Ryan Murphy: Changing The Channels

“I was at a fundraising event at Rob Reiner’s house and I was talking to the lawyers who are fighting to get Proposition 8 overturned,” Murphy says. “And I asked them why they thought public opinion on gay marriage has changed so much in the last four years.” 
According to Murphy, the legal duo answered without a moment’s hesitation: “Television.”

“I remember being young and hearing my parents having a very derogatory conversation about Paul Lynde while they were watching him on Hollywood Squares,” Murphy recalls. “They thought every gay person was like him, and I thought, Well, I do like scarves, it’s true, but I’m not Paul Lynde,” he says dryly. “That memory stuck with me, so whenever I got any kind of ‘power’ in television, I tried to showcase different kinds of gay people and always made sure gay people were represented in my projects.”
Not that this showcasing came easily to Murphy. “When I first started working in the entertainment industry, it was out of the question to have an authentically gay character on television. Forget it! Forget it.” On his first TV show, Popular, a WB teen dramedy set in the Hobbesian world of public high school, Murphy would get notes from the network criticizing his straight characters as “too gay.” Other shows he pitched around town with gay characters, or even straight characters “with a gay sensibility,” as Murphy describes them, were turned down for being too polarizing and unfamiliar to audiences. “Now it’s like, if you don’t have a gay character, something is wrong with your show.”

Interesting interview with Ryan Murphy in the new issue of Out, with much discussion about how TV has changed over the years, and the potential for TV to change how the world sees The Gays.
The latter subject is this season's hot gay topic in the media, and Murphy may be slightly overstating his case - the first quote above is ridiculously reductive hyperbole.
If only it was that easy...