Despite all the ballyhoo in Washington about cleaning up the airwaves of sexually themed programming, it seems inevitable that a gay cable TV channel will be making its debut. 
   The only question is when.
   The answer appears to be, sooner than we may think.
   Yesterday, here! TV, currently a pay-per-view provider of gay-themed content to satellite subscribers, said it plans to launch a channel on Oct. 1 offering gay-themed programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including original movies and series.
   The service will still be pay per view and offered to satellite customers via either a monthly subscription or four-hour programming blocks.
   But with primetime flooded with gay-themed TV shows--NBC’s “Will & Grace,” ABC’s “It’s All Relative,” Bravo’s “Queer Eye For the Straight Guy”--it would seem the next logical step would be a gay-themed network offered to cable subscribers as a premium channel.
   Indeed, Viacom, which two years ago played with the idea of a gay launch, is broaching that idea again, with MTV Networks chairman and chief executive Tom Freston currently working on the plan. 
  Here! TV may launch sooner, but Viacom would undoubtedly have bigger distribution and more money behind it.
  There will certainly be some challenges to such a launch, and leading the list would be securing carriage. To gain carriage, a network would have to sell distributors not only on the fact that there's a huge potential audience of viewers but that those viewers would sign up in sufficient numbers to make the network a viable proposition.
   That could be a tough sell. The three-year-old PrideVision, a gay channel in Canada, is in only 25,000 households, though owner Headline Media Group hopes to expand to the U.S. this year.
   Securing advertiser support would also be an issue. 
   Though many advertisers, especially in financial services and travel, have embraced marketing directly to gays, they remain in the minority. Whether companies that do not now market directly to gays would choose to buy ad time on a gay-themed network remains an open question.
    But it would not be for a lack of an attractive audience. Gay households have an average income of about 8 percent more than straight households, Forrester Research finds, and gay consumers spend some $500 billion per year, according to gay marketing agency Prime Access in New York.
   In addressing the gay network idea recently, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone lamented to investors last month that the company may have missed a billion-dollar prospect by not launching sooner.
   In addition to securing rights to about 200 independent film titles, here! TV will offer a 30 hours-per-month subscription video-on-demand service starting June 1 via three- to six-hour pay-per-view blocks.
   Original movies include “Deadly Skies,” about a gay colonel bounced from the army who saves the world from an asteroid, and “Too Cool for Christmas,” about a teen who doesn’t want to spend the holidays with her two dads.
   Original series will include “Dante’s Cove,” a gothic thriller, and “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” with lesbian action hero Cynthia Rothrock.