Currently, most of what has been published about television and its portrayals of sexual minority themes and characters comes from qualitative writings. Little quantitative research has been conducted to document gay issues and characters on television. Despite the lifting of some longstanding taboos over the last several decades, television programming has been called “compulsory heterosexual” ( Wolf & Kielwasser, 1991), and depictions of the sexual issues associated with nonheterosexuals 1 may remain relatively rare ( Brown, 2002). One theme that has been especially ignored is the portrayal of sexual issues related to gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals. At its inception, television rarely presented sexual themes, and throughout the early decades of television, topics such as pregnancy, contraception, and other aspects of characters' sexuality were considered too sensitive to be portrayed or discussed in television shows.
Sexual content of programming on American television has changed substantially since the medium was first invented more than 50 years ago.
