Considered television's first reality show, An American Family was shot documentary style in 1971 and first aired in the United States on PBS in early 1973. The show was twelve episodes long, edited down from about 300 hours of footage, and chronicled the experiences of a nuclear family, the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, during a period of time when parents Bill and Pat Loud separated and Pat filed for divorce. The parents had five children. One of them, Lance Loud, was a gay 20-year-old man who occasionally wore lipstick and women's clothes and took his mother to a drag show in the second episode of the series. Scholars sometimes mention that Lance came out of the closet on TV, but this is technically incorrect—he was simply gay without announcement or drama; his family says that they had known for quite a while. As such, Lance was the first openly gay character on television and has become something of a gay icon.

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