Queer Vibes, Zero Representation: Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Everwood, 7th Heaven, and the Small-Town Closet

There’s a very specific genre of television—a warm, wistful, emotionally manipulative genre—that raised us in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The small-town comfort drama. The shows that gave us family dinners, teen heartbreak, monologues about morals and meaning and what it really means to grow up.

And woven through all of it, quietly, insistently? Queer vibes. So many queer vibes.
And absolutely no queers.

Let’s start where we always do: Dawson’s Creek. Jack’s coming out was genuinely huge at the time, but instead of building on that foundation, the show shut the door right behind him. Joey and Jen flirted with sapphic chemistry for years. Hell, Dawson and Pacey had one too many emotionally intense boat rides for two allegedly straight boys. But nothing more. Queerness was a plot device. A Very Special Episode. Never a lived-in truth.

Then Gilmore Girls sauntered in with its mile-a-minute banter and small-town kitsch, gave us Luke in flannel drag, Michel with immaculate side-eye, Miss Patty and Babette straight out of a Tennessee Williams fever dream—and still… not one openly queer person in all of Stars Hollow. This is a town that staged a living diorama of the American Revolution, but two women holding hands would’ve been too edgy?

One Tree Hill, meanwhile, gave us tortured artists, emotionally intimate male friendships, brooding jocks who learned to cry, and more eyeliner than a MySpace profile. Brooke Davis was bisexual-coded, and nobody can tell me otherwise. Peyton made out with her art. Mouth had a love arc that could’ve gone anywhere. Instead, we got another round of heterosexual pairings with enough unresolved tension to power a solar grid.

But the deeper cuts—Everwood and 7th Heaven—they’re the ones that make you want to scream into a throw pillow.

Everwood was peak emotional boy drama: small town, big grief, and even bigger piano solos. Ephram Brown wore scarves indoors and had more chemistry with his best friend Bright than he ever did with Amy. Bright, who couldn’t string a thought together without making it sound gay. These two were built on repressed intimacy and accidental homoeroticism, but instead of going there, the show just... gave them trauma and unresolved tension and called it character development.

And then 7th Heaven. Oh, 7th Heaven. A show about a preacher’s family with seven kids and zero queer people. Statistically impossible. Lucy had 200 sapphic breakdowns and still somehow ended up with Kevin. Ruthie had main-character-lesbian energy for years before disappearing into plot irrelevance. And Simon? Let’s just say Simon grew up with more repression than a 1950s prom queen. But did the show ever acknowledge queerness? Not unless it was to judge it with Christian-lite side-eye.

These shows taught us how to love, to long, to suffer. But they also taught us how to shrink ourselves. To live in subtext. To recognise crumbs and pretend they were enough.

And yes, we devoured every scene with hidden glances and emotionally intense friendships. We needed those shows. But we also needed someone—anyone—to say the word. To look like us, live like us, exist without explanation or tragedy.

In today’s landscape, where shows like Sex Education, Heartstopper, Yellowjackets, and The Last of Us are finally letting queerness take centre stage, it’s worth remembering just how many small towns TV gave us where we were expected to stay invisible.

It’s not just about missed opportunities. It’s about who got to belong—and who didn’t.

Because for all their comfort and charm, these shows left a lot of us outside the diner, looking in.