“Humans Burn Bright, but for a Brief Time”
Rewatching Season 14′s Ouroboros I was instantly struck by what I was feeling toward the beginning of the episode.
Cas and Dean are talking in the diner, with Castiel trying to get Dean talking about what he’s living with. Dean’s putting on a brave front about keeping AU!Michael locked away [closet themes], but facing his own mortality while Cas tries to take care of him. In fact, Dean is telling Cas that he wants Cas to kill him put him in the Ma’lak box before it gets too bad. The conversation is interwoven and played over Jack coughing up blood in the bathroom, secretly slowly dying.
It’s harsh. The whole thing suddenly smacked me in the face and I said to myself:
Supernatural didn’t do an episode that reached for the feeling of living through the AIDS crisis,
I thought this was too far of a stretch, I was making this up, I talked myself out of it. And then I kept watching …
I watched as the queer coded monster of the week mostly killed only gay men.
I watched as they died because they hooked up with the Gorgon.
They show one victim take advantage of the Gorgon at a truck stop. They aren’t even subtle about it - the truck stop sign indicates it’s literally just called “Truck Stop”.
(The queer-coded Gorgon used to also kill women but says they’re careful now because of toxic masculinity. … so the monster is actually Bi. Great. the writers do know what that is.)
TFW fights the Gorgon but he is only ever seen using his venom on his gay hook ups and Cas, only knocking Dean unconscious.
Dean is hit on the head and Cas and Sam bring him to the infirmary.
We have seen a lot of illness or deathbed scenes on this show and VERY few take place in the infirmary. But in this episode TFW worries over an unconscious Dean in an older hospital setting.
Cas and Jack have a conversation about mortality, about accepting the inevitability of death; dealing with the fact that the people they love, and specifically Cas’s partner Dean, are eventually going to die so they have to cherish the time they have with them, even though it’s going to be short.
I felt crazy for even daring to think this could really be what I was watching, so I looked up the author of the episode and it was [drumroll please] Steve Yockey, Supernatural’s resident gay writer born in 1976.
Yockey brought us more than a few contenders for gayest subtext’d episodes of Supernatural, or rather those episodes that lay the groundwork for making Deancas canon including both Banes episodes, Lily Sunder, & Advanced Thanatology. He is also 45 which means he was a teen at the height of the AIDS crisis, and was 20 years old in 1996 when Rent came to Broadway and the US saw a decrease in deaths for the first time after the exponential climb.
It was a scary time to be gay, and a scarier time to be out. There was incredible secrecy and shame to the diagnosis. People had to watch as their friends and family got impossibly sick, knowing it was a death sentence.
Luckily, that is no longer the world we live in. We live in a world where we know what HIV is and how to protect ourselves from it. Where medications mean HIV is a condition and not a sentence. Where PreP and Truvada mean protection from contracting the disease, and mean patients could carry a near zero viral load, so they don’t get sick or spread the disease to their partners.
We face a new epidemic today, a pandemic actually, but we can’t forget our history. The last epidemic we faced decimated one segment of the population in particular and so people were left to deal with it alone, or, if they were lucky, with their found families. It was ignored, treated as a punishment, got no funding or public awareness campaigns, until it did. We shouldn’t forget.
Supernatural so often dabbles in the flirty side of queer coding. We pass GIFs of Dean checking out army dudes, or Crowley making amazing one liners. I think that Steve Yockey, though, slipped one by us, past the network, past the general audience, and told another side of the story, of the experience, of being queer in America that would have been experienced a bit more by someone Dean’s age, or more so a bit older.
Was this intentional? A case of an effect of growing up during a crisis worming it way into your writing without realizing it? Not actually in the episode at all?
At this point I think that yes, Yockey intended it.
But I want to hear what you think so please share your thoughts.
