f-ckyeahfutbol:

millionsofbooks:

f-ckyeahfutbol:

I’ve written about Dean Winchester as an LGBT person before, and as many queer references as there were in the episode All in the Family (see @drsilverfish‘s post “All in the Queer Family”), I want to write a few words on how the episode related to “The Family” for me.

The most important scene was the heartfelt conversation between Chuck and Dean in the very beginning of the episode. This is a heavily queer-coded conversation during which Chuck acknowledges that Dean has had a ‘complicated upbringing’.

Dean: Well, from where I sit, it feels like you left us and you’re trying to justify it.
Chuck: I know you had a complicated upbringing, Dean, but don’t confuse me with your dad.

Dean, with tears in his eyes, listed all the ways that the world is fucked up, and told Chuck – God – that it didn’t get better. Despite promises, it never got better, for him.

Dean: People – People pray to you. People build churches for you. They fight wars in your name, and you did nothing.
Chuck: You’re frustrated. I get it. […] And I saw that I needed to step away and let my baby find its way. Being overinvolved is no longer parenting. It’s enabling.
Dean: But it didn’t get better.
Chuck: Well, I’ve been mulling it over. And from where I sit: I think it has [gotten better].

It’s important to note here that the character of Chuck – God – is a textually queer character. Chuck is bisexual. Chuck is LGBT. The subtext to this conversation between a queer character and a character that many of us read as queer is this:

“It Gets Better“ is a queer-coded phrase. It is a phrase that every LGBT person in America recognizes. It is the slogan of a famous campaign for LGBT youth (see also video of Dan and Terry talking about their ‘complicated upbringings‘). And is not only that it’s instantly recognizable to queer people, it’s that the show itself has made a reference to the campaign before in text, in Jeremy Carver’s episode We Need to Talk About Kevin (note also the queer-coding of the episode title itself, “We need to talk about [name of son]” being a line parents say when they suspect their son might be gay):

Sam: You know, it gets better.
Kevin: You know I’m not gay, right?

And let us not ignore how Kevin’s simple, no nonsense line, “You know I’m not gay, right?“ shone a light on the negative space of how Dean Winchester in the entire run of the show had never said those words.

They explicitly referenced the slogan of the campaign in this exchange. The phrase ‘it gets better’ is also attached to the queer experience in the textual canon of the show. So, the conversation between Chuck and Dean is queer-coded. It is the conversation between two queer characters. Dean was telling Chuck that as was his understanding, it was supposed to get better. He had been promised that it would get better. He, a queer person, had been promised that it would get better, and it hadn’t.

And Chuck, a queer person, told Dean that from his point of view, it had gotten better. It is better when you open your eyes, Dean.

And the fact that the character of Kevin Tran, who was killed of two seasons ago, suddenly made a reappearance for the scene immediately preceding this queer-coded conversation between God and Dean Winchester? It only serves to contextualize this scene even more securely with the LGBT campaign It Gets Better.

Kevin Tran knew that it was a phrase that was told to queer youths. Sam Winchester knew that it was a phrase told to queer youths because Kevin Told him (he might have known otherwise too, to be sure, but we explicitly know that he knows because of the scene between him and Kevin – and the re-appearance of spectral Kevin could only serve to jog his memory of this). And here, his brother is weeping before him about how it never got better.

Sam knows that Dean is queer. God knows that Dean is queer. And conversely to what a lot of the fandom seems to think, Dean Winchester knows full well that he is fucking queer.

And the audience is starting to catch up, too. Because this motherfucking reference was as subtle as a brick to the face.

I totally agree with this, but I’m fairly certain the title ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ was a reference to the book of the same name? Idk that just seems more obvious.

It’s a queer-coded phrase regardless. Yes, it’s likely a reference to other things, mostly likely the Rembrandt song title We Need to Talk about Kevin in addition to the film – given the history of the show using song titles as episode names.