(Screenshot via YouTube)

Willie Garson, who played Carrie Bradshaw’s gay best friend Stanford Blatch in “Sex and the City,” thinks his character was one of the more well-rounded gay characters on television at the time.

Garson spoke with Huffington Post U.K. and said as a straight actor he wanted to represent the gay community authentically.

“Most of the pressure I felt was to not be offensive. I didn’t want to offend the community at all, and that was a really big concern of mine. To the point where I didn’t even have HBO for the first three years, because I didn’t want to see it, because I was so terrified of being offensive,” the actor says. “But, the gay community really rose up, and said ‘we know people like this, this is real.’ And so that made me feel great, and I could start watching the show.”

Garson says even though Stanford was portrayed as a flamboyant character, he showed that the gay community has a complexity.

“It was also very important to the show, to show someone having fun being gay, being proud, open and comfortable with who they are. You know, we’d just come through the crisis and every representation of gay was kind of dark, and spoken in hushed tones,” Garson says.

“But Stanford was like, ‘hey, I’m gay. Really gay. Super gay. And I’m happy about it, I’m looking for a boyfriend, looking for a husband’, and it was very open, and different to what had been shown before,” Garson continued.

Garson also thinks Stanford reflected the mentality of a lot of gay men.

“I don’t know if we broke stereotypes, but I imagine many, many gay men felt the same way. That they don’t feel like taking poppers and staying up all night, dancing to electronic music. I want to wear nice clothes and go to a nice restaurant and look for a boyfriend,” Garson says.