It's been nearly 14 years since Showtime premiered Queer as Folk, an American take on the U.K. series about the lives of gay men in Pittsburgh. Aside from its British predecessor, there was nothing quite like it. This was a time before HBO's Looking, ABC's Modern Family, and even the relatively wholesome antics of the boys on Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Seeing LGBT characters on television — especially as unapologetic and explicit as Queer as Folk — was still brand new.

And Peter Paige, who played flamboyant, sometimes flighty Emmett Honeycutt on the series, is all too aware of the evolution of gay representation on TV. He was there in 2000 when Queer as Folk felt like a risky experiment, and in 2013, he co-created The Fosters with Bradley Bredeweg. The ABC Family drama centers on a lesbian couple, Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum), and their children — and while it's not the raw, sexually provocative series that Queer as Folk was, it's arguably just as subversive to heterosexual cultural norms. Here is a family that could be yours, with two moms in a loving, committed relationship.

Having existed within the world of LGBT television over the course of his nearly twenty-year career, Paige is well equipped to offer the kind of context few outsiders can comprehend. Sitting outside at a coffee shop in Burbank, not far from where The Fosters films, he did his best to put Queer as Folk's humble beginnings in perspective.

"Will and Grace was on the air, so we already sort of had that moment," Paige said. "But there's something about the comic representation of gay people that, I feel like up until that moment, they had really left out an entire part of what it is to be gay, which is that we actually had romantic and sexual lives."

Even 14 years after Queer as Folk premiered, complicated, three-dimensional queer characters on television remain too few and far between. But we can still see the effect of shows like it, as Paige notes. Behind the camera, he continues the work he's been doing since he stepped into Emmett's sizable shoes and now that television is less resistant to LGBT stories, the struggle becomes finding the right stories to tell — and not limiting characters by their sexual or gender identities.

"It's an interesting balance," the affable, yet direct Paige noted. "It's one we try to find with The Fosters. Yes, it's not about the 'being gay,' but it's also not like 'the gay' is like an asterisk. It's not like 'the gay' is a footnote. And that's certainly my human experience. My life's not about being gay — although one could argue I'm pretty professionally gay — but that's not how I experience life. Being gay is a profound part of who I am, but it isn't all of who I am."