My favorite kind of anti blog post is when they’re like, “If you really wanted representation, you’d pick Sam to be the bi one.” Mainly because I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand. This isn’t an either-or situation. I want to interpret all of them as queer without people telling me it’s ~enough~.”
Queer Sam? Heck yeah. Queer Charlie. Queer Dean. Queer Jody. Queer Donna. Queer Crowley. Queer Rowena. Queer Hannah. Queer Mary. Queer Bobby. Queer Ellen. (Holy shit. Queer Ellen. Jesus.) Queer Kevin. Queer Benny. Queer recurring characters. Queer characters that only show up in one episode. ~Flaunt~ the possibility of queerness in everyone’s face, until heteronormativity ain’t a thing anymore. (The thing that’s truly maddening is most of these characters have never said a damn word about their sexuality, but they’re all assumed to be straight.)
*Oprah voice* And you get a queer headcanon! And you get a queer headcanon! Everybody gets a queer headcanoooooon!
ABSOLUTELY. All the characters are potentially queer, basically. The only difference is that a heavy weight of subtext within the show happens to be on Dean, so he is our best bet for a character to be made CANONICALLY queer, & provide real representation, so it makes sense to focus efforts there. This is no way takes away from the ability of others to see more characters as queer.
That argument is NerdBoy Gatekeepers all over the place, trying to show how much superior to the Fake Geek Girls they are.
So much this! Queer anyone! Queer everyone! (Hey, straight people have no compunctions against claiming anyone and everyone as straight, so turn-about is fair play!) There’s literally no compelling reason to assume that any given character is straight, once you remove the presumption that straight is the default.
Claiming they’d support a different character being queer often reeks of “you can only have characters I don’t care so much about,” or worse, “I only support queer representation as an abstract concept – not as an actual reality.”
The idea that if we “really cared about representation” we’d have no preference at all as to which characters were queer rests on several grossly heteronormative presumptions:
That it’s either/or (as this post already addresses)
That straight people have automatic ownership of all characters, and thus it’s entirely their call whether or not to toss us the occasional crumb (i.e. they inherently deserve everything, we inherently deserve nothing, so we’d better be damn grateful cause it’s pure generosity to give us anything at all)
That it’s simply unthinkable that there might be any subtext specifically around Dean – straight fans who don’t see it are automatically right, queer fans who do are automatically delusional (which is homophobic as fuck)
That sexuality (though really just queer sexuality) is an arbitrary label, an inconsequential afterthought, not an integral part of who a person is. That it’s so superficial and irrelevant that it makes absolutely no difference which character it’s slapped onto. (Curiously, this is the exact opposite of the constant claim that a particular character can’t be queer, cause they don’t fit some narrow stereotype.)
We don’t want Dean to be “made” queer – we want acknowledgment that he’s already queer (insofar as a fictional character “has” any implicit traits – but that’s a tangential matter of literary theory and the relationship between subtext and main text). Could other characters also be queer? Well duh! But what the hell does that have to do with Dean being queer? Two different peoples’ orientations are two completely distinct entities. Would they argue that my cousin can’t be queer, because I am? Queerness is not a finite resource! There’s more than enough queerness to go around!
I’ve talked about the incongruity between what Dean says and the subtext of this scene before, but let’s rehash: Dean Winchester lives a dangerous life, this is not the first time he’s had a gun pointed at him. He knows full well that it is a rifle, and very obviously he does not wish to have a rifle pointed at his back.
So what he’s actually saying is that dear god, for once in his miserable life, why can’t it be a dick pressed up against his back. He’d love if his life was the kind of life where it would be a dick and not a gun. Especially the dick of the guy he seems to have decided was pretty hot just a moment ago.
Okay, then lets talk about the next scene between them in which they are totally flirting…
Ash fucking winks at Dean, and Dean does that devour thing.
He also does the cheek thing very briefly.
