I used to think that too much exposure of gay culture beyond gay ghettos like San Francisco's Castro in such events as Gay Pride parades was an embarrassment to those of us who were closeted or who otherwise distanced ourselves from our more public gay brothers and sister.

I do not feel that way anymore.

I see now that it must be done if we are ever to walk as a free people through the world, be it in a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or other society bound to traditions that denigrate and sometimes kill us for being what we are.

The word "solidarity" comes to mind. It helped Poland and other nations emerge from the grotesque shadow of the now defunct Soviet Union. We are all together in this. Recognizing our solidarity as gay and bisexual people will see us through.

"Queer As Folk" is more than entertainment. The attention it is earning showcases our own revolution.

(The following article was contributed by Michael of San Francisco.)

Less than 30 years ago, Home Box Office created the pay-television business by showing uninterrupted and uncut feature films. On network television, feature films were cut up by commercials, any foul language was bleeped, and any sex scenes edited.

Within a few years, HBO was offering no-holds- barred comedy specials by performers like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy. By the 1990's, it was in television's vanguard with explicit dramas, beginning in 1993 with "And the Band Played On," about the AIDS epidemic, and continuing with current series like "Oz," about a maximum-security prison; "Sex and the City," about a group of single women in New York; and "The Sopranos," about a Mafia family leading a middle-class life in New Jersey. These shows' language, sexual content and violence broke television taboos.

And now comes Showtime's "Queer as Folk," taking the explicitness even further. A 22-hour television drama about gay and lesbian life, "Queer as Folk" starts on Dec. 3. The opening two-hour episode was seen for the first time on Thursday night at a premiere in New York co-sponsored by the Gay Men's Health Crisis and Showtime.

The series, which seeks to rival HBO in sexual candor, also shatters an unwritten rule in television against explicit depictions of sexual behavior between men, including kissing, fondling, anal sex and oral sex, much as HBO's "Sex and the City" depicts men and women engaged in various sexual acts. But if "Sex and the City" has more talk than sex, "Queer as Folk" has more sex than talk.

(Although "Oz" has featured scenes of men raping men, sex is not the dominant element in that series, as it is in "Queer as Folk.")

"We pushed this as far as we could go," said Tony Jonas, a former president of Warner Brothers Television and an executive producer of "Queer as Folk."

Mr. Jonas said that the highly successful NBC sitcom "Will and Grace," about a gay man and a straight woman, was "a wonderful mass-appeal show, but it's still sanitized."

"Our show has no such limitation," Mr. Jonas said. "We don't have to apologize for or whitewash or pretend what gay sexuality is all about. In a way, it's a giant step for cable." The series, set in Pittsburgh, is based on the award-winning and darkly funny British series of the same title that dealt with a group of gay men in Manchester.

(The title derives from an old Yorkshire saying, "There's nowt so queer as folk," meaning there's nothing so odd as people.)

The British series's explicitness led to intense news-media coverage during its 10-episode run in 1998-99. But the show's popularity with general audiences seemed to be inspired not only by its sexual candor but also by its provocative characters.

The American series's centers on five gay men who spend most of their nights at a gay dance club or looking for bedmates. The characters also include a lesbian couple with a newborn baby and the mothers of two of the men. (One is played by Sharon Gless of "Cagney and Lacey.") The central character, Brian, played by Gale Harold, is a seductive advertising executive who revels in his promiscuity.

"Actually, he's an archetypal character, a bit like Don Juan, which is how I play him," said Mr. Harold, a San Francisco and Los Angeles theater actor who was, he noted, "massively unknown" before being cast as the lead in the series.

He added: "This guy's a blast to play. He believes unapologetically in his freedom. He holds nothing back."

The American series was written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, who also created the Emmy Award- winning dramatic series "Sisters," which ran for six seasons on NBC. Mr. Cowen and Mr. Lipman said Showtime executives encouraged them to be even more explicit than the British series.

(Some gay writers in Britain criticized the original series because, they said, it depicted only one element of gay life - the club scene - and reinforced the stereotype that gay men were promiscuous and obsessed only with youth and staying in shape.)

The American show is significantly different. The original series focused on an affair between a 29-year- old advertising executive and a 15- year-old boy, a plot device that drew criticism because the boy was so young. In the American version, the youth is nearly 18. The new series has also expanded various roles, including those of the lesbian couple and of some older boyfriends, as well as those of the gay men's mothers.

"I don't think any one of us has seen anything on television that portrays gay people in as complex a way as this," Mr. Cowen said.

