By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 22, 2005; N01

It took guts. That's the least that can be said for it. And if it sometimes stooped to the soap-operatic and melodramatic, so do most TV series -- even comedies. "Queer as Folk" was still revolutionary, the first American TV drama to portray gay characters as credible, dimensional and fully functional human beings.

Homosexuals had been depicted on many, many shows by the time "Queer as Folk" premiered but usually as the equivalent of fig-leaved nudes. It was in the tradition of sitcoms from TV's first two decades: Bathrooms had no toilets, and even married couples slept in single beds. The characters in "Queer as Folk" had sexual relations, some of them often, some of them too often, and they weren't just stick figures. They weren't castrati.

In the end, ironically or not, the show comes out squarely for family values, albeit its own definition of them. And "the end" lies just around the proverbial bend. When "Queer as Folk" returns to the Showtime cable network tonight at 10, it will be for its fifth season and its last. It will bow out with a special two-parter on July 31. Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, the creators and executive producers, have decided to move on to other projects, and moving on becomes a theme for many of the characters in the piece. Doors close, doors open. Relationships are born, relationships die -- sometimes in the same night, actually.

"Nothing changes, everything's the same," moans a major character in one of the first scenes from the season premiere. "It's all like an illusion, [like] theater." He and a friend are standing amid the frantic frolic -- momentarily frozen by a remarkable special effect -- of Babylon, a dance bar in Pittsburgh that has been a second home for many of the characters since the series began. The dialogue parodies Lewis Stone's famous ironic speech in "Grand Hotel": "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens."

Much has happened in the show's run, and the final 13 episodes look to be, if anything, even more eventful than those of previous seasons.

There is a bittersweet undertone to the proceedings, even perhaps to the comic relief. Cowen and Lipman sent an open letter to critics along with copies

of the new season's episodes, and in it they laud some of the social progress and consciousness-raising that have occurred during the show's run but also sound a despairing note about the present and the future.

"With the last election," they write, "the advancement of gay rights has taken a severe setback. The issue of gay marriage has ignited an explosion of invective, hatred and prejudice. Constitutions have been changed in at least a dozen states to prevent gay people from ever having the right to marry. . . . In Michigan, a law may soon pass that permits doctors to refuse to treat gay people.

"And, unbelievably, the president wants to change the Constitution of our country to prevent certain citizens from having the same rights as other citizens -- to legally create a second-class citizenship."

"Queer as Folk" (originally adapted from a two-season British series that it now only nominally resembles) has never pretended to be an objective, clinical view of gay life in America. The producers and writers deal with the hullabaloo over same-sex marriages by portraying such unions positively in the series, but the show isn't propaganda; one of those relationships unraveled last season and still looks irreversibly kaput in the first episodes of the new one.

As for onerous laws and constitutional amendments and such, they're represented, starting in the seventh episode, by "Proposition 14," a local initiative designed to prohibit gay marriage. The characters had to fight a reactionary mayoral candidate in an earlier season and wound up defeating him, putting a progressive in office. This fight will be harder.

That the social environment has changed in lamentable ways since roughly the latest turn-of-a-century is evident in tonight's two-hour premiere (actually two episodes airing back to back). Justin (Randy Harrison), the still-boyish blond whose coming out engendered a lot of strife in the first year, is in Hollywood working on preproduction of "Rage," a film based on his own comic book about "the first gay superhero." But fate, or rather a fat cat, puts the kibosh on that: The tycoon financing the film decides to pull out.

"He's afraid -- the time, the political climate," Justin is told by one of the filmmakers. The mogul has decided to fund "The Passion of Moses" instead. Of course "Queer" needed an excuse to get Justin back to Pittsburgh anyway, so it's not the end of the world.

The other characters continue with their own foibles, failings and, of course, feuds; that's what friends are for. Michael (Hal Sparks) and Ben (Robert Gant) are still together, still supposedly a model of domestic tranquillity, but the compulsively promiscuous Brian (Gale Harold, essentially the series's leading man) scoffs at their variation on heterosexual bliss and calls them "Stepford Fags." That's awfully harsh. On the other hand, they sometimes seem as excessively cuddly as the little old ladies in "Arsenic and Old Lace" but without the compensating dark humor.

"When," Brian asks his old friend Michael, "did you become this pious, sanctimonious, sentimental twit?"

But Brian's dedication to whoopee and a life of sex-on-demand has already begun to take on its own kind of pathos, and in the final season his philosophy will face major challenges, one of them the New Boy in Town. The Nordic hunk shows up one night at Babylon after Brian has bought it and not only rejects a sexual advance from Brian, unthinkable in these parts, but also sets his sights on becoming the new reigning rooster. And the beat, inevitably, goes on.

Lesbians Melanie and Lindsay (Michelle Clunie and Thea Gill) continue to bicker over custody of a baby fathered, via artificial insemination, by Michael, who takes to fatherhood in a big, big way. The trio end up playing their own version of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby." Meanwhile Ted (Scott Lowell) suffers encroaching middle-age panic and tries to remake as well as reinvent himself, and effeminate Emmett (lovably played by Peter Paige) gets an on-air job on a local TV station as the house homosexual -- a development that gives the writers a chance to lampoon "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and the genre it threatens to become.

Swishy though he is, Emmett risks losing his new job immediately when, of all things, the station manager accuses him of not acting "gay enough."

Sharon Gless, triumphant in the role of Debbie, Michael's more-than-tolerant mother, will have a great year, if a look at the first seven episodes is any indication. Her portrayal seemed aggravatingly cute and twinkly at first sight, but she and Debbie have matured, and she's clearly responsible for some of the most affecting dramatic moments on the show.

Guest star Rosie O'Donnell will appear in three episodes starting next week as Loretta Pye, a woman who's run away from an abusive husband and applies for a waitress job at the diner where Debbie has long held court. Another guest star, Cyndi Lauper, will pop up later in the season.

All the episodes for the season have been finished, and your obedient critic made it through more than half before the demands of deadline brought down the curtain. It wasn't hard to keep watching, because even if the story line is simplistic at times, the characters have the credibility to keep one hooked, and the show continues to deal with relevant issues in ways that make good drama. That isn't easy, and there are times when the scripts drift -- or leap -- into a pat preachiness. But those are rare.

Describing for Michael what makes something "tiring," Brian in his dissipated way offers as synonyms "predictable, unsatisfying, boring." These are things that, for the most part, "Queer as Folk" has managed to avoid. It has been, in its way, a great leap into the unknown, and its longevity strongly suggests that it attracted heterosexual as well as homosexual viewers. You don't have to be embroiled in any of the issues to be concerned for the characters and what will become of them -- and to be quite sad that their richly lived lives will soon be over.