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The Golden Girls is a sitcom about a group of retired older women living in Florida. Naturally their biggest fanbase was the LGBTQIA+ community.

“On Saturday night, the gay bars would stop the music, and at 9 o’clock the show would come on, they would all watch the show, and then 9:30 they would turn it off and start the dancing again,” Rose actress Betty White says during a Golden Girls panel at PaleyFest LA 2006.

Rue McClanahan was surprised to discover that a lot of gay men were drawn to her character Blanche. “I asked a fella, a gay young man in Greenwich Village several years ago. I said, ‘Tell me something, what is it that gay guys like so much about Blanche?’ And he said, ‘Are you kidding? We all want to be her.’ I hadn’t thought about it that way,” McClanahan says.

The writers hadn’t sought out to make a show for the LGBTQIA+ community, but they note that some of it happened organically. “The fascinating thing is, you would just write what was a really great joke, and you put it in Bea Arthur’s mouth, and it comes out gay. I don’t know how it happened. And for me what it was, gay men just appreciate women of a certain age,” series writer Marc Cherry says.

Realizing that they had a gay fanbase, the writers began to include more LGBTQIA+ storylines in the show. “I think it’s because by that time we knew we had a gay audience. They would play it in bars across the country. So, we knew, and we knew we had to address it,” co-producer Jim Valley says during a Golden Girls spotlight panel for Prive LIVE.

“It was also in the news. We were going through a gay liberation. It was something we were all experiencing,” writer Stan Zimmerman says.

“It was a big deal for middle America to see these women embrace the gay culture,” Valley says.

In other words, thank you for being a friend.