As Maggie Andrews (2012) has pointed out, with regard to televisual form, the home environment and the context of femininity:

Unlike film, which may be considered as presenting discrete texts to specific audiences often set within organised social settings (see Ellis 1982), television's broadcasting address to the home audience establishes its form as intimate, intertextual and focused on family life. As part of this, the address to females as heads of the domestic household, potentially paying concern not only to the utilitarian notion of organising or representing the household but also framed within the intuitive and emotive context of female identity, potentially offers scope in accommodating the ‘other’. Part of this might include the emerging representation of sexual diversity, and its relationship to domestic, or feminised, environments. Hence, this chapter explores the development of the straight girl and the queer guy relationship within televisual form, enabled largely through the feminised domestic context of contemporary media.

Early television representations that explored the straight girl and the queer guy relationship included Love Sidney (Warner Bros 1981–3, US), a prototypical text that represents a middle-aged man (who is coded as queer) sharing his apartment with a young girl, who becomes pregnant and who later has a child. Later more explicit representations of the straight girl and the queer guy union were apparent in the serial drama Tales of the City (Channel 4 1993, UK) and the sitcom Ellen (ABC 1994–8, US), which established a cultural appetite that would be developed in Will and Grace (NBC 1998–2006, US) and Gimme Gimme Gimme – (Channel 4 1999–2001, UK), which focused on leisure and consumption. At the same time the notion of the queer guy in the company of females was equally apparent in Sex in the City (HBO 1998–2004, US) and Girls (HBO 2012 to present, US), where notions of female identification are counterpointed to the queer male experience.