Flipping through the channels yesterday, I ended up with an old Dawson’s Creek episode. Even in its best moments the show was only bearable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have a special place in my heart. I watched the second season of the show on TV in the summer of 2005, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the ‘Jack-McPhee-is-gay’ storyline somehow helped me come to terms with my own feelings, when I finally faced them a year or so later. It was not so much that I thought Kerr Smith was kinda hot, than the pro-gay environment of Capeside in a way felt comforting to an insecure young gay looking into fiction from the real world.

This particular episode – it must’ve been from early in the third season or something – was nothing much, but it was still pleasant. Jack chickened out of his first gay date, because ‘ [then] I would not only tell the world that I’m gay. I would actually be gay.’ That would be a familiar position of sorts, were it not for the fact that I’ve never been on a date, gay or straight. On this sad note, we salute gay Dawson’s writer Greg Berlanti for actually writing some halfways decent scripts on this issue, particularly in the second season. And tomorrow I will probably make that half-conscious flipping of channels thing again, trying to deny that I’m really looking for another dose of Dawson’s escapism.