With Glee winning the Golden Globe for Best Television Series—Comedy or Musical, Lady Gaga selling millions of songs, and Adam Lambert being the most memorable participant of last year’s American Idol (who won again? is that guy going to show his face?), it is clearly the time of the freak. This is the group of our peers who knew very early about self-expression and weren’t afraid to be different.

The late-Nineties and the Aughts (or as Paul Krugman called the last decade, “The Big Zero”), saw the rise in popularity and economic power of so-called “geeks”—those who spent too much time studying and had interests in role-playing games with dice.

These geeks might have rolled the dice too many times with our finances, figuring out how to make money on the lending of money by insuring money against the loss of said money.

These two groups appeared briefly on an all-too-short-lived television show, Freaks and Geeks, that bridged the two decades. The geeks were obsessed with getting ahead academically. The freaks enjoyed living. The freaks on this show, James Franco, Seth Rogan and Jason Segel, are now some of the most recognizable and powerful actors working.

Glee actor Chris Colfer

Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee, in his acceptance speech said, “This is for anybody and everybody who got a wedgie in high school.” Yes, geeks got wedgies. Freaks did too, and much more. For the group that is included in the freaks are homosexuals. Glee has an openly gay character who knows who he is, dresses accordingly, gets hazed regularly, and came out to his father in a very moving episode. (Immediately upon reaching the microphone, Ryan Murphy thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press and Barbara Streisand). Lady Gaga was recently nominated by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s annual media awards.

Glee doesn’t announce its agenda directly. It doesn’t have to. Those who found themselves outside the groups of power in high school understand the mise en scene created in the show. Lady Gaga has a mission to free everyone for themselves from their environs. She invites everyone who feels different, other, odd, to celebrate themselves in spite of well…everything. She certainly does.

The title character on Ugly Betty falls under the freak category. What keeps her from truly shining is her inability to see (and celebrate) her freakishness. We see the incongruity in her wardrobe. This clashes directly with her desire to fit in. Should she revel in the “Betty-ness” that is her, she would approach cult-status.

Lady Gaga has a cult following. She is a cult. In her appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, several audience members wore items reminiscent of Gaga’s vast wardrobe. Oprah is a stickler about audience wardrobe and behavior. Even this didn’t matter when it came to Gaga’s popularity and reach. Gaga is big and bold and loud (her music, that is—she is very soft-spoken and thoughtful when speaking). It might be easy to write her off as a fad, a camera-seeking freak who wants to stretch her 15 minutes to an hour (as many of us are stretching 15 cents to a dollar). Her music is catchy (hum a few bars of Poker Face and then try to get it out of your head), and her style is eclectic and wow-inducing. She is also at the forefront of a powerful new movement.

With the new census coming up, it’s time we all stood up and were counted as the freaks we are.