'Schitt's Creek,' 'Pose' and the rise of LGBT families on TV

When it comes to queer stories on TV right now, family is king. The groundbreaking LGBTQ shows of the ’90s and early 2000s focused not on the nuclear family but on what writer Armistead Maupin called one’s “logical family.” “Sooner or later,” he writes in his memoir, “no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us.” Close to three decades since Maupin’s own “Tales of the City” was adapted as a TV miniseries, though, his idea of that kind of “logical family” — the community in San Francisco’s fictional Barbary Lane — has given way to heartwarming stories with a modern twist on the hallowed nuclear family. At the height of the AIDS crisis, the call for “family values” placed gay men and women outside of society’s idea of what a family could and should look like. On the comedy side, a number of new shows have pushed past the success of the Emmy-winning “Modern Family” — which features a suburban gay couple with an adopted kid — and the failure of Ryan Murphy’s “The New Normal” — which centered on an affluent gay couple eager to have a kid — to establish a new kind of gay family sitcom. In the world of “Schitt’s Creek,” David Rose finds plenty to nitpick about his eccentric parents but his pansexuality is never a concern for either party; in Comedy Central’s “The Other Two,” Cary Dubek finds the support of his own family embarrassing when his younger brother releases the viral hit “My Brother’s Gay and That’s Okay!” And in Josh Thomas’ latest sitcom, Freeform‘s “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay,” his character, who is gay, becomes the legal guardian of his two teenage half-sisters when their dad dies of cancer.