hirty years ago, prime-time television series often depicted homosexuals as suicidal or psychopaths. In an episode of "Marcus Welby, M.D.," the doctor tells a tormented patient to "win that fight" against his homosexual feelings. An episode of "Police Woman" centered on three lesbians who murdered the residents of a retirement home.

If American television audiences could have seen then what viewers can see now.

Tonight the Bravo cable network will present the first episode of "Boy Meets Boy," in which a gay bachelor will choose a potential partner from a field of 15 men, some of them straight.

That will be followed by "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," in which a team of gay men with expertise in designer clothing, food and wine, and in the arts save aesthetically challenged straight men from their own warped senses of fashion.

These shows join a growing prime-time roster of gay-themed programming — "Queer as Folk" on Showtime, "Will and Grace" on NBC — that reflects a major shift in attitudes about gay subjects. Several network and cable television executives said the Supreme Court's 6-to-3 decision in June, overruling a Texas sodomy law and legalizing gay sexual conduct, underlined what they already knew: that the nation's attitudes toward gays and lesbians are radically changing.

"Finally, television is catching up with society at large," said Max Mutchnick, the co-creator with David Kohan of "Will and Grace," "These new gay shows are a reflection of what everyone sees now in their jobs, in their families, in their schools."

But the trend has already come under attack. A. William Merrell, a vice president on the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, said the new shows were a sign of the growing influence of gays in Hollywood. "I believe that the net effect is to forward an agenda making homosexuality appear first normal, and then desirable," he said.

At the same time, some scholars and writers specializing in gay issues said the current crop of gay-oriented shows served only to trivialize and stereotype gay men.

In many ways the new shows are trying to capitalize on the popularity of "Will and Grace," which was the third-most-watched sitcom on network television last season behind "Friends" and "Everybody Loves Raymond," with an average weekly audience of 16.8 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The shows are also a measure of the hunger among television executives to offer new, even daring shows in a highly competitive industry.

Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the executive producers of "It's All Relative," a new ABC sitcom about a star-crossed engaged couple — the daughter of two upscale gay men and the son of a blue-collar couple — said the television landscape had shifted significantly in the eight and a half years since their first gay-themed television project, the NBC movie "Serving in Silence." The movie was based on the story of Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, the officer discharged from the Washington State National Guard in 1992 for acknowledging she was a lesbian. (She was later reinstated.) "It was a really difficult experience," Mr. Zadan said.

Sponsors chafed at the movie — some refused to advertise — some conservatives protested and even some of NBC's affiliated stations expressed discomfort with a kiss shared by the movie's stars, Glenn Close and Judy Davis.

"Look where we've come now, where the opposite has happened, where the chairman of ABC comes to us two years ago and says, `I want to do a show on gay parents," Mr. Zadan said.

Lloyd Braun, the ABC Entertainment chairman, said that when he came up with the idea for "It's All Relative," "I just thought it was funny," he said.

The sitcom, he said, seeks to discuss "some of the ridiculous stereotypes that exist in our society." For the last two and a half years, Showtime has offered "Queer as Folk," a fairly explicit portrait of a group of gay men and women in Pittsburgh. Next January, Showtime will present an original series, "The L Word," about the lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles.

Then there is "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" on Bravo. It has won good-natured reviews from critics for its universal theme: Who doesn't want to be made over to look better?

The show drew roughly 1.6 million viewers on its first two outings on Bravo in July, the largest audiences in Bravo's history. After that success, NBC, Bravo's corporate sibling, decided to broadcast the show itself last Thursday, a rare instance of a broadcast network following cable's lead.

The show drew an audience of 7 million and was the second-highest-rated show in NBC's Thursday 9:30 p.m. slot since mid-June.

The program did not seem to want for advertisers, either.

"Advertisers have gotten past the point of resistance," said Jack Myers, editor of the Jack Myers Report, a media industry newsletter heavily subscribed to on Madison Avenue. "If audience is there, the advertisers are there," he said.

Still, the broadcast of "Queer Eye" did not go off without a hitch. One NBC affiliate, WAGT in Augusta, Ga., refused to show the episode until 2:35 a.m.

John Mann, the station's president and general manager, said he did not object to the gay theme but rather to scenes that he believed crossed the line of decency with blunt sexual innuendo.

"If that appeared in `Friends,' and we knew about it in advance, we would have moved it, too," Mr. Mann said.

"Queer Eye" has offended some people. In his weekly opinion column earlier this month, L. Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, called it "The Gay Supremacy Hour."

Such programming "may be acceptable for that element in our culture that's already earning an advanced degree in Sin Acceptance," he wrote. "But it's also acceptable to the gang at NBC, and the suits upstairs at General Electric?"

For different reasons, some scholars who have explored gay life and issues are not entirely pleased at the new phenomenon, either. One is Martin Duberman, professor of history at the City University of New York and author of "Stonewall," about the June 1969 uprising that helped give birth to the gay rights movement.

"You're not seeing diverse images on these shows," he said. "You're seeing primarily middle-class white men with a lot of discretionary income. Well, a lot of gay people are poor, a lot are working class. These people are not seen on these shows."

Eric Marcus, the author of several books on gay issues, including "Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Rights," said: " `Will and Grace' was a breakthrough. People love it. But it's as demeaning to gay people as heterosexual sitcoms are to heterosexuals. It's so painfully clichéd."

Mr. Mutchnick, the co-creator of "Will and Grace," expressed anger and frustration at such criticisms. "I don't think it's our job to write about the hardships of life in this format," he said. "While I don't want to suggest that the plight of, say, breast cancer patients isn't important, I don't think the audience sitting down to an episode of `Murphy Brown' wanted to hear that."

Randy Barbato, a filmmaker who, with his partner, Fenton Bailey, created a documentary, "Gay Hollywood," about a group of five gay men in Hollywood, to be broadcast on AMC on Aug. 11 at 10 p.m., said: "There are a few visible stereotypes right now. That'll open the door for different kinds of characters."