Living Single premiered on Fox 25 years ago today on August 22, 1993—a time when media depictions of black folk were myriad and complex. Bridging the generational gap between The Cosby Show and A Different World, Living Single followed the lives of six twenty-something professionals living their best lives in Brooklyn: Khadijah James (Queen Latifah), the founder and editor of urban mag Flavor; her cousin Synclaire (Kim Coles), her assistant and, eventually, an aspiring actress; Regine Hunter (Kim Fields), their childhood friend and roommate with a fondness for wigs and wealthy men; Maxine Shaw (Erika Alexander), attorney at law, and their omnipresent next door neighbor; Overton Wakefield Jones (John Henton), the handyman of the brownstone in which the women live and Synclaire’s beau; and his roommate Kyle Barker (T.C. Carson), a suave and savvy stockbroker victimized by an on-again/off-again romance with Max.

Traditionally, female-centric sitcoms have often found a home among queer audiences (your Golden Girls, your Designing Womens, your Sex and the Citys) but Living Single was the first time those women were young, single, and black. And like those other female-centric sitcoms, Living Single’s queer appeal went beyond the novelty of a group of sisters doing it for their goddamn selves, extending to the way their characters interacted with each other and the world around them. In the case of Living Single, its four female protagonists didn’t simply have queer sensibilities but also queer-identifying markers that, to queer audiences of color, were like manna from heaven in '90s television’s otherwise arid desert of representation.

Take Khadijah. Queen Latifah—long associated with lesbian empowerment, from “Ladies First” to Set It Off to Bessie—was never your typical leading lady. Instead, she made Khadijah her own; a tomboy more at ease in a baggy pair of jeans and Tims than a dress and heels. That she was romantically interested in men wasn’t a major part of her character; rather, she was defined by her ambition, and the men she did date had to get on her level for her to even feign interest.

Diametrically opposed to her, Regine was ultra-feminine, to the point of parody. With her collection of wigs and outsize mannerisms (“Smooches!”) this self-described diva clearly found kinship with drag queens, which is why she was the one to lead the women to a gay bar in the fourth season episode, “Swing Out Sisters.” I was always a mix of hesitant and excited whenever a sitcom visited a gay bar in the ’90s. As a kid, this meant that I could gain access to a world that I had yet to know, but it was the ’90s, after all, and a gay bar also opened the doors to any number of stereotypes and cheap, offensive humor. Luckily, this episode is one of the better examples of this particular trope.

Wanting to exhale and celebrate their respective successes without the fawning attention of men, Regine takes the girls to Club Nexus, where they immediately find Khadijah’s music critic, Russell (a lascivious Jamaican with a perpetual eye for Regine) tending bar. “These folks are great tippers,” he explains. “Especially when I flash my winning smile.” After demonstrating those victorious pearly whites to a patron, Russell takes to the dancefloor where he is surrounded by adoring gay men, which, of course, makes Regine jealous. It’s a cute but completely unexpected scene. Growing up in a Guyanese household and among men of West Indian descent, I was more than familiar with their fragile masculinity and pervasive homophobia. At 10 years old, to see Russell (and I have known several Russells in my life) so open and free among all these gay men was quietly revolutionary.

Elsewhere, the always-open-minded and big-hearted Synclaire comforts a sad gay who’s having trouble with his handyman boyfriend (she can obviously relate) and Khadijah breaks Hank’s record on a basketball arcade machine, leading to a shoot-off. Hank, it turns out, is a six-foot-plus black man serving banjee girl realness. In an age before politically-correct, academically-informed labels, Hank could just have been a gag, and an easy target for some casual homophobia, yet here again, the show defies expectations.

When Khadijah wins the shoot-off by pointing out a run in Hank’s stocking, he complains, “That’s not fair,” leading Khadijah to respond with an actual read: “Well neither is the way you’re stretching out that skirt!” The joke isn’t about being a drag queen, as it would often be when insults fly from the straight to the queer community; instead of being, as Dorian Corey put it, “a vicious slur fight,” Khadijah “found a flaw and exaggerated it,” indicating that both she and Hank are “of the same thing."

The episode continues to play with gender in a really interesting way when Max, ever the butch, gets mistaken for a man. “Listen, pal, I am a natural born woman,” she says defiantly. “Never had a jockstrap. Never got a prostate exam. In fact, I’m ovulating as we speak.” Her would-be suitor is disgusted that he’s been hitting on a cisgender woman, proving once again that the ’90s, god bless ’em, were problematic AF. But Max is perhaps the most interestingly queer character among the four women.

In the season three episode, “Woman to Woman,” her recently engaged college roommate Shayla (played by Erika Alexander-aka-Pam’s Cosby Show bff Charmaine, Karen Malina White) comes to visit. Max learns that not only is Shayla a lesbian and that she’s engaged to a woman (come on, 1996!) but that Max is basically the last person to find out, as Shayla came out to Khadijah (again, “of the same thing”) in junior year. Max then begins to question her relationship with Shayla, not because she’s a lesbian, but because she waited so long to tell her; the reason, Shayla eventually explains, is that she was in love with Max: “When we first met at the dorm and you introduced yourself as Max the Maverick, I didn’t know what to make of you.”

“But you knew I was straight right?” Max asks. “Well, I did wonder,” Shayla says, citing Max’s frequent insults to and about men.

Max is both avowed “man-hater” and man-eater, plowing through beaux of the week with the same kind of braggadocious confidence Samantha Jones would later exhibit on Sex and the City. Her aggressive sexual appetite and her very masculine energy were intrinsic to a character unlike any I had seen on television up to that point: a powerful black woman in full possession of herself and her body who seemed to straddle genders with ease and an enviable nonchalance.

Once her girls point out to Max just how much their friendship obviously mattered to Shayla, and matters to her still, Max apologizes to her old roommate and explains that if Shayla had come out to her in college, she may have “freaked” but she at least wanted “the chance to rise to the occasion.”

Living Single always centered the importance of female friendship, especially black female friendship, but this time it took crucial consideration of sexual orientation. It would be years before I saw that kind of positive and affirming representation of queer people of color, but Living Single was doing it and doing it and doing it well before Noah’s Arc, Kimmy Schmidt and Dear White People. In a ’90s (and a 2018) kind of world, I’m so glad I had my girls.