Also, this is immediately following their father’s death and while Sam’s mourning seems to have brought him closer to his estranged father, Dean’s mourning seems to come out as (belated) rebellion against his upbringing. I think the compliment on the hair-cut was entirely genuine: Dean admires rock musicians, but he’s had to sport the buzz-cut all his life because his father raised him to be a good little soldier. But a Skynyrd roadie? That shit is hot to him. Attraction to someone like Ash is the last thing he thinks John Winchester would have allowed him, so that’s exactly what he goes for in his rebellious mourning.
I could not spot the shielding thing, but there was some interesting things going on when Ash came back on screen. For one thing Ash ditched his undershirt, and came strutting topless in when the boys were back at the Roadhouse.
Then he had a weird stand off with Dean…About touching his laptop.
Wow, I totally see why there was a Dean x Ash ship going on back then. What´s up Dean indeed… Those two have something going on. I´ll post the kiss by proxy tomorrow.
Dean has his hand on his lap under the bar table right after we’re shown Ash reading John Winchester’s notes, and he keeps it there until Ash leaves the room, so he had his arm between Ash’s eyes and his junk in a pretty obvious fashion.
And yeah, Ash coming out with his chest bared and thrusting his pelvis forward? That is ridiculously sexy, and entirely for Dean’s benefit, cause he’s like “been waiting for you, man”.
And oh Jesus, Dean’s fingers hovering on top of his keyboard. Both the transcript and the closed caption give his line as “What’s up, man?” but it’s not that exactly. Could “Yea, what’s up, man?“ or “Tell me what’s up, man?“ However, the way Ash is positioned, they are making the connection between his junk and his ‘junk’, like if Dean were to touch his computer for Ash it would be the same as fondling his goods, and he’s giving Dean a look that says “At least buy me a drink first”.
And then he drinks from Dean’s bottle.
Yes! Let´s talk a little bit about that. Because Ash sure is thirsty. But first Dean wants Ash to call him as soon as possible.
Look at that sneaky bastard.
Just so pleased with himself.
Oh well, would you look at that, he is drinking beer with a cupids bow and arrow. Fuck me sideways…
Kissing each other by proxy.
Uhh… what do you know about the movie `Pink Flamingos`?
Wow, I had totally missed the detail about the bottle! I was always convinced the subtext was intentional because there was no way the contrast between his scenes with Ash and Jo could be accidental, but the fact that Wanek along with Shiban and Edlund, in two separate episodes, conspired to make this happen suggests that it was planned exactly this way.
I think we have a shot of him looking at a woman with the exact same face he makes in gif 2, but I can’t remember the episode.
I’ve never seen Pink Flamingoes, but well spotted!
I have not seen the movie as well, but apparently the line ‘I´m on it like Divine on dog dookie’ is from this movie.
Sam obviously doesn´t get it, but t Ash seems to know who does in the company. He glances over to Dean, he mainly said it to Dean…
I am guessing this genius said it to gauge if Dean is… interested.
Pink Flamingos is classic niche queer cinema from John Waters (1972) who is probably best known to mainstream audiences as the creator of Hairspray. It is best described as having a “trash, kitsch queer aesthetic”. It is a deliberately in-your-face shocking romp through absurdity and “bad taste” – a big in-your-face f-you to conventional life and morals. Drag queen Divine eats dog poo in it, which is what the line above refers to. I would say, it’s worth seeing if you’re interested in the history of queer cinema, but it is dated and doesn’t “work” in the same way today as it did back in the 1970s. Mentioning it, as Ash does here, and having someone know what you are talking about – in the kind of blue collar macho hunter culture of the Roadhouse – is sure-fire code for “Are you familiar with queer culture and hence with a lil’ queerness, darlin’?“
I’ve seen several people talking about how pointedly not gender-specific Dean’s “mingle with the local wildlife” comment was–it was pointed enough for me to comment on it as I was watching.
