You know Doug Savant as Matt, Heather Locklear's long-suffering gay tenant on Melrose Place. Denied on-screen kisses and doomed to date bad men, this soap stud had it rough. "It was the nature of the show," Savant tells TV Guide Online. "No one was happy! The straight people were burning down the building, so if everybody else is crazy, Matt can't be happy and normal."

Back in the '90s, before Queer as Folk and Will & Grace were hits, goodhearted Matt broke some TV barriers. "They did show me getting out of the same bed that another man was in," Savant says, "but because of the paucity of gay characters in TV, everybody wanted to see their version of what 'gay' meant reflected in this guy. It's only one gay man's life."

Savant � the father of three kids � often courted controversy by refusing to confirm his own orientation in interviews. "In real life, I married Laura Leighton [who played Melrose minx Sydney]," he says. "But the whole time I was on the show, I never said whether I was straight or gay. You don't go out and make your living playing a gay character and then walk down a red carpet somewhere and go, 'Look at the hot babe I'm with. I'm not really gay.' I thought, 'You may assume whatever you like about me' � it would've been immoral to do anything less than that."