When EastEnders co-creator Tony Holland was a jobbing television producer in 1975, he took a sitcom idea to the head of Thames Television drama, Verity Lambert. The comedy would rest on a gay couple whose emotional wellbeing was complicated by their class divide. It was to be called The Unlikely Lads. Lambert scored a hit later that year with the wonderful TV adaptation of Quentin Crisp’s memoir, The Naked Civil Servant. At the time, Lambert deferred on Holland’s project, contending that two shows with a central gay thread a year would be one too many for the socially conservative British public taste. The idea would come to fruition a decade on in the characters of Colin and Barry on EastEnders, the first gay men to kiss on a British soap opera.

Twenty-two years later, Ellen DeGeneres caused shockwaves across America by breaking the glass closet, declaring her lesbianism on her sitcom, Ellen – a first for US TV. The bedding, homeware and clothing giant JC Penney cut its advertising. Death threats followed. Yet in the ensuing 20 years, Ellen has become not just one of the most powerful women in the American entertainment canon but the most recognisable public face of a new vanguard raising visibility and awareness of LGBT people on TV.

Mercifully, on the 20th anniversary of DeGeneres’s coming out, times and sociological tastes have changed. In a study by the advocacy group GLAAD of American TV between 2016-2017, a record number of 278 LGBT characters were identified in TV shows. What was particularly poignant about the study was not just the swelling numbers, but the broadening range of characters on the LGBT sexuality/gender spectrum. TV’s rainbow diversity initiative appeared to be inching closer to its pot of gold.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest I’m coming out: Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey in Ellen. Photograph: ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images

Laverne Cox: 'Now I have the money to feminise my face I don’t want to. I’m happy' Read more

In 2017, a new barrier is being broken with the casting of Asia Kate Dillon in the role of Taylor, a gender non-binary character in the Showtime drama Billions – the first such character on networked US TV. When Dillon read about Taylor in the script “it said ‘female, non binary’. I thought, ‘How can those things co-exist?’” says Dillon over the phone from New York. “I thought, ‘Aren’t they the same? How are they different?’” A non-binary identity is not associated with either gender and as such uses the pronouns “they” and “them”.

“In doing the research specifically on those terms for background on Taylor I understood for the first time, in the clearest sense, oh, female, as in sex, then non-binary, as in identity,” continues Dillon. “I had never come across the exact language to describe the feelings that I had before. And there it was.” One of Dillon’s favourite song lyrics had always been “I’m not a woman/ I’m not a man/ I am something that you’ll never understand”, the gripping opening gambit from Prince’s I Would Die 4 U; Dillon’s professional life was now starting to untangle any mystery implicit in it. Perhaps some people weren’t either/or, or both. Perhaps some were neither. It made complete sense.

In Billions, Dillon’s character is a geeky, sombre tech-whiz with a shaven head who acts as a useful dramatic counterweight to the competitive, neurotic machismo of the leading men, extreme capitalist Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and his nemesis Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti). In its study of government corruption and high-stakes hedge funders, the show is shaping up to be the closest anyone’s got to fashioning a Trump-era Sopranos.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Asia Kate Dillon in Billions. Photograph: Jeff Neumann/Showtime

Dillon says that the character of Taylor was developed as a direct result of conversations going on at the showrunners’ homes. “Brian [Koppelman] and David [Levien] both have children and their children have friends who are gender fluid, non-binary, who use ‘they’ and ‘them’, and so organically as parents they were just learning about the world that their children are in. I don’t think it was from a position of social justice,” Dillon says. “It wasn’t about the need to put a gender non-binary person on television. It was just art reflecting life.”

Whatever changes are coming I think people are ready. That’s what gives me hope Asia Kate Dillon

Dillon joins a growing swell of positive, compelling and highly visible role models with a lineage that can be traced from Ellen’s announcement via television shows such as Will & Grace, The L Word, Glee, Six Feet Under, The New Normal, Looking, Brothers & Sisters and Oz, all the way to Modern Family and recent Netflix hit Grace and Frankie. In keeping with modern mores, however, it feels as if a new battle-line has been drawn, away from sexuality towards gender identity, as if gayness is almost old news.

Year zero for the latest LGBT television makeover looks to have been the appearance of Orange Is the New Black’s Laverne Cox. The sensational black, transgender actor was on the cover of Time magazine in 2014, in a bodycon dress and blonde weave – a new television focal point for the shifting sands in the global gender dialogue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Natasha Lyonne, Kimiko Glenn and Laverne Cox in Orange Is the New Black. Photograph: Netflix/Everett Co/RE

Doctor Who's Bill Potts to be show's first openly gay companion Read more

“Laverne was the game-changer,” says Paris Lees, the writer and broadcaster who was the first trans panellist to be invited to share her opinions on BBC1’s Question Time. “When I was growing up, trans people were not just the butt of the joke, they were the joke.”

Laverne made instant anachronistic mincemeat of the cringeworthy jokes shared by Chandler and his Friends about his transgender dad, played by Kathleen Turner, a detail that dates the show as much as its aversion to the digital world. The warm reception afforded Caitlyn Jenner on transitioning by her family works in direct contrast to Chandler’s bad gags, part of the reason Keeping Up With the Kardashians has become as much a benchmark of its era as Friends had been previously.

Like Cox, Asia Kate Dillon’s big career break was on Orange Is the New Black, a series that makes effortlessly light work of ticking most boxes on the racial and sexuality inclusivity spreadsheet. And like OITNB, Billions is an obvious contender when it comes to awards season. Dillon has thought about the issues that might result if their performance in Billions gets nominated for an award, making the best actress/actor gender divisions at the Emmys and Golden Globes look like a strange anachronism.

