When I was in high school, screen and television writer Kevin Williamson was my idol. I loved his Scream films as well as his clever genre riffs like I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Faculty. I faithfully tuned in to his hyper verbal teen soap opera Dawson’s Creek each week. An aspiring writer myself, I patterned my own plays after his enjoyably overwritten, self-referential scripts; for instance, my play Drama was a winkingly meta, play-within-a-play love story straight out of the Williamson playbook, with references to Ally McBeal and Entertainment Weekly peppered throughout.

Like me, Kevin was a Jamie Lee Curtis-obsessed movie nerd who — like Dawson — plastered his walls with Steven Spielberg posters. I covered my closet door in Kevin Williamson ephemera. I also learned that, like me, Kevin was gay. As such, he became my first gay hero.

Knowing that a gay man from a small town had become a mega-success in Hollywood was truly inspiring. The first gay magazine I ever bought, as a still-closeted teenager, was an Advocate with Kevin on the cover, flanked by pal Katie Holmes in promotion of his directorial debut Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

Kevin’s work wasn’t explicitly gay, really— with the notable exception of Dawson’s Creek, which inspired me with its groundbreaking coming out saga featuring Jack (Kerr Smith)—gay themes and characters weren’t really at the forefront of his productions. But a certain queer sensibility was there, if you knew where to look. It was in the snappy dialogue, like IKWYDLS’s Sarah Michelle Gellar calling her bitch sister “a twit with a wit.” It was in the strong, empowered female characters, like Scream’s Sidney (Neve Campbell) and Tatum (Rose McGowan) and Dawson’s complicated Jen Lindley (Michelle Williams). It was in the way men were as likely to be sex objects as women, like towel clad Ryan Phillippe in Last Summer or sweaty, tied up Jerry O’Connell in Scream 2. It was in the continued emphasis on the lonely outcasts: Dawson’s motherless Joey (Katie Holmes), or Scream’s geeky, lovelorn Randy (Jamie Kennedy), or The Faculty’s adorkable Casey (Elijah Wood). I’ve often shot down my boyfriend’s suggestions that I go running with him by quoting Casey: “I don’t think someone should run unless they’re being chased.”

Conflict with authority was a recurring theme with Williamson, and one that resonated with me as I butted heads with various teachers and administrators at my Catholic high school. Owing to his own negative experiences, such as having an English teacher tell him he’d never amount to anything as a writer (the inspiration for Teaching Mrs. Tingle), Williamson frequently depicted teachers and faculty members as less than altruistic. Dawson’s coming out story is prompted by a cruel instructor forcing Jack to read a homoerotic poem out loud in class (an experience reportedly based on a staff writer’s life). Some of the titular Faculty are suspect even before the aliens take them over, like Robert Patrick’s angry, violent coach. The trailer narration for that movie played like a teenage battle cry: “now, these six students won’t just question authority — they’ll have to destroy it!”

Moreover, Kevin’s productions are just fun. His wit elevated everything he touched, including an un-credited rewrite on the original Halloween franchise reboot Halloween: H20 (as Entertainment Weekly wrote at the time, “his inside-jokey fingerprints are all over the damn thing”). Whether the story was about a movie-quoting slasher, or body-snatching alien invaders, or a 9 to 5 hostage situation with a nasty teacher (as in his underrated Teaching Mrs. Tingle, with a sublime Helen Mirren in the title role), Kevin’s movies had a verve to them nothing else could match — and in the wake of Scream’s success, many filmmakers tried.

They boasted great soundtracks filled with alt rock artists of the day, everyone from Collective Soul to Eve 6 to Garbage; Dawson’s Creek, in particular, gave a boost to various up and coming musical acts featured on the program. Even Williamson’s “lesser” efforts, like the short-lived TV series Wasteland (a sort of Dawson’s Creek for twentysomethings) or Glory Days (an enjoyably schlocky exploration of a Twin Peaksian town) were always nothing less than watchable. Probably his highest profile failure, the notoriously troubled werewolf movie Cursed, on which he reteamed with Scream director Wes Craven, still manages to be a zippy and entertaining romp through a very early 2000s Hollywood — and it features a heartfelt gay storyline in which Jesse Eisenberg’s high school nemesis Milo Ventimiglia turns out to have a crush on him.

milo ventimiglia and jesse eisenberg in cursed.png

Williamson had his finger uncannily on the pulse of that sought after group — “the youth.” He not only wrote entertainment that young people wanted to watch, but analyzed and commented on them (not always favorably). One of the more disturbing aspects of Scream is how blithe some of the students are when their classmates and principal get butchered; horror films have not only given them tips on how to survive, but have seemingly desensitized them to bloodshed. And the impact of cinematic violence on real people is a subject the series would return to again and again.

Scream 4 (2011), which saw Williamson return after sitting out Scream 3 (he was simply too busy to write it), manages to comment on everything that had happened in both the horror genre and youth culture in the ten-plus years since the previous film. Its killer’s motivation perfectly summed up the social media generation and all the worst instincts of millennials, who’d rather make money off Instagram followers than go to college or work for a living.

Of course, most wannabe influencers don’t throw themselves through glass coffee tables to get there.

Williamson also made some profound, if gentler, statements about young people when he penned the Dawson’s Creek series finale in 2003 after leaving the show at the end of the second season. He created a through-line about soul mates and how the relationship between a gay man and a woman can be every bit as deep and meaningful as a romantic one, a truth which is certainly borne out by my own life.

That truthfulness blended with entertainment value is what made me adore Kevin. It’s why I constructed my closet door shrine, with the words “The World of Kevin Williamson” at the top. It’s why I put a picture of Kevin inside my locker door, which provoked the derisive comment, “I don’t usually keep pictures of guys inside my locker” from one of my classmates (If only I could have punched him in the face a la Sidney in the first Scream — “bam, bitch went down!”). And it’s why someone enthusiastically telling me that Drama was “so good, like Dawson’s Creek writing!” filled me with pride. They were comparing me to Kevin Williamson, my inspiration.

Twenty years later, he remains an inspiration to me. He’s a potent reminder that LGBTQ people have always been vitally important to the horror genre, and to film and television in general. This Pride month, I salute you, Kevin.