And it reminded me of Dean earlier in the season, talking about the things he’d given up in an effort to reduce the effects of the Mark, things he was looking forward to experiencing again when it was gone: burgers, beer, and… more burgers.
There was some discussion when that episode aired about how the “more burgers” was something that tripped us up because the word everyone was expecting to hear was “babes.” In addition to the obvious alliteration, casual sex is something we’re used to seeing Dean use as a coping mechanism, and so a lot of people were surprised when Dean very pointedly failed to say the expected thing.
And now here we are, with Dean talking about a vacation, and what he’s going to do when the mark is gone, and he mentions the beach, and he mentions beer… and then, exactly when we would normally expect him to mention something about babes in bikinis, he comes out with “mingle with the local wildlife.” His expression definitely gave that a sexual tone, so why wouldn’t he just talk about pretty bikini-clad (or hell, topless, on some beaches) girls?
This is the second time now that Dean has very pointedly not mentioned women in connection with what he wants of life after he’s gotten rid of the Mark.
Except you know what? It’s really the third time, because he talked about non-gender-specific people he wanted to experience differently, or maybe for the first time.
My favourite argument against bi!Dean is ‘BUT DEAN SAID HE WAS STRAIGHT’, because I just get to laugh a knowing little laugh & think to myself ‘Yeah, so did I. even believed it at the time, too’
Ok no but what I said last week still holds – something that might be interpreted as bi!Dean happens on the show and suddenly all the haters clog the wank tag with how much it’s deluuuusional to think Dean might be bi.
It really bothers you a lot, doesn’t it, that people might be interpreting him as anything but perfectly straight? That the show started to be pretty frequent about the bi allusions?
Maybe you should start thinking about why you feel the need to defend Dean’s heterosexuality instead of blabbing on about how people “only do it to validate their ship.”
And . if Dean’s heterosexuality was as crystal clear as you apparently want it to be, it wouldn’t need any defending, surely?
How do you define ‘crystal clear’? Because this is how I define it:
The people that Dean has kissed and/or had sex with, all females:
So, the question is, why do YOU see his ‘bi-ness’ in pastry and his newfound appreciation for Taylor Swift, when his heterosexuality is staring you right in the face?
It bothers us because it’s fucking offensive to say someone is bi based on their choice of music, food, and the colors of the shirt they are wearing. That is encouraging nasty stereotypes.I KNOW why I need to defend it because idiots like you are being the homophobic parents who won’t accept their child is gay.
You…realize I’m queer right? And that I know all about nasty stereotypes and parents who don’t accept their child for their queerness…Not that it matters. At no point did I ever say any of these things you seem to think I said. Nowhere. Don’t you read the posts you shit on? Jesus.
“Dean said he was straight and queer people are never in denial about their sexuality and here’s a bunch of gifs of Dean making out with women because bisexual ppl don’t do that and how dare you take evidence of Dean rejecting the harshly ultra-macho heteronormative hunter culture he grew up in by embracing traits that were repressed (ie, taking pride in his appearance & clothing, enjoying "feminine”-coded music, etc.) as support of the reading that he’s a repressed bisexual who is slowly coming to terms with his internalized queerphobia and effemiphobia"
lmao ok
Just this part:
It bothers us because it’s fucking offensive to say someone is bi based on their choice of music, food, and the colors of the shirt they are
wearing. That is encouraging nasty stereotypes.I KNOW why I need to
defend it because idiots like you are being the homophobic parents who
won’t accept their child is gay.
You realise Dean’s a fictional construct, right? You realise fiction does not follow the same laws as the real world, and symbolism, parallels and subtext are all real, valid things that have significance in telling a story. Showing that Dean’s taste in music isn’t as rigidly defined as it once was has significance in portraying his character development, and it’s meant to have implications for other aspects of his character. The costume department and prop department choose things because of their significance and don’t just throw outfits together based on how you’re feeling that day, like people do in the real world. Symbolism is a thing. Motifs, parallels, symbols…they’re put there to represent aspects of the story that aren’t being told at a face-value level. These aren’t nasty stereotypes. They’re storytelling techniques.
