Plot

Brian Kinney is a handsome, 29-year old advertising executive with a voracious sexual appetite. He was raised by a carousing, alcoholic father and an obsessively Catholic mother. He lives a self-contained, self-centered life, preferring the honesty of lust to the dishonesty (and vulnerability) he perceives in love and romance. Michael Novotny is his best friend since childhood, he is a great admirer of the comic book superhero Captain Astro, and is also just turning 30. At the beginning of the series, Michael works at a retail store called The Big Q. Ted Schmidt, 33, is an accountant with low self-esteem, and Emmett Honeycutt is a flamboyant Southerner who works in trendy clothing shop "Torso" on Liberty Avenue.

The first episode finds the four friends ending a night at an idealized gay oasis called Babylon. Jaded Brian picks up and deflowers the sensitive and artistic Justin Taylor, a 17-year-old prep school student who becomes far more than a one-night stand. Brian also becomes a father that night, having sired a child through artificial insemination for college friend Lindsay Peterson, an art teacher, and her partner Melanie Marcus, an attorney who loathes Brian as much as Lindsay loves him. Debbie Novotny is Michael's mother and a committed gay-rights activist. She waits tables at the Liberty Diner, which serves as a haven for the group of friends. Her brother Vic Grassi has AIDS and lives with her until he dies later in the series. Debbie ultimately becomes romantically involved with police detective Carl Horvath.

The characters become enmeshed and entangled in various ways over the course of five years. Michael's seemingly unrequited love for Brian fuels the story, which he occasionally narrates in voice-over. Justin's coming out and budding relationship with Brian has unexpected effects on Brian and Michael's lives. Justin confides in straight high-school friend Daphne Chanders, while struggling to deal with homophobic classmates and his dismayed, divorcing parents, Craig and Jennifer. Later in the second season Justin & Michael co-create the sexually explicit underground comic "Rage", featuring a "Gay Crusader" superhero inspired by Brian.

Brian's son Gus, being raised by Lindsay and Melanie, becomes the focus of several episodes as issues of parental rights come to the fore. Ted is Melanie's accountant and once harbored a longstanding crush on Michael. He and Emmett begin as best friends, but briefly become lovers later in the series. Their relationship ends as Ted, unemployed and with a criminal record earned from running a legitimate porn website that was targeted and used as an example by a Chief of Police running for Mayor, becomes addicted to crystal meth. In the fourth season, Brian, who has lost his job by assisting Justin in opposing an anti-gay political client, starts his own agency. Michael marries Ben Bruckner, an HIV positive college professor and the couple adopts a son, James "Hunter" Montgomery, who is also HIV positive as a result of his experiences as a child prostitute.

Melanie and Lindsay's relationship, while on the surface, might represent a more "stable" relationship is actually quite tumultuous and controversial. Each cheats on the other at various points in the series, both tackle on a threesome shortly after they marry and become separated for much of the 4th and 5th seasons. Melanie is impregnated by Michael through artificial insemination in the third season, so that the best friends are now co-stepfathers. As a result, Melanie gives birth to Jenny Rebecca over whom Melanie, Lindsey, and Michael have a brief legal battle following the women's break-up. Brian's new advertising agency, Kinnetik, becomes highly successful both through a combination of Brian's customer loyalty and his edgier advertising. As a result of this, Brian is able to purchase Club Babylon from its now bankrupt owner.

In the fifth and final season, the boys have become men and the series, perhaps more comfortable in its role in gay entertainment, tackles political issues head-on and with much more fervor.

A political campaign called "Proposition 14" is depicted during much of the final season as a looming threat to the family-relations that the four principle characters have created. This proposition, like so many real-life recent legislative moves that have affected many U.S. states, threatens to outlaw same-sex marriage, adoption and other family civil rights. The many ways in which such a proposition would affect the characters are depicted through nearly every episode. Debbie, Justin, Jennifer, Daphne, Emmett, Ted, Michael, Ben, Lindsay, Melanie and the children are depicted standing up and fighting against this proposition both by active canvassing, political contributions and other democratic processes, but are met with staunch opposition, discrimination, outright hatred and political setbacks by their neighbors.

The show climaxes near the end of the series when a benefit to support opposition to Proposition 14 hosted at Brian's club Babylon (after repeated relocations of the benefit, due to discrimination) is attacked by a bomb that initially kills 4, and eventually another 3 (including one supporting character) and injures 67.

This horrible event sets the bittersweet tone for the last three episodes in which Brian, frightened into reality by his third possible loss of Justin to an early death, finally declares his love for him. The two even plan a wedding, but Justin's artistic abilities get noticed by a New York art critic and the two decide in favor of a more realistic approach to a relationship that works for their characters. Melanie and Lindsay, realizing they have more in common than they don't, resolve their relationship but relocate to Canada to "raise [their children] in an environment where they will be not called names, singled out for discrimination, or ever have to fear for their life."

Brian and Justin resolve their relationship, as do Lindsey and Melanie. Emmett becomes a Queer-Eye type TV presenter but is later fired when professional football player Drew Boyd kisses him on the news. Ted confronts his midlife crisis head-on and finally reunites with Blake. Hunter returns and the Novotny-Bruckner family perseveres.

The series came full circle with the final scenes staged in the newly re-built Babylon nightclub. In the final scene, Brian dances to Heather Small's "Proud," a song that accompanied a pivotal scene between Brian and Michael in the very first episode of the series, as Michael recites the final lines:

So the "thumpa thumpa" continues. It always will. No matter what happens. No matter who's president. As our lady of Disco, the divine Miss Gloria Gaynor has always sung to us: We will survive.

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