I don’t know what to tell you. I gave you a bunch of examples that predate Garak’s debut on DS9 and a link that had a lot more.
Aight, give me an openly gay man on TV before deep space nine that had a role where they had even half as many appearances as Bashir or Garak because I didn’t see one there.
I checked, Roy’s son was apparently in 2 episodes, the answer is there aren’t any who come close. We’ve made truly gigantic strides in LGBT representation, it was a dark time.
They didn’t know that Garak would have that big a role when he started.
Queen as Folk (UK). This life (also UK)
Ooh, you know I meant US TV, but technically correct potentially and that’s my failure for not specifying, so I can’t call you on that piece too much.
However, Queer as Folk and This Life both started well after DS9 and I did explicitly specify before Deep Space Nine. You’re coming up on the time when we started to get over ourselves and things started to get better. The AIDs epidemic wasn’t exactly… good… but people were starting to make an effort to understand it more and were at least less terrified.
My bad, I didn’t realise DS9 was as old as it is :)
I guess there’s also Nancy and Leon in Roseanne?
