how long do you think it will be before that changes? For that matter, are there any openly gay actors playing characters on a show on either network?
Oooo! That’s so GAY-ven. 
Damn, she’s cute too.
An upcoming episode of GOOD LUCK CHARLIE is apparently set to feature a lesbian couple.
No gay characters on the Disney Channel, although TV guide just announced that an episode of the show “Good Luck, Charlie” set to air next year will have a lesbian couple.
No openly gay characters on Nickelodeon, although the Canadian high school drama/soap “Degrassi: The Next Generation”, which aired on Nickelodeon’s sister channel, N (now Teen Nick), had gay characters.
No idea about actors.
Captain Li Shang, from Mulan, who slowly fell head-over-heels in love with Ping.
Until he found out that Ping had girl parts, at which point he … remained in love with her. Big, two-handed slap in the face to the whole “born that way” idea for sexual orientation, but what are ya gonna do?
Good to see that they’re finally addressing this issue. Next up for Disney: Cannibalism!
Ah, but to quote the world’s leading expert on the subject: “'Baby, you were born this way, no matter gay, straight or bi.”
High School Musical’s Ryan Evans is as gay as Disney could get away with on air, and is explicitly gay in the stage version. That musical number he did with Chad in HSM2 was pretty homoerotic (& in the next scene they’re wearing each other’s shirts). Drake & Bell has it’s moments too. The writers of these types of shows seem to love sneaking crap past the radar.
Wikipedia has several lists of TV shows with LGBT characters, but a quick look through them didn’t turn up any Disney or Nick shows. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been any, of course.
Sorry this is so vague, but a few years back I remember reading about some family or children’s TV show that had a little boy character with stereotypically gay interests and mannerisms. I want to say that this show was mostly about a family and that this boy was the friend of one of their children. Whatever this show was I never saw it and I don’t know what it was called or what channel it aired on, but IIRC what I read was that the show’s creators did intend for this character to be gay. I feel like the article even said there was a “vision of the future” scene where the adult version of this character was shown with a man who was implied to be his boyfriend.
Slightly OT: The comic strip “For Better or For Worse” has a character, Lawrence, who came out in his late teens. When it happened, in the mid 1990s, the strip’s creator said that she had always known that Lawrence would be gay, from the time she introduced him to the strip as a preschooler, and was simply waiting for him to be old enough to recognize it.
This sounds very familiar, but for the life of me I can’t think of the show name either.
Oliver Beene. The gay kid was Oliver’s best friend, Michael.
Eh. Victor/Victoria did it long before. Usually the men are dragged kicking and screaming into the realization they’re falling in love with this supposed other man and then the big reveal and all is well.
Raven-Symone is coming out? I thought she had been openly gay for several years now.
The kids’ networks will be slower than the adult ones to have gay characters, even absent any bias against them. A lot of characters on such networks’ shows will be young enough that they don’t really have any well-defined sexuality.
For that matter, it goes back at least to Twelfth Night by Shakespeare. Count Orsino loves him some Viola in drag.
I don’t think there are actually a lot of shows about children that young. And while I’m not up on current children’s shows, when I was a kid it was certainly very common for characters on children’s shows to have heterosexual crushes, so it’s not like the sexual orientations of child/adolescent characters has traditionally been left unaddressed.
I do not and can not accept that SpongeBob Squarepants is straight.
My kids watch a cartoon called Sophia the First. The castle steward is queer as a three dollar bill, although they don’t expressly assign any sexuality to him.
He’s in love with a gay fish.
Oh, he is. He’s got the hots for Sandy the squirrel, but those pesky scuba suits get in the way. 
Squidward, however, is DEFINITELY gay, although involuntarily celibate. I wonder if Larry the Lobster is too.