ABSTRACT
Ellen DeGeneres may be the most iconic gay character to break ground by coming out on prime time television in 1997, but there was also another openly gay character on the tube who was openly gay in the 1990s. Ricky Vasquez, a gay Latino character on the short-lived 1994 show My So-Called Life, featured an adolescent gay teen struggling with homophobia on the show. The part of Ricky Vazquez, played by Puerto Rican actor Wilson Cruz, was one of the first examples of an openly gay teen on American television whose struggles and issues about being gay took center stage (Out Magazine). In an Out Magazine interview, Wilson Cruz, now a Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) spokesperson who advocates for LGBT rights, reflects on his character’s impact on popular culture, “It’s probably hard to measure the effects of it, but I know for many people the only LGBT people that they know are people that they meet on their television screens or at the movie theater.” Ricky Vasquez may have been the first openly gay Latino character featured on television, but he would not be the last.