Also, look at the cases where Dean says he’s straight or that he “doesn’t swing that way”. He’s on the defensive in all of them. He feels threatened or insecure and his way of taking back control of the situation is by reaffirming his masculinity, which he thinks is achieved by saying he’s straight. The macho image he’s trying to project by denying that he “swings that way” is more of a stereotype than anything else. Put him in a situation where he doesn’t feel threatened, thinks he’s in control, and then pull the rug out from under him by directly confronting the issue of his sexuality, and you get some awkward flustering and stumbling over words a la the Aaron scene. You don’t get untroubled affirmation from him that he’s straight.
Also, the comment above me? That x 100
Dean is not bisexual in canon. He’s not and I don’t like people insisting that he is because there’s a whole bunch of problems with that. But this hostility towards people who are doing nothing more than personally choosing to interpret him that way? Why do you feel so threatened by it? If he was bi, so the fuck what? It doesn’t degrade his character at all.
I have no doubt that Dean was originally intended to be written as straight, and anything people saw as hinting towards his bisexuality in
earlier seasons was just (un?)happy accident. Now, though, the writing
and production team clearly have a different view on the show. There’s
plenty of stuff they’ve retconned the original intended meaning of
(reapers, angels, heaven, hell…all sorts, really); they seem to
interpret the characters differently than the old writers did, and they’re more aware of the
fandom than ever. They know the bi!dean interpretation exists. They know
they’re fuelling it. Adam Glass’ twitter has made it quite plain he’s aware of people interpreting Dean as bi, and it’s evident in his writing (and some of the other writers’) that he’s pandering to it. That has problems in itself if he’s not taking it seriously and just wants to cash in on a queer audience, but the people who have that interpretation don’t deserve to be attacked.
Dean, being fictional as he is, cannot define his sexuality for himself. In fanon, people can interpret it how they like. In canon, even if he’s said he’s straight in past seasons, that’s only a statement of the show’s canon as it currently stands. It’s not a precedent for that to always be the case, and there have been cases where shows have revealed a character’s sexuality to be something other than previously presumed. The writers are the ones who get to define his canon sexuality, and their recent actions suggest to me their stance is “Fandom: you wanna interpret him as bi? Well, we’re not gonna confirm that outright, but we’ll give you plenty to work with.” Whether or not their actions are harmful in doing so, well…I think that’s a different debate, but it’s not the pro-bi!dean portion of the fandom who can be blamed for that.
If you ever wonder whether some members of the Supernatural team were writing Dean as a (closeted, even unto himself) bisexual character, in the show’s subtext long before the arrival of Castiel, remember to rewatch 1×12 (Faith) by Sera Gamble and Raelle Tucker. Still one of my favourite episodes.
Dean’s heart has been severely damaged by electrocution and he is dying. The heart is symbolic of the essence of a person e.g. “I loved him with all my heart”. Gamble and Tucker could have chosen to make Dean terminal in any number of ways, BUT they chose his heart.
Sam takes Dean to a faith healer and he is cured – his heart is repaired. A young man called Marshall Hall dies of a heart attack at exactly the same moment.
Again, Gamble and Tucker could have killed Marshall Hall any way they liked, and the narrative would still have worked on a textual level. BUT they chose his heart.
Later Sam and Dean discover that the healer’s wife has been controlling a Reaper to swop the lives of those she deems immoral for the lives of those she deems worthy. She chose to kill Marshall Hall because he was an openly gay teacher.
“So Marshall Hall died to save me?" Dean asks, just to make the connection absolutely explicit.
The gay teacher’s heart is effectively “given” to Dean.
In the subtext – Dean’s heart is forever a little bit gay.
