I have a theory I’d like to test, but there seems to be no way of getting the information online, so if there’s anybody in the fandom with back-issues of the Playboy magazine, hit me up.
In 7.22, Dean mentions that he has read Kevin’s translation of the Leviathan tablet “more times than the…
Did some little research, and everything is online, but you would have to become a member of the site that archives all the issues. The simmons story was later renamed “dying in Bangkok” and bundled. It might available in libraries?
Yeah, the short story I found and just finished reading it. A guy who doesn’t realize he’s in love with his comrade in arms, who is found dead and junkless in a river, and he gets revenge on the vampires many years later when he contracts HIV.
The bisexual stuff disturbed me and excited me at the same time. I didn’t understand myself well then.
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I don’t think that I knew in Vietnam that I was gay. I had disguised the very real love that I felt for Tres as other things: loyalty to a buddy, admiration, even the kind of masculine love that grunts are supposed to feel for one another in combat. But it was love. I realize that now. I have known it since shortly after I returned from the war.
I never came out of the closet. Not publicly. Even while in medical school I learned how to troll the most discreet bars, meet the most discreet men, and make the most discreet arrangements for temporary liaisons. Later, as my practice and public persona grew, I learned how to keep my prowlings restricted to rare nights in cities far away from my home in L.A. And I dated women. Those who wondered why I never married had only to look at my busy practice to see that I had no time for a domestic life.
I would venture that it was this short-story that 14-year old Dean Winchester read more than once.
I would venture that as well.
It’s also a Dabb and Loflin episode, and I’m pretty sure they haven’t written a single episode without a bisexual Dean reference yet. It’s actually pretty clever. All three Winchester read the magazine, but they read it differently.
I didn’t find the Broyles Jr. article, but researching I realized that there was an article from him I had read before, Why Men Love War. He talks about the heightened erotic desire in war in this article:
Most men who have been to war, and most women who have been around it, remember that never in their lives did they have so heightened a sexuality. War is, in short. a turn-on. War cloaks men in a coat that conceals the limits and inadequacies of their separate natures. It gives them all aura, a collective power, an almost animal force. They aren’t just Billy or Johnny or Bobby, they are soldiers! But there’s a price for all that: the agonizing loneliness of war, the way a soldier is cut off from everything that defines him as an individual—he is the true rootless man.
The uniform did that, too, and all that heightened sexuality is not much solace late it night when the emptiness comes.
There were many men for whom this condition led to great decisions. I knew a Marine in Vietnam who was a great rarity, an Ivy League graduate. He also had an Ivy League wife, but lie managed to fall in love with a Vietnamese bar girl who could barely speak English. She was not particularly attractive, a peasant girl trying to support her family He spent all his time with her, he fell in love with her—awkwardly informally, but totally. At the end of his twelve months in Vietnam he went home, divorced his beautiful, intelligent, and socially correct wife and then went back to Vietnam and proposed to the bar girl, who accepted. It was a marriage across a vast divide of language, culture, race, and class that could only have been made in war. I am not sure that it lasted, but it would not surprise me if despite great difficulties, it did.
Of course. for every such story there are hundreds. thousands, of stories of passing contacts, a man and a woman holding each other tight for one moment, finding in sex some escape from the terrible reality of tile war. The intensity that war brings to sex, the “let us love now because there may be no tomorrow,” is based on death. No matter what our weapons on the battlefield, love is finally our only weapon against death. Sex is the weapon of life, the shooting sperm sent like an army of guerrillas to penetrate the egg’s defenses is the only victory that really matters. War thrusts you into the well of loneliness, death breathing in your ear. Sex is a grappling hook that pulls you out, ends your isolation, makes you one with life again.
You know. If you were wondering why exactly Dean came out of Vietnam-Purgatory looking like he wanted to eat Cas like he was a candybar.
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