A few episodes into the best job of his life on Dawson’s Creek, Kerr Smith got invited for a coffee he was sure would end it.
Show creator Kevin Williamson pulled him aside on a Wilmington set in 1998 and walked him to a cafe on Front Street. Kerr sat down fully expecting to be let go, with one wilder theory rattling around behind that. Then Kevin said they were taking his character in a different direction, and the panic in the actor’s head boiled down to one question.
“Was I fired . . . or gay?”
Kerr, now 54, tells the story in his new memoir, I Don’t Want to Wait: My Life on Dawson’s Creek, out November 10. Variety has published an excerpt, and it’s a far less cozy version of a story TV has been telling for 26 years: how Jack McPhee became one of the most important gay teenagers on American television.
The excerpt has the ultimatum that still stings him, the lunch with TV’s Mr. Leery that sealed the deal and a conversation with the late James Van Der Beek. And the kiss that came next took a fight from Greg Berlanti, years before he directed Love, Simon, who was ready to lose his job over it.
The Offer He Couldn’t Really Refuse
Kerr joined Dawson’s Creek in its second season, a 26-year-old playing 16, and looked for all the world like a new love interest for Joey (Katie Holmes). It was his first big primetime role, and he’d barely unpacked.
At that table, Kevin laid it out. They wanted Jack to come out, and they wanted him to make a mark as a gay teen on primetime. Kerr could be the one to play that, or they could bring in somebody else and work out some other use for Jack.
Kerr heard it the only way a young actor could: do this, or start packing. He writes that it hurt, and that the memory is painful to this day. A few months into the job, he was being asked to turn a likable new boyfriend into someone a good chunk of America might reject.
When the two men sat down again decades later for the book, Kevin remembered being the terrified one. A no would have wrecked his plans, and he felt like he was practically asking the actor’s permission.
He also remembered what frightened Kerr most, and playing gay wasn’t it. Kerr wanted to know what happened afterward. Would Jack come out, have his big storyline and then quietly disappear? Kevin promised he wouldn’t.
The Calls That Changed TV
Kerr asked for the rest of the day. He called his dad, his sister Alison, his manager, his agent and a close friend, pacing back and forth while every one of them told him to take it.
To see why he needed that many votes, listen to Greg, then a young writer on the show. He says in the book that the overwhelming majority of male actors back then, gay or straight, wanted nothing to do with gay roles. The team fully expected a disaster.
The clincher came over lunch with John Wesley Shipp, who played Dawson’s dad. John’s pitch had two parts. If Kevin cared this much about a story, Kerr would get the best writing on the show. And whatever happened, he shouldn’t go on talk shows loudly announcing he was straight, because the man writing Jack would take that personally.
Kerr, who is straight, took the note. His own one condition was that Jack never turn into a stereotype, and he pushed back when they tried to change his hair. Kevin agreed that nobody becomes a different person by coming out.
So Who Actually Knew?
Ask who was in on the plan and the accounts split.
On the Pod Meets World podcast last year, Kerr said it existed only in Kevin’s head, and that neither The WB, Sony nor the producers had a clue, as People reported.
Kevin’s version is very different. In a 2018 Hollywood Reporter interview, quoted by Instinct, he said Jack was designed to come out before the character ever reached the show. He told producer Paul Stupin, and the two plotted how to get it past the network, because he was scared a gay writer’s storyline would get rejected. WB president Susanne Daniels called him back the next day, on board.
Even in the memoir, Kevin mentions the producers getting excited about it before anyone told the actor. The person who truly had no idea, it seems, was the guy playing Jack.
Kerr has a theory on why it happened at all. Each of the show’s four leads carried a piece of Kevin’s personality, he says, and none of them carried his sexuality.
The Kiss The WB Tried To Shrink
Jack came out in season two, in a brutal pair of episodes that began with a teacher forcing him to read a revealing poem aloud. The bigger fight came a year later.
By then Greg was running the show. He’d watched Melrose Place cut away from two men kissing and never forgot it, and he told the Paley Center that Dawson’s was his chance to fix that. The network’s counteroffer, according to TVLine’s recap of a Vanity Fair history, was to shoot it from across the street. Greg threatened to quit.
He won. On May 24, 2000, in the season three finale, “True Love,” Jack finally kissed Ethan (Adam Kaufman), in close-up.
Will & Grace had staged a protest smooch a few months earlier, as NBC News noted, so this wasn’t the first time two men’s lips had met on network TV. It’s widely cited as the first romantic kiss between them, which is why it still turns up on every list of TV’s best gay kisses.
What Was On The Other Side Of The Wall
John remembers busloads of Baptist protesters at the studio gates. Kerr remembers hearing them from the lunch table, since only a cement wall stood between the cafeteria and the crowd. They were screaming about Jack, about gay people, about abomination. He says he never received threats, and that the cast and crew stood by him.
That same wall was decorated with a hand-painted portrait of the show’s four leads, and he wasn’t in it. In his whole time on the show, he writes, he never felt more like the odd man out.
He was blunter on the podcast last year, telling the hosts he’d probably have been beaten up if he’d walked outside.
What He’s Said Since
Kerr’s public version of all this has gotten more honest with time.
In 2010, he told Entertainment Weekly it had been a risk that opened minds. In 2020, he told Us Weekly he’d decided to go ahead and make history. Only last year did he admit that, in the moment, the news had been a letdown, that he’d just landed his dream job and was very scared. He also said he’s hugely proud of what they pulled off.
The memoir goes further, and it lets other people talk about him. Beyond Jack, the 272-page book promises episode deep dives and stories from the set, with interviews from the cast, crew, network executives and writers.
James, who died in February at 48, spoke to Kerr for it in 2025. He praised the choice to play Jack as a strong guy at a time when the stereotype of a gay man was anything but. And Mary Beth Peil, who played Grams, says most of the people who stop her at stage doors to talk about Dawson’s Creek want to talk about Grams and Jack.
Did Jack Disappear?
Kevin kept his word. Jack stayed through the very last episode in 2003, when the finale showed him with Pacey’s brother Doug (Dylan Neal), the two of them taking in Jen’s baby daughter.
So no, Kerr wasn’t fired. Jack spent the rest of the series answering the other half of the question.