"Most of the time we see gay people portrayed as eunuchs or clowns or victims of AIDS or tortured teens. I don't think we've ever seen gay people expressing and celebrating their sexuality as they are here."

Mr. Lipman added, "No constraints were put on us by the network." Jerry Offsay, Showtime's president for programming, said the network was making "Queer as Folk" because the British series was "the most interesting, unique, innovative television show we've seen in a couple of years."

"It's truly a show that's exploring characters and a lifestyle we've never seen before on television," he added. "You can do the 47th lawyer show or the 50th cop show or the 700th doctor show. We've seen those. We haven't seen this before." "People have no problem seeing this kind of honesty in movie theaters," Mr. Offsay continued. "We and HBO have the ability to bring the same kind of honesty into your living room because we're invited in. We're not there without your invitation."

The limits, he said, are "what we think is in good taste, what we think is responsible." To an extent, Showtime has everything to gain from a series that will inevitably earn plenty of media attention. The network's goal is straightforward: to lure more paid viewers in hopes of competing with HBO. Currently, HBO has 25 million paid subscribers; Showtime has 12 million, according to Paul Kagan Associates, a media research company in Carmel, Calif.

The broader issue for Showtime and HBO is how far to go in terms of creative freedom. Several network and cable executives said privately that Showtime was treading a path between daring and sensation for sensation's sake in "Queer as Folk." But several top executives at HBO as well as at Showtime said that dealing bluntly with sex was not what differentiated cable from network television.

"The advantage we have is that we can go for an honest representation of an idea; we don't have to couch anything," said Chris Albrecht, president for original programming at HBO. "We don't say, `Let´s be shocking.´ And we use our judgment about what´s appropriate and not appropriate for a show. If everyone on `The Sopranos´ said `Shucks,´ it wouldn´t feel like a real rendition of that group of characters. The same goes for `Oz.´ One of the most intense places on the planet is a maximum-security prison. The show needs to be extremely intense."

The freedom enjoyed by cable television is the envy of some top creative writer-producers who must contend with network television's standards and practices departments. And certainly some network executives resent the constant unfavorable comparisons between the freedoms of cable and the limits of network television. That "The Sopranos" has failed to win the best dramatic series Emmy for two years in a row may be a measure of the resentment that networks feel toward cable.

Steven Bochco, who helped create "N.Y.P.D. Blue," "L.A. Law," and other network series, said the start of "N.Y.P.D. Blue" in 1993 was delayed for a year while he argued and negotiated with ABC executives about how far he could go with language and nudity. He and other television writer-producers have long argued that the networks must relax their standards on language, sexuality and general realism because serious shows on cable are drawing large audiences away from broadcast networks.

"Cable plays by a completely different set of rules on every level," Mr. Bochco said.

"First of all, they spend more money. Second of all, they have no advertisers. They don't have as many episodes as we do. Their schedules are longer. And they compete more directly with motion pictures on a content level."

But Mr. Bochco said he envied cable television only to a point. Last year, he explained, he sold a project to HBO, but the deal collapsed over the issue of how much freedom he could have.

"Ultimately, I withdrew," he said. "Ironically, HBO didn't give up creative control, and I didn't feel comfortable ceding the kind of control that I've had for 20 years in broadcasting." The control involved, among other issues, approval of writers, directors, the cast and scripts.

"We were willing to give the same creative control that we gave to David Chase and Tom Fontana," said Mr. Albrecht of HBO, referring to the creators of "The Sopranos" and "Oz," respectively.

But Mr. Bochco, who still has great leverage in network television because of his track record, is unusual. Alan Ball, a television writer who also won an Academy Award for his "American Beauty" screenplay, has had perhaps more typical encounters. Now working on a forthcoming series for HBO called "Six Feet Under," a dark comedy about a dysfunctional Los Angeles family that runs a funeral home, he had a dismal experience with his most recent network series, ABC's "Oh Grow Up." A comedy about a group of men living in a Brooklyn apartment, it ran for 11 episodes last fall.

"The difference between working for a network and for HBO is night and day," he said.

Mr. Ball, who has also written for shows like "Grace Under Fire," said ABC executives kept telling him to "make everybody nicer and articulate the subtext."

That means, he said, that audiences must be "spoon fed" information about the characters on the sitcom and that essentially nothing in a character's life can exist beneath the surface. Subtlety is out of the question, Mr. Ball added.

"That's why everything seems so formulaic on network television," he said. "If you're watching a show and have half a brain, you know in the first five minutes where it's going to go." Working in cable, he said, "I'm getting the opposite notes. It's like, `Maybe we don´t have to spell things out so much.´ I can´t believe what I´m hearing.

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