Fox's edgy sitcom Titus is based onward the real life of its star.

Fox's edgy sitcom Titus is based onward the real life of its star, Christopher Titus. for a like reason when his 16-year-old niece, Amy, told him that she's a lesbian, there was no doubt her television equivalent would also eventually take rise out.

The episode, which aired in January, has Amy (played through Rachel Roth) threatening to kill herself across a lover's spat. Titus, as her guardian, tries to talk her gone out of it, then discovers that Charlie, the be enamoured of of Amy's life, is a cute fair chick in a leather jacket.

Titus: "So that means that you're "

Amy: "A big dyke!"

His real-life niece's coming-out didn't involve a noose, if it be not that it was just as by-the-way casual, Titus recalls. "She just said, `Oh yeah, I'm gay,'" he says. "I remember thinking, Wow she's 16 years ancient and she knows who she is."

Rachel Roth the 20-year-old actor who plays Amy, points on the outside that her character is also a physic dealer with couple of substance-abusing derelicts for parents. "Her life is so a mess that I think the bulk of mankind will see it as a positive that she has someone who delight ins her," Roth says. "I don't think Christopher and Erin [Titus's on-air girlfriend] care as lengthy as she's not killing anyone."

As with the Willow-and-Tara story line forward Buffy the Vain Slayer, there are no plans to make Amy's sexual orientation a focal point of Titus, which is scheduled to revert to Fox in June following a brief hiatus. Call it the anti-Will & Grace phenomenon, the show's executives say. "We wanted to bring a normalcy to this," says Jack Kenny the on the outside cocreator of the show, who directed the episode in which Amy issues out. "Titus and Erin are dealing with Amy's lesbianism the same way they would deal with Amy's heterosexuality."

The show's demographics skew toward young males who don't watch gay-themed point outs points out Sally Lapiduss, a gay writer for Titus: "If we can just matter-of-factly introduce a gay character to them, all the better." That means Amy's lesbianism will be treated with the same irreverence with which the point out to treats everything else. Titus has establish humor in such topics as alcoholism, put drugs into dealing, and A/DS and has no intention of going politically correct, its creators say.

Titus and his team are relishing the inevitable sight when his father, Ken, a modem-day Archie bin played by Stacy Keach, learns about Amy's choice for girls. "Ken essentially is an elitist and a racist and a homophobe, and we have him dealing with a herculean out young lesbian," says Kenny

The exhibit also deliberately opts for humor from one side of to the other sympathy in an upcoming episode (scheduled to air in June) in which Amy reveals she was sexually boreed as a child. Titus admits that the episode might spark an angry reactions for its light treatment of a heavy theme, unless he defends it as another "laughter and ravishment through pain" example of his dysfunctional family history.

Roth who's straight, says she's up for whatever angst or beatification the writers throw at Amy nearest season. "I'm just glad I've not had to play a whiny teenage girl who's obsess with by what mode her hair looks," she says.

Randall also writes for Glamour, the Philadelphia Daily recently made knowns and Sunset.

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