After 5 and a half seasons and a lot of pushing from this website, last night The Walking Dead finally introduced it’s first gay male character.  Aaron from the Alexandria Safe Zone.

The Walking Dead over the years have had a veritable United Nations of characters but in the past have shied away from any of the comic’s gay content. (Season 3, Prison) without any explanation and a lot of blowback from this site.  Eventually after many complaints they added the role of the lesbian character Tara (a character not in the original comics and lesbians are more acceptable after all.  But now FINALLY the comics first gay character has arrived.

So last night Aaron shows up in the aftermath of the devastating storm at the end of a rather dull-ish English Patient type episode clean looking well-fed, dry, and inexplicably chipper. He mumbles something about “stranger danger” but assures Maggie and Sasha—both standing ready to shoot his brains out—that he comes as a friend with “good news.” He asks to speak to Rick, whom he (alarmingly!) knows by name.

In the comic Aaron and his partner Eric are recruiters for the Alexandria Safe-Zone, a walled-off community that our survivors have called home for several years now. He scouts potential new groups of survivors, watches them for some time, then invites them back to Alexandria if he deems them worthy.

Other than Aaron’s arrival in last nights episode Rick finally delivers the iconic comic book line, “We are the walking dead,” in an emotional speech about his grandfather, who fought against the Germans in World War II.

“Every day he woke up, told himself, ‘Rest in peace, now get up and go to war,’” Rick explains to his soggy, downtrodden group inside the barn. “Then after a few years of pretending he was dead, he made it out alive. That’s the trick of it, I think. We do what we need to do and then we get to live. But no matter what we find in D.C. I know we’ll be okay. Because this is how we survive. We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead.”

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