Ryan Phillippe Played Daytime TV’s First Openly Gay Teen At 17 And At 51 He Is Still That Guy
Ryan Phillippe has been quietly carrying the torch for the gays since the year Wayne’s World came out. In June 1992, the then 17-year-old soap actor walked onto a One Life To Live set and became Billy Douglas, the first openly gay teenager in American daytime television history. Now 51 and signed on for season two of 9-1-1: Nashville, he has done a lot in the years between.
The role that almost did not happen
People around Phillippe told him not to take it. The storyline, and the on-screen friendship that turned into something more with another teenage character, were genuinely controversial in 1992. “I think there were some fears associated with the point in time that we were at,” Phillippe told The Fight in 2025, “and it being before so many walls and ceilings have been broken.” He took the part anyway.
The only thing that rivals shirtless Ryan Phillippe in IKWYDLS is Ryan Phillippe in a sharp suit in Gosford Park. pic.twitter.com/lhjYvdrGzY
— Netflix Tudum (@NetflixTudum) June 7, 2019
The fan mail changed him
Then the letters started arriving. Queer kids wrote in to say they had finally seen themselves on screen. Parents wrote in to say the storyline had helped them open a conversation with their own children. “It was such a different time,” Phillippe later said, adding that the experience “very much matured” him. GLAAD honoured his work. ABC wrote the character out in 1993 after a paired romance with another teen drew sustained backlash from a vocal slice of the audience.
Then came 54
Six years later, Phillippe played Shane, the wide-eyed Jersey kid turned Studio 54 bartender in the 1998 film 54. Director Mark Christopher described the character as an “opportunistic bisexual” and shot Phillippe shirtless behind the bar and on the dance floor. Most of that footage did not survive the original Miramax edit. It came back in the 2015 director’s cut, which restored 36 minutes of bisexual content the studio had stripped out, and the timeline has been better for it ever since.
Then there was Sebastian Valmont
In 1999, Phillippe played Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions, the role that fixed him in the cultural memory as the original problematic heartthrob. Joshua Jackson, then peak Dawson’s Creek, played openly gay Blaine Tuttle alongside him, and his scenes with closeted jock Greg McConnell (Eric Mabius) gave the film a second queer thread that DVD-era gay teens definitely rewound. The film also handed queer cinema one of its most replayed kisses, courtesy of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair, and gave a generation of gay teens an early lesson in why you do not trust a boy who quotes Choderlos de Laclos at you.
The 9-1-1: Nashville chapter
In 2026, Phillippe joins 9-1-1: Nashville for its second season as a “brilliant, iconoclastic detective” with “a past.” If that reads as code for “still smouldering at 51,” it is. Instinct did not bury the lead, calling him “the original problematic heartthrob” who is “still very much in his prime, physically, professionally”.
We have appreciated him for 33 years, and we are not stopping now.