The phrase I see all the time from naysayers is “You’re reading too much into it.” Supernatural is very open about it’s heavy use of subtext, we’re supposed to read into things, that’s one of the ways the show engages their audience. Any fan who claims that subtext doesn’t exist on Supernatural must not know how this show works. It was even told to us, clear as day, in Meta Fiction 9.18 that subtext is one of the things that makes a story work. At the other end of the spectrum are fans who acknowledge that Supernatural is heavy with subtext but ignore the subtext they don’t like and try to convince people that it doesn’t exist.
The confessional scene was obviously meant as subtext because Dean spoke vaguely, that’s a method writers use to invite the audience to look at subtext and determine what Dean really meant by his vague statements. But we have to look at the entire scene to read the subtext, we can’t draw conclusions based on one sentence.
It starts out with Dean spending a full minute talking about his sexual history with women. The only one mentioned by name is Gina. I can’t remember any time in canon that Dean hooked up with a Gina and my search of the wikis is turning up nothing. That means it wasn’t a reference to a specific canon event, Gina is being used as a general reference to Dean’s many sexual flings.
When Dean finishes his discussion about sex and the priest gives him penance they have this conversation:
Dean: Then that’s it? Then I’m good to go? Father Delaney: One would hope some inner exploration might occur. Prayers are just the beginning to some serious soul searching.
Dean’s confession was over but that last line from Father Delaney inspired him to keep talking and to be more honest. He spoke about his fear of death and then:
Dean: There’s things, there’s.. people, feelings, that I want to experience differently than I had before. Father Delaney: Go a little deeper, perhaps, than with Gina. Dean: Yeah. I’m just starting to think maybe there’s more to it all than I thought.
The confession concludes with Father Delaney asking if Dean believes in God and Dean replies with the same thing he’s been saying since season 5, he believes God exists but doesn’t care.
The key elements of the confession were: Dean’s past sexual conquests, being told to pray, Dean’s fear of death, his desire to experience life in a different way, Father Delaney clarifying that by different he meant different from his past sexual/romantic experiences, and then re-affirming to the fans that Dean still thinks it’s pointless to pray to God.
I’ve seen people say that Dean’s line about experiencing things differently was a reference to the overall theme of the second half of season 10 which has been Dean trying things that he used to not be interested in (like Taylor Swift and cake). I do believe that was part of what he was saying, most people have several layers when talking about wanting a major life change, but it wasn’t the main reason for him saying that. We were told, very blatantly, that he was talking about sexual/romantic relationships because of Father Delaney’s clarifying remark of “Go a little deeper, perhaps, than with Gina.” The priest wanted to make sure he understood Dean so he brought up Gina and Dean said yeah, Dean confirmed Father Delaney’s suspicions that he was mainly talking about sex/romance. That part wasn’t even subtext, it was actual text.
Now the question is, was he talking about wanting a deeper relationship with women or was this Destiel subtext?
It’s a little late in the season to plan on having Dean meet a new woman that he can enter into a relationship with. It’s possible that they’re planning to bring back someone from his past, like Cassie or Lisa, and this confessional speech was foreshadowing that. However I can’t find any scenes/subtext in this season’s episodes that reference Cassie or Lisa. That means it’s highly unlikely that this was foreshadowing him getting back together with an ex. This late in the season Supernatural doesn’t introduce new subtext lines, they reinforce the ones they’ve built up in earlier episodes.
The romantic tropes surrounding Dean and Cas have been significant since season 8. Two things that stand out to me about the confessional scene is that Dean was told to pray and then it was reinforced to the audience that Dean doesn’t pray to God. So who would he have thought of when the priest told him to pray? Who has Dean been praying to for the past 6 years? There is one specific person that Dean associates with prayer and right after he was told to pray Dean shared that he didn’t want to die because there are people and feelings he wants to experience differently. We don’t have to dig at all for that subtext, even people who hate Destiel know that when Dean prays he prays to Cas.
