When I came out to one of my best friends, at the age of 21 and standing outside a gas station next to the college pub, she proclaimed that she should’ve pieced it all together years ago because of my love for The Golden Girls. To be frank, I should’ve as well. My love for The Golden Girls predates me being aware of my love for men. It goes way back, encoded in my DNA, almost as if I was born a Golden Girls fan just as much as I was born gay (never mind the fact that I was 1 when Golden Girls debuted). But the connection between Golden Girls (and its younger sitcom sister Designing Women) and gay culture has always been a given. They just go hand in hand, and you need not think about why.

As a methodical and comprehensive examination of queer representation on television over the last 70 years, it’s part of Visible: Out on Television’s gig to get into the why. The new Apple TV+ docu-series breaks the connection down in Episode 3, “The Epidemic,” providing vital context for the connection between queer people and queer-coded sitcoms that I’d never really noticed. It is, without a doubt, the most succinct explanation as to why these shows matter to who they matter to that I’ve ever heard.

The segment comes 18 minutes into Episode 3, the must-watch episode of the series as it tackles how the AIDS epidemic unfolded on TV and how the coverage (or rather lack of coverage) led to the deadly stigmatization of gay men and many setbacks for LGBTQ rights. With people suddenly associating gay men with a mysterious plague, the friendly fop archetype that popped up on TV often in the ’70s was replaced with tortured gay victims in the ’80s, if queer people were presented on TV at all. The AIDS epidemic pushed representation off TV, and therefore queer audiences had to look elsewhere to see themselves reflected.

Golden Girls immediately resonated just because of the premise, based on a foundation of found family. “I think a lot of gay people, especially my age and older who may’ve not always been embraced by their families—we really connect with those characters who are kind of a chosen family,” explained Carson Kressley in the episode.

Margaret Cho added, “I look at Golden Girls as really, they’re all gay archetypes. There’s a real genius there, because you couldn’t get away with having guys on it at that time period, but there’s a way to subvert that and trick the status quo by making it about these older women.” Also fostering this subtextual connection were the textual LGBTQ storylines told in Golden Girls. The show championed acceptance, championed gay marriage, and the destigmatization of AIDS years, even decades before that was the norm.

’80s sitcoms weren’t the first time that storytellers used women as a stand-in for gay characters. Billy Porter said that he calls this trick the “Tennessee Williams effect.” “For a long time, gay men had to be in the mouths of female heroines,” said Porter. “Every story that Tennessee Williams told was about a gay man, and that replacement that we had to make for many years is why we love our divas so much. It’s like we can relate to those narratives inside of something like The Golden Girls, inside of something like Designing Women.”

Porter singled out Dixie Carter’s character Julia Sugarbaker, whose passionate speeches have become part of the gay canon. “Julia Sugarbaker, all of those speeches, you could’ve put into the mouth of a gay activist and that’s why we responded so much, because it’s like you’re saying the shit that needs to be said.”

With fear and misinformation spreading about AIDS, Designing Women took action in 1987 with the episode “Killing All the Right People.” The episode, wherein Sugarbaker & Associates are hired by a young gay man to design his funeral, was directly inspired by creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s personal life. Her mother contracted AIDS via a blood transfusion during heart surgery, and Bloodworth-Thomason got to know several AIDS patients—and see how they were treated—while staying with her mother at the hospital.

“There were 17 other young men on the floor and they were all dying of AIDS,” said Bloodworth-Thomason. “My mom was treated abysmally, probably better than any of the gay men but still horribly. Nobody knew how you get it, so we’re all in gloves and masks and her medicine’s kicked into the room in a bucket. And one day I heard one of the nurses say, ‘Well if you ask me, this disease has one thing going for it: it’s killing all the right people.’ And I just thought, okay, I’m going to remember that and that’s going to be on TV.”

It was on TV, spat out by a client/villain-of-the-week who immediately incurred the wrath of Julia Sugarbaker. “I told my mom, ‘I wrote this show for you.’ And it was justice for her, and I felt a little bit of justice for those 17 young men who died while I was on the same floor with them.”

The connection between these female-driven sitcoms and queer culture isn’t superficial, and it’s not just because gays love a strong dame with quips to spare. It’s because when television turned its back on the community, when the American government was slow to even acknowledge the existence of a plague, when nurses held their patients in contempt, these shows were there for us, representing us, and fighting for us. This context mostly goes unnoticed 35 years later, as younger generations fall for the shows in reruns and on streaming. But this important episode of Visible reminds us that we can’t forget that this connection was forged during a great struggle—and that’s why we’re still thanking them for being a friend.

Stream Visible: Out on Television "The Epidemic" on Apple TV+

Stream The Golden Girls on Hulu

Stream Designing Women on Hulu