Over the past few years, gay and lesbian visibility on television and in films has increased substantially, with queer images popping up almost everywhere. From Brokeback's cowboys to The L Word's Hollywood lesbians, it seems that queer folks have, at last, arrived in America's living rooms.

But this explosion in queer visibility has erupted from a long-burning fuse lit by gay men and women involved in the entertainment industry since Hollywood's very early days. Although many books have been written about the history of queers in popular media, beginning with Vito Russo's groundbreaking The Celluloid Closet, more recent books on the subject provide fascinating, contemporary relevance and context.

Stephen Tropiano's The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV is a painstaking study of queer visibility on television. In the book's introduction, Tropiano discusses how his own identity was shaped — as many of ours have been, at least in part — as a reaction to the gays he saw on television. And television obviously means a great deal to Tropiano, as he must have spent thousands of hours researching this extensive chronicle of queer television appearances.

He divides his book into four sections, each spanning the decades from the 1950s to the early 2000s: gays on medical shows, gays on legal shows, gays on dramas and gays on comedies. Tropiano also delineates an overarching trajectory for the queers allowed into people's homes through the magical intimacy of television.

Tropiano explains that gays and lesbians first appeared on television as specimens or curiosities in 1950s tabloid talk shows with episodes titled “Homosexuals and the Problems They Present,” or in Mike Wallace's infamous special investigation, CBS Reports: The Homosexuals. In 1960s medical shows, lesbians were often portrayed as women in need of some good psychoanalysis to straighten them out.

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