“The L Word” was supposed to be the beginning of a new era of teevee shows about the real true lives of lesbian and bisexual women — and although we never quite got there, here are 15 examples of shows that don’t just have queer characters in them, but are also *about* being queer.

“We’ll comb desperately and hungrily through minutes upon minutes of storylines we don’t care about on shows we’ve never seen before — aliens! middle schoolers! telenovelas! big brother 10! — to reach the two-minute morsel we care about more than we probably should: the holy grail of promised homosexual content.”