"The O.C"'s Gay Legacy

Deciding that he cannot bear life in the O.C. without Ryan, Seth gets on his boat and sails away. His apparent choice of Ryan over Summer even drew the attention of Conan O'Brien, who brought it up to actor Adam Brody in an interview before the show's second season:

O'Brien: I love the show, and I have something to confess. I watch the show, and I think your character on the show, Seth, seems really obsessed with Ryan, to a degree sometimes that seems a little weird. Anyone who watches the show knows that there's this other character, and he's your age, and just because he, like, gets a girlfriend or something, your character gets so flipped out that he gets on a boat and runs away.
Brody: I'm telling you, you feel that way because I think it's true. I think Seth is in love with Ryan. I don't know, I really, I mean …
O'Brien: You think it's a little bit of a — maybe a slightly gay undertone.
Brody: [overlapping] Every time I read … total homosexual undertone! Every time I read the scene … a script, I'm like, OK, for sure, next scene they're making out.

The O.C. was a show that loved its meta references, and Conan's reaction even made it into the dialogue of the second-season premiere. Hearing that Seth has run away and is now staying in Portland with Luke and Carson Ward, Seth's grandfather states: "I don't get it. His best friend leaves, so he runs off with another boy and his gay dad. You gotta admit, sounds kind of strange."

Season 2 actually expanded the range of subtext for the ambiguously gay Seth, as a new character, Zach (Michael Cassidy), enters as a rival for Summer's affections. Zach is "the WASP version of Seth" with many common interests, and at times it is unclear whether the two boys are more interested in Summer or each other.

When Seth expresses surprise at Summer dating Zach, Ryan says, "A second ago, you wanted to date him." At one point Zach asks Seth, "You're going to hook up with a guy?" On a trip with Zach and Summer, finding that their hotel room has a double bed, Seth exclaims, "Zach and I are getting cozy tonight!"

Finally, Summer, irritated at the amount of time her ex and current boyfriend are spending together developing a comic book, accuses them of having turned into "Kavalier and Gay." (This is a reference to the characters of the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — made funnier by the fact that in the novel, Sam Clay, who shares the same initials as Seth Cohen, actually is gay.)

Unfortunately, and perhaps partly to offset all of this, Seth seemed to develop an obnoxious, homophobic or just insensitive side. When Carson Ward was outed, Seth's principal response was to gloat that Luke (who for so long had called him gay) now had a gay dad. Being beaten by his friend Anna at Skee-Ball, he tells her, "OK, clearly, you're a lesbian."

When lead character Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton) took her much-publicized dip into bi-curiousness in the second season, dating a female character called Alex (Olivia Wilde), it didn't take Seth long to react with the usual drooling frat-boy jokes about hotness and threesomes. He then became bizarrely preoccupied with breaking the couple up and getting Marissa back together with Ryan, her ex-boyfriend. When he partly succeeds and makes Alex upset and jealous, he jeers, "That is one angry lesbian!"

One positive thing about Seth, however, is that he did enlarge the possibility of what an attractive male lead could be like. Unable to defend himself physically, a man of talk rather than a man of action, he represented an alternative kind of masculinity to that embodied by Ryan. The show played with jokes about his feminine characteristics without saying that it was bad to be that way or that he needed to change.

When the friends decorate Marissa's room in Episode 24 of Season 1, Seth does the painting while Summer does all the building, heavy lifting and wiring of electronics. In a way, Seth's relationship with Summer was reminiscent of what the writers of Friends did with Monica and Chandler: give the ambiguously gay male character a girlfriend who is more macho than he is.

Picking up Where Dawson's Creek Left Off

Despite Marissa Cooper's exploration of bisexuality, there were no significant plots with overtly gay male characters in Seasons 2 or 3. The show kept up its queer (and camp) factor, however, with scenes like the surreal opening of Season 2, where the Cohens' house is being remodeled by construction workers who are all buff, shirtless and look as if they could join the Village People. A bewildered Sandy Cohen says to the foreman: "Could you please try to convince the fellas here to wear something in a shirt? My neighbors have started to refer to my house as The Manhole."

This scene (and other minor references in Seasons 2 and 3) marked the beginning of a much more playful way of dealing with homosexuality than the serious, issue-based takes of previous teen shows such as Dawson's Creek. In doing so, The O.C. moved past the Very Special Episode vibe of story lines such as the outing of Luke's father.

One of the most striking things about the gay aspect of the Season 2 opener is that there is no particular reason for it to be there. Indeed, a gay sensibility often seemed to be brought into The O.C. as something that was just there — very much as it is in life. This was a notable contrast to Dawson's Creek, where gay men would be brought in only for the specific purpose of interacting in some way with Jack, the main gay character.