“These conversations are already happening in the younger generation. I think the older generation are primed for them,” says Dillon. “Whether it’s awards or television shows, whatever it is, whatever changes are coming I think people are ready. That’s what gives me hope.” Dillon wrote a letter to the Emmy academy on the subject of categorisation and they wrote back saying “anyone can submit under either category for any reason”. Dillon has since submitted under the supporting actor category for Billions. The MTV Movie & TV awards this week went one step further, scrapping gender specific categories altogether.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent. Photograph: Jennifer Clasen/Amazon Video

An even bolder move into the mainstream came in 2014 when the multi-million-dollar streaming service Amazon Prime launched a new, original show featuring much-loved American elder statesman actor Jeffrey Tambor as a transitioning septuagenarian Maura: Transparent. It has a number of transgender actors in its cast – notably Hari Nef, who plays one of Maura’s historic ancestors, and 12-year-old Sophia Grace Gianna as a child version of Maura. The first transgender actor to appear on screen was eight-year-old Jackson Millarker, who joined Modern Family in 2016 – another show, like Transparent, in which the LGBT characters have become certified and garlanded national TV treasures.

A satisfying analogy for the mainstreaming of LGBT representation on screen is the connection between the pivotal early-90s Harlem vogue balls documentary Paris Is Burning (currently on Netflix) and the rampant commercial behemoth of RuPaul’s Drag Race, this year strutting into its ninth season. What was once considered “other” is now playground chatter. Drag Race is every bit as generationally defining a show for young LGBT people and their straight pals as Queer As Folk was to their predecessors.

In tumultuous political times (like recent events in Chechnya), television can provide services of representation the state cannot. The entertainment industry is peopled by a disproportionate number of LGBT people; politics is not. One can only hope that someone, somewhere in American TV fiction is currently scripting a storyline about the Census Bureau’s recent decision not to include a separate category for the LGBT community in their 2020 survey, one that could and most likely will see devastating consequences for its citizens’ specific health needs. It is a story that could fit adroitly into an episode of Veep. The trans bathroom saga that has dominated the American LGBT news agenda is one that has already been chewed over, for example, on Transparent.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jim Broadbent and Ben Whishaw in London Spy. Photograph: Joss Barratt/BBC/WTTV Limited

LGBT representation on TV is still some way from its nirvana, however. Responses to the GLAAD survey included bisexual characters on shows being portrayed as inherently untrustworthy, and it also identified an alarming new trend: Dead Lesbian Syndrome, in which the likelihood of your character being killed grew exponentially if they’re Sapphic. Since 1976, 65% of the US shows that feature a lesbian or bisexual character have a deceased queer female character.

Programme-makers have to catch up or they’ll make themselves extinct Paris Lees

Still, a thrilling panopoly of new LGBT awareness is starting to be inoculated through our screens in the UK. Jim Broadbent and Ben Whishaw played an old gay man and his young friend in the smart BBC potboiler London Spy. Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi’s roles as long-term lovers in the ITV sitcom Vicious coincided with the passing of the same-sex marriage act. Both the BBC and Channel 4 have seasons assigned for the forthcoming 50-year anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. In soapland, EastEnders can lay claim to a female-to-male transgender actor among their current rainbow cast. And on reality TV, LGBT couples have been effortlessly slotted into First Dates, while Gogglebox pries directly into their living rooms.

These castings and appointments matter, too. “You have shows like Orange Is the New Black,” says Dillon, “and shows like Transparent already breaking ground in terms of representation on television. And, as we know, representation and visibility save lives. It’s the great silver lining of art representing reality. Reality then gets to go, ‘Oh, I see myself in that piece of art and I feel a little bit less alone now.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Strike a pose: a dancer in Paris Is Burning. Photograph: Off White/Rex/Shutterstock

LGBT characters on TV will make up larger percentage than ever, study finds Read more

Dillon thinks that if there had been a character like Taylor on TV as a youngster that the world might have looked an easier place to navigate. “I’m very honoured that I get to speak about the gender identity aspect publicly. Because when I was young, if there had been someone who was out and non-binary then that would really have meant something to me.”

For Paris Lees, the changing nature of LGBT representation on TV was inevitable – but it needs to work hard to keep pace with the times. “There are great stories here,” she says. “And not just this obsession with ‘old men turning into women’ that you get with Transparent and Caitlyn Jenner. In 20 years’ time those will look as old-fashioned and boring as stories about tortured people living in marriages when they’re gay.”

From inside these communities, there is a clear, rich stream of storylines that are less concerned with the physical details and more with the interior life of LGBT characters. She has a further point: “Look, we know what straight, white men think, what their hopes, desires and fears are, because we’ve been told nothing but them on TV. Which is precisely why a younger generation no longer owns TV sets. Programme-makers have to catch up or they’ll make themselves extinct.”

The symbolic aspect of a film about old, white Hollywood having to hand back its best picture trophy to a brilliantly nuanced story about young, black, poor gay America at this year’s Oscar ceremony was not lost on Asia Kate Dillon. Watching a piece of paper being snatched from the hands of Warren Beatty and the word Moonlight being thrust to camera, for a global audience of multimillions to see, carried its own special magic. “Right in front of our eyes,” says Dillon, “an injustice occurred and it was made right, right in front of us. That’s how easy it is. That’s how easy it is to say, ‘Guys, we made a mistake. You didn’t win, we won.’ It felt like watching justice happening live.” Where the door has creaked open on screen incrementally in the past, Moonlight’s victory should fling the LGBT closet wide open. The story is very much to be continued.

Billions is on Tuesdays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic and on Now TV