The History of TV's Gay Teens from "ATWT" to "Queer as Folk"

All My Children (1996)

All My Children’s Kevin Sheffield (Ben Jorgensen) was a gay teenager who was thrown out by his family after he tells them he’s gay. His older brother blamed a school counselor for his brother’s sexual orientation, and in true soap opera tradition, decided to murder him. He instead killed the man’s sister, and ended up in prison – for which their parents, of course, blamed their gay son. They shipped Kevin off for reparative therapy, which didn’t work, and then got him a job at a restaurant that subsequently blew up. While All My Children producers swear he wasn’t killed in the blast, that was the last viewers saw of Kevin Sheffield.

Dawson's Creek (1998)

The popular teen drama Dawson’s Creek went where My So Called Life and the soaps hadn’t yet: its gay teen actually had boyfriends. Jack McPhee, who first appeared in the show’s second season, is forced to confront his sexual identity when a teacher makes him read a poem containing strongly suggestive language in front of his class.

Although he struggles for quite a while with accepting himself as gay, he finally decides to give a relationship with Ethan a try. Unfortunately for Jack, Ethan got tired of waiting for him to figure things out, and had gotten back together with his old boyfriend. But not before the two shared TV’s first gay teen kiss.

In the fourth season, Jack starts dating a gay activist named Toby, which lasts until Jack goes away to college. In a storyline being echoed in 2007’s Greeks, Jack is ostracized by his frat brothers when they find out he’s gay. Jack develops a drinking problem and survives a fall off a roof into a swimming pool before embarking on a series of relationships with other men.

Because Jack was a main character on the show for six seasons, viewers got a chance to see him with his friends, his family, and his lovers, just as they did the show’s many heterosexual characters. While Queer as Folk and Degrassi: The Next Generation (both discussed in more depth below) also brought gay teenagers into the viewing audience as family members, albeit in a less intense way than can happen in a soap opera, those shows were not on mainstream broadcast channels. Dawson’s Creek was. It was also an extremely popular show, particularly with young audiences, and for that reason probably did more to normalize viewer perceptions of gay people, and what it’s like to grow up gay, than any show before or, arguably, since.

Despite Jack’s struggles with alcohol and the difficulty he had accepting himself, the show let him work through those problems and ultimately find his happy ending. He was no longer a teenager when the series finally wrapped, and a flash-forward episode let the audience know that in years to come, he would be in a relationship and raising a child with series regular Pacey’s brother Doug.

Queer as Folk (2000)

When 17-year-old Justin Taylor (Randy Harrison) splashed his sneaker-clad foot in a puddle on Queer as Folk’s Liberty Avenue, it was the first time American TV audiences met a gay teenager not in the grip of an existential coming out crisis.

Justin wasn’t struggling with being gay; he was just looking for a good place to buy a fake ID, the best clubs to go to, and how to get 29-year-old Brian to fall in love with him. When his father told him he couldn’t live at home unless he agreed not to talk about his “disgusting lifestyle” and threatened to send him to military school, Justin just laughed, pointing out that military school was probably a hotbed of gay sex. When his father hit him in response, Justin shrugged it off, saying his father could hit him or send him away, but “I’ll still be your queer son.”

Justin was also the most overtly political of TV’s gay teenagers. He got suspended from school for objecting when a teacher let another student call him “queer,” defended another student who was being harassed, and started a Gay/Straight Student Alliance at his high school. When the school refused to let the club meet, he enlisted the support of a pro-gay state senator and got the media and a local PFLAG chapter involved.