Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley dicusses his character's sexuality

One of the new TV series on my watch list is The CW's Gossip Girl. While the pilot had no gay characters, the book series that inspired the series has some gay stories later in its run, including Blair's gay dad (who will be appearing on the show soon), the sexually ambiguous villain Chuck and a gay relationship for lead guy, Dan Humphries (played by Penn Badgley).

Thus, a recent interview with E! Online conducted with Badgley caught my attention. While it's a brief interview, it's also the first time I saw a major media outlet ask if the TV version of Dan might follow the path of his literary inspiration. Badgley's response:

"Yeah, I think he’s straight-up gay in the books. But I don’t think network TV really has the balls to make one of their [teenage] series regulars gay. Let's say the show builds up to become a big hit, then I think they'd maybe explore it in year three or four. It would be an interesting thing to do. It could bring in a whole different demographic."

As I understand it (and feel free to correct me, Gossip Girl fans, Wikipedia tells me only so much), Dan doesn't get a boyfriend until late in the book series, with the tenth book, Would I Lie to You, so putting it off for the third or fourth season would match the books.

Overall, though, I found Badgley's comments encouraging. Earlier in the interview, he comments that the show doesn't feel obliged to follow the novels too closely and I was happy he didn't repeat that view as roundabout way of saying that he didn't want to see that aspect of his character to be explored. We'll have to wait and see how it goes. but considering that Gossip Girl is the first new show of the season to get a full-season pickup, I expect the series will last long enough.