV-positive college professor played by Robert Gant. They adopt a teenage son, James “Hunter” Montgomery, who is also HIV-positive.
Sharon Gless plays Debbie Novotny, Michael’s mother. Jack Wetherall plays Vic Grassi. Alec McClure plays Chris Hobbs, the homophobic classmate who makes Justin’s school life a misery. Justin’s parents, Craig and Jennifer, are divorcing, and neither handles their son well. Justin confides in Daphne, his straight high-school friend.
A Pittsburgh That Never Existed
Here is the part that matters more than any plot turn. “Queer as Folk” is set in Pittsburgh, but almost none of it was shot there. The production center was Toronto, chosen for its lower cost and its mature television and film industry. Almost all of the Liberty Avenue scenes were filmed in and around the Church and Wellesley area, Toronto’s gay village. Not a single shot of the real Liberty Avenue was ever used.
Pittsburgh was picked as the closest parallel to Manchester, England, the industrial setting of the UK original. But Pittsburgh has no large gay district like San Francisco or New York City, so Toronto stood in. The show’s geography is loose to the point of fiction. It makes repeated references to the Susquehanna River, which flows in the eastern and central parts of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is in the west.
Woody’s, the central bar in this fantasy Pittsburgh, is named after a leading gay bar in Toronto. The real exterior was shot with only minor disguise. In a Season 4 episode where several characters travel to Toronto, the real Woody’s was renamed “Moosie’s.” Babylon was also a real Toronto gay bar, open during the show’s run and closed since. The real place was a sit-down martini bar. The dance club scenes were filmed at a different Toronto nightclub, Fly.
Canadian Directors and the Pilot
The pilot was directed by Australian director Russell Mulcahy. Much of the rest of the series went to Canadian directors known for independent film work: Bruce McDonald, David Wellington, Kelly Makin, John Greyson, Jeremy Podeswa and Michael DeCarlo. Later seasons added writers Michael MacLennan, Efrem Seeger, Brad Fraser, Del Shores and Shawn Postoff.
That roster is not a trivia footnote. It explains the show’s texture. “Queer as Folk” does not look like a standard American cable drama of its moment. It looks like a Canadian independent film that happens to run for 83 episodes. The show’s willingness to sit in long scenes, to let a club feel like a club, comes from that bench.
The Question Everyone Asked the Cast
The actors’ real-life sexual orientation became a public subject, and the show handled it badly at first. At a 2015 “Queer as Folk” reunion, Harold and Lowell said they refused to discuss their own sexuality in the press, at least during the first season, to lessen distractions. Lipman backed that up. He said that during the first season, even he did not know their real-life sexuality.
On April 24, 2002, on CNN’s Larry King Live, 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 later, Gant came out as gay in an article in The Advocate. In 2004, Gill, then married to director Brian Richmond, came out as bisexual in an interview with Windy City Times.
Sharon Gless had married Barney Rosenzweig in 1991, and her life as a woman married to a man was already well known while the show was in production. She has been described as a straight woman. In the years since the series ended, Harold, Harrison, Lowell, Paige and Sparks have all discussed their sexual orientation openly in gay publications.
The Numbers
- Network: Showtime
- Run: December 3, 2000 – August 7, 2005
- Seasons: 5
- Episodes: 83
- Created by: Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen
- Based on: the British series by Russell T Davies
- Main cast: Gale Harold, Randy Harrison, Hal Sparks, Peter Paige, Scott Lowell, Sharon Gless, Thea Gill, Michelle Clunie, Robert Gant
- Audience score: 8.3/10 on TMDB, from 544 votes
Five Seasons, Ranked by What They Carry
Ranking the seasons is a fair way to see where the show’s weight actually sits. The order below is our call, based on the story the series tells.
- Season 4 — Brian loses his job, starts his own agency, and hides testicular cancer treatment from everyone. The show’s best run of episodes puts its most guarded character in a hospital bed and refuses to let him be noble about it.
- Season 2 — Rage arrives, and with it the show’s sharpest idea: a gay superhero drawn by two men who cannot say what they mean to each other. The comic is a joke and a confession at once.
- Season 1 — The pilot sets the terms. Babylon, Justin at 17, Gus born the same night. The show announces its whole architecture in one episode.
- Season 5 — The final run, ending August 7, 2005. It closes the arcs, but the show had already said its biggest things.
- Season 3 — The Ted and Emmett romance, Ted’s crystal meth spiral, and the porn website case. Strong material, unevenly placed.
What Holds Up and What Does Not
The case for “Queer as Folk” rests on two things. First, it put gay men and women on screen as ordinary and specific at once — accountants, professors, ad men, mothers — and let them be petty, funny and wrong. Second, it treated health and politics as plot, not as a Very Special Episode. Ted’s addiction, Ben’s HIV, Brian’s cancer, the parental rights fights over Gus and Hunter. The show did not tiptoe.
The case against it is the same case. “Queer as Folk” is sometimes racy and sometimes sensitive, and it rarely knows which it wants to be in a given hour. The Pittsburgh that never existed is a symptom. The show wants to be about a real city with real political weather, and it is standing in a different country. The Susquehanna River is the tell: the show points to it as if it ran near Pittsburgh, and it does not.
The cast question is the harder one. The show asked its actors to carry a landmark of gay representation while the press treated their own lives as a parlor game. Harold and Lowell drew a line and took grief for it. Gant and Gill came out on their own clocks. That is not a flaw in the series. It is a flaw in how the series was covered, and it is worth naming plainly.
What remains is a show that did something no American series had done at this scale. Five seasons, 83 episodes, on Showtime, from December 3, 2000, to August 7, 2005. It is uneven. It is also the reason a lot of later television got to be casual about things “Queer as Folk” had to be loud about. The loudness was the point, and it still carries.
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