At first glance, it might look like any other game show. Two nervous contestants hold their hands over their buzzers while a toothy host lightly mocks them; an overdramatized countdown clock tick-tocks to build the pressure. But then there's the set: a life-sized homage to Barbie's Dream House. And the contest categories, which focus heavily on Cher and Liz Taylor. And the fact that reigning champion Maddy, the femme fatale brunet in the low-rider jeans and bust-hugging purple top, was born a man.

Welcome to Pink, one of the most popular programs on GAY-TV, Italy's 24-hour satellite channel. "I want to show that gay people are not UFOs," Pink host Fabio Canino says during a taping break. "I hate the word normal, but that's the only way to explain it."

Pink is just one in a lineup of gay-oriented (but not gay-exclusive) shows on the network, which is owned by Dutch-financed company XAT Production and has been featuring normal gay folk for more than a year. Alongside lighthearted semispoof shows like Pink, GAY-TV carries movies (but no porn), music videos, celebrity-gossip shows and serious current-affairs programs, all designed to give homosexual audiences a familiar voice but also get straight viewers to tune in.

It's an increasingly popular formula on both sides of the Atlantic. The runaway hit of American television is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy — a series in which style-challenged heterosexuals have their looks and lives overhauled by a squad of gay advisers. Starting this week, Queer Eye will air in the U.K., and a British version of the show is set to launch early next year. And in January, France will see the debut of Pink TV, another gay-themed cable and satellite channel.

GAY-TV began in May 2002 as an experiment in niche marketing, but quickly pulled in major advertisers like Dolce & Gabbana, Eagle Pictures and Renault (with an ad for the Clio that shows a male cop pulling over a car, looking at the male driver and whipping out his pad — to write not a ticket, but his phone number). The channel claims peak-hour viewership of up to 500,000 Italian households. The numbers may be small compared to the major networks, but they do contain a fabulous little secret: nearly half of the audience for GAY-TV is straight. "We do not want to create gay programs, but programs that come from a gay point of view," says the channel's director, Francesco Italia. "If we do something funny, everyone wants to laugh. If we talk about emotions, that's something everybody knows about. Some people may turn on GAY-TV and ask, 'Where are the homosexuals?' That's because they're used to seeing the images of gays on regular TV and they always seem to be in wigs and high heels."

France's Pink TV aims to use similar programming to reach thousands of French homosexuals, as well as to "seduce people who aren't gay, but identify with the values of freedom, tolerance and openness," says the channel's marketing and communication director, Pierre Garnier. Unlike the GAY-TV audience, who can pick up the channel free with a satellite dish, Pink TV viewers will pay an extra j9 a month to watch the selection of game shows, documentaries and lifestyle programs. A secure code will also allow access to four adult films it plans to air per week. This has caused the channel's launch to be delayed for two months; while France's broadcasting regulator csa has given approval for Pink TV to show porn, it's still not satisfied that the channel's encryption system is foolproof. Undaunted, Garnier says it hopes to gather 180,000 subscribers in the next three years. "The ideal is to have one-third gay boys, one-third gay girls and one-third straight viewership," he says.

Of course, gay themes aren't restricted to gay networks. Mainstream TV's attitude toward gays started growing up in 1997, when American comic Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her self-titled sitcom. "It was an important lesson for advertisers and producers who are naturally cautious and who saw that people weren't freaking out, they were kind of interested," says Joshua Gamson, an author and sociology professor at the University of San Francisco. At the same time, advertisers began targeting gay audiences as members of a high-spending demographic. "Once it's demonstrated that you can have a hit with gay characters, commercial TV is amoral," says Gamson. "There are some limitations, but fear of other people's sexuality isn't one of them. A hit is a hit."

