Who are the LGBT characters in The Gilded Age? One of them has a president in his family tree
The Gilded Age has spent four seasons in 1880s New York, where nobody says the word out loud. Its queer characters still number more than you'd think, and two of them were real.
HBO's The Gilded Age returned for season 4 on November 1, 2026, and Julian Fellowes' drama still runs mostly on money, marriages and Bertha Russell's war on old New York. Its queer storylines are fewer and quieter, which fits a decade when they couldn't be anything else. Across four seasons, though, the show has built one central gay love story, given it a very Fellowes ending and slipped two real-life figures into the background.
The full list
Here's everyone on the show with a queer storyline or a queer place in history:
- Oscar van Rhijn (Blake Ritson): Agnes van Rhijn's son and heir, and the show's main gay character since the pilot.
- John Adams (Claybourne Elder): Oscar's lover, a descendant of two presidents and a fictional member of a very real family. Seasons 1 to 3.
- Oscar Wilde (Jordan Waller): The real Irish writer, who turns up in season 2.
- John Singer Sargent (Bobby Steggert): The real American painter, who arrives in season 3 to paint Gladys Russell. The show never addresses his private life, but his biographers have.
Oscar and John carry almost all of it. The other two are history doing a cameo.
Oscar van Rhijn
Oscar is in the closing scene of the very first episode, kissing John in a hotel room, and from then on the show treats his sexuality as a fact and his public life as a performance. He's charming and mercenary enough to want a rich wife, so he spends season 1 courting Gladys Russell for her father's fortune, with the plan of keeping John on the side.
It doesn't go his way. In season 2, a con artist, Maud Beaton, swindles Oscar out of his fortune. By season 3, he's dealing with the fallout of every scheme he ever ran, and the show starts letting him be sympathetic instead of just slippery.
John Adams, the president's descendant
John is the one with the famous name. On the show, he's a great-grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, which also makes him a descendant of John Adams, the second. He's respectable, wealthy and a lot braver than Oscar about how he lives. In the first episode, Oscar's mother, Agnes, and her sister Ada even float John as a husband for their niece Marian, which goes exactly nowhere.
The Adams family is real. John Quincy Adams' son Charles Francis Adams was Lincoln's minister to Britain, and his grandsons were still prominent in the 1880s, including the writer Henry Adams. John himself, though, is Fellowes' invention, a fictional man placed inside a real family tree.
Elder told BroadwayWorld that John was trying to live authentically while still moving in society, and that he didn't just hide in the brothels downtown. He kept showing up in public.
"An interesting dichotomy of brave and socially conscious."
— Claybourne Elder, on John Adams, to BroadwayWorld
How John's story ended
Season 3 gave the couple their best material and then took it away. In episode 6, which aired July 27, 2025, John talks with Oscar about how cruel lavender marriages are, promises to help him and is then struck and killed by a passing carriage.
He leaves Oscar his summer house and money. In episode 7, Oscar sits in the back pew at John's funeral instead of up front where he belongs, breaks down in front of his family and finally tells his mother he misses John. Agnes goes quiet. Marian tells him she'll stand by him.
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Slate's David Mack called it "one of its best and most moving episodes to date." Plenty of gay fans were less forgiving. Killing off half of the show's only queer couple landed squarely on the old "bury your gays" trope, and The Daily Beast ran a piece on how the twist let down the show's gay fans.
The Gilded Age gave its one gay couple a funeral before it gave them a scene in the open.
The real ones: Wilde and Sargent
The show's two real queer men get far less screen time. Oscar Wilde arrives in season 2, episode 3, to premiere his play Vera in Manhattan, and nobody seems to like it. He spends most of his few lines noticing the coy looks between Oscar and John, who by then are exes.
John Singer Sargent shows up early in season 3, when Bertha commissions him to paint Gladys in the hope of landing the Duke of Buckingham. The show stays out of his personal life. His biographers haven't: his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche called his life in Paris and Venice "positively scandalous," and recent scholarship points to the artist Albert de Belleroche as a possible great love, Out reports.
Season 4: Oscar's lavender marriage
Oscar opens season 4 married. His wife is Enid Winterton (Kelley Curran), Bertha's former lady's maid, widowed into a fortune. It's a lavender marriage by design: she brings the money, he brings the van Rhijn name, Town & Country explains.
Ritson described Oscar as a man whose life is limited by the society around him, so he's "always looking for a workaround." Enid is the workaround. Season 4 runs through December 20, and the show's only openly queer leading man is spending it in exactly the kind of arrangement John called cruel.
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