To answer your questions, people are saying we’re reading too much into things because they either can’t see subtext or don’t want to acknowledge the subtext they don’t like. They claim we’re only talking about sex because an effective method of invalidating people is to ignore the body of a discussion and flippantly say it’s about something frivolous or selfish. Supernatural has been fairly obvious about the Destiel subtext in the past 3 seasons, so obvious that they’re receiving a large amount of hate for queer baiting. Entertainment news writers have always turned a blind eye to queer baiting but many have started commenting on the Destiel subtext, that’s how blatant it’s become. Even TV Guide, who have always been supporters of Supernatural, wrote an article saying the queer baiting needs to stop. Whether or not Destiel will actually go canon is up for debate but the existence of Destiel subtext is not.
In the confession scene, the Destiel connections were fairly easy to make. It may have been foreshadowing, it may be queer baiting, only time will tell. My money is on foreshadowing because it doesn’t make sense that they would queer bait after receiving so much bad press for it.
I’m glad the scene excited you, and you don’t have to be queer to be happy about the possibility of queer representation. It’s important for everyone and queer allies should be just as excited about representation as queer people are.
ok I’ve seen a lot of us doing what we tend to do when we’re particularly excited about a piece of spn that lends credence to ‘dean is bi’ readings, which is conceding like, “and yes, its ambiguous, and it could mean something else really easily, but if you look at it this way with other things from earlier in the show, you could use it to read it the way I prefer, and that could turn into something later.” and i feel like this tactic is sort of owning up to the ambiguity/polysemy that our perspective hinges on, and acknowledging that this ambiguity could negate our reading.
but with this one…i don’t know guys, i kind of feel like the ambiguity is exactly what supports the ‘dean is bi’ reading.
to cut right to it, why wasn’t this the dialogue of the scene?
Dean: …Recent events…made me think i might be closer to that than i really thought. And – and I don’t know, i mean, there’s things I wanna experience differently than I have before. You know, uh, I’ve always kinda loved ‘em and left ‘em but…I don’t know, maybe I’d wanna stick around for once, do the whole wife and rugrats thing
Priest: Go a little deeper perhaps, maybe with Gina?
Dean: Yeah…I’m just starting to think, maybe there’s more to it all that I thought, with someone like her
Something like that would be more like something we would go “ok yes he’s talking about a hypothetical woman, but we could interpret it as a symbol for anyone, and that he’s really talking about, just in general, a long term relationship,” and in that way find our reading in the text.
But Dean is not so gender-specific in the speech. He wants to experience things, people, feelings differently, maybe for the first time, and he’s realizing there might be more to it all than he realized. I don’t know, it just reminds me of when I’m talking to my friends who don’t know I’m queer and we’re all talking about the future and I talk about a hypothetical person while they talk about a hypothetical husband. My gender-unspecific language is something they can overlook, but I’m sure some of them go, “Hey wait, that ambiguity is kind of making a statement in juxtaposition to the specifics you’d expect to hear.”
And I feel like it’s a very loud silence on Dean’s part here not to talk about a hypothetical woman here, especially in a Catholic confessional, because I know the church has become a bit more progressive in recent years, but I still feel like one would want to clarify that you’re not maybe yearning for something their teachings might condemn – unless you are. And if you are, i feel like you use language unspecific enough to be safely interpreted in a way that protects you, but that is close to the truth. You know? So you don’t out yourself and say, “I think I might like guys,” but you also omit saying, “I want to have a relationship with a woman.”
So, tl;dr: Dean’s omissions here speak very loudly. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this counts as Dean outing himself explicitly, but it definitely pinged something in my head to go, oh, maybe the writers will go there this season or beyond.
This reminds me of the Fayetteville sheriff talking about his partner when everything indicated he ought to be saying wife.
Those are definitely non-gender-specific when you’d expect specificity.
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