From Ellen, it was a quick jump to gay/straight sitcom Will & Grace and finally Queer Eye, with gay men replacing black people as TV's favorite subculture: the oppressed minority, once kept on the fringe, is now center screen defining the new cool. Thanks to Queer Eye's Fab 5 — a quintet of queens ranging from fruity to button-down who use their expertise in fashion, culture, cuisine, grooming and interior design to "make better" (because "makeover" sounds so temporary) a straight man's entire life — the show became a massive hit when it first aired in the States on cable station Bravo in July; it was soon picked up by the NBC network (which owns Bravo) and it now attracts some 7 million viewers every week. The show has been sold into syndication from Australia to Iceland. Advertisers love it, too, with the Fab 5 constantly name-dropping everything from furniture stores (like Pottery Barn and Domain) to shaving products (Neutrogena, Zirh) that the new-and-improved straight guy simply must spend his money on. "We've said this from the beginning, it's not a gay show," says Queer Eye creator David Collins, one of the coproduction team at Scout Productions (Collins is gay; his partner in developing the show, David Metzler, is straight). He came up with the idea in an art gallery in Boston when he saw a group of gay men jump to the defense of a guy being publicly berated by his wife for his poor dress sense. "Queer for us doesn't have a sexual connotation, but it means unique, different, an exciting perspective. All of our guys are credentialed experts. Being gay doesn't mean you automatically have style, taste and class, just like being straight doesn't automatically mean you don't."

This week, U.K. cable and satellite station Living TV will start finding out whether its audience — 12 million mainly female, mostly straight viewers a month — is also going to fall for the Fab 5. "Women up and down the country will recognize the potential in their slobby hetero husbands or boyfriends or partners," vows Living TV director of programming Richard Woolfe. The producers at Living are so confident of its popularity that they're already cooking up a homegrown version, although a planned January launch has been postponed.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) But it doesn't end there. The channel has another show that casts gay men as lifestyle gurus. Starting Nov. 19, Straight Dates by Gay Mates sends two gay men on a mission to find true love for a hopeful (and sometimes hopeless) single gal. The dynamic duo, Max and Michael, will pull men off the street, send them on a date with that week's Lonely Heart and watch the date from a secret room, all the better to tell the lady where she goes wrong. The idea is to bring a woman's gay best friend to the small screen. "Because we tell them when their bum looks big in those jeans or if they're dating a loser. And they listen and trust us because we have no ulterior motives," says Richard Hastings, the show's creator. "Gay men can just tell a woman the truth, like, 'You're being a real bitch.' If a straight man said the same thing, it would be offensive."

The two heroes may be homos, but Straight Dates is targeted directly at straight women, so great care was taken to make sure the show was just gay enough. "Gay men have their own humor and it can be kind of bitchy, so we had to make sure the humor in this show crossed over and was accessible to women," Hastings says. "If Max and Michael have to criticize our single girls, they'll do it with a wry smile and give her a hug afterward."

Not everyone is happy with the newfound success of queer TV. While there has been no public criticism in Italy, in the U.S., conservative groups like the American Families Association have launched campaigns to boycott companies that advertise during queer shows. And some gay media critics chafe as well. "It's not an insulting stereotype, to be told that I'm extra-fabulous, extra-witty and extra-attractive. It's just not accurate," says Gamson at the University of San Francisco. "The idea that we're all experts in upper-middle-class mores and consumption habits ... produces a lot of invisibilities by celebrating certain kinds of people within the population and not others." But Andy Medhurst, a lecturer in media studies at the University of Sussex, argues that gay-themed shows and channels are an improvement over the limp-wristed sidekicks of yesterday's sitcoms. "Diverse visibility, even if it falls into certain categories, is still more than it was 20 years ago," he says. And gay activists in Italy say GAY-TV is already having a positive impact. "Only through television can you reach certain 18- or 25-year-olds who live in the small towns and feel isolated from other gay people," says Luigi Valeri, spokesman for national gay-rights association Arcigay. "The image of gays on television is moving closer to the reality." And on the way, it has just about everyone seeing pink.

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• It's prime time for gay TV in Europe