“"Dean’s story was a coming out story in many ways, but it wasn’t him coming out to the audience. It was the audience coming out from its own preconceptions about what it understood or expected of queerness and masculinity in the first place." #deanisbi (1) https://t.co/nxo5eX3edo”
I will literally be talking about this for the rest of my life.
#deanisbi on Twitter but I’m bringing it here too...
“...Dean Winchester is a rare character in popular media, let alone queer media. This is someone we got to see grow over fifteen years, watching his psychology and relationships explored and developed consistently over what, for some fans even, was nearly a lifetime— this is remarkable for any character, and nearly nonexistent with regard to queer representation.
A character introduced beneath a veil of superficial masculinity, whose complexity is gradually teased out year by year as he grapples with guilt, shame, self-hatred, and the overwhelming responsibility to live and die for a punishing father and god. Who slowly learns to overcome those expectations, to choose who he wants to be and accept that his love is not wrong, his vulnerability is not shameful, his life is his own. It is a meaningful journey, and it is clear why it is so immensely resonant for queer audiences. The idea that you can be all of these things, that you can survive all of these things, and still come out the other side whole and strong. That you can come out the other side and be loved. It is a narrative that is rarely granted to queer characters.
Moreover, seeing this play out for a blue-collar, bisexual Gen X man, a rough monster-hunter who loves hugs and Scooby Doo pajamas, whose identity and its expression are not at odds with one another but all simply part of who he is? This bisexual man finding romantic love in his forties? Name five characters off the top of your head, right now.
Dean began as an archetype enmeshed in the shadows of Dean Moriarty and Han Solo, simultaneously queer and forced into conventions of hypermasculinity that tried desperately to convince the audience and the characters themselves who Dean was supposed to be and what he was supposed to want. Dean’s journey as a character to redefine these foundations reflects his journey as a person— authenticity’s victory over a prescribed performance. Integrating who you choose to be with what rings true to your soul, to define what that means to you and use this definition to claim space.
Dean’s story was a coming out story in many ways, but it wasn’t him coming out to the audience. It was the audience coming out from its own preconceptions about what it understood or expected of queerness and masculinity in the first place.
This is incredibly meaningful, even cut short and undermined by his powerless death and silent departure. Dean Winchester is, and will always be, representative and validating to those who connect with his journey and see themselves in him. He is a queer character— not just queer-coded, not subtextually queer. Dean is a bisexual character by any reasonable standard of media analysis. But one can’t help but reflect on how much greater his impact would have been if he’d been allowed to answer Castiel’s “I love you”, if his story had ended the way it had obviously built toward, if the themes of the story at large had been permitted to carry through. Had he been allowed to choose, finally, what he wanted. Had he gotten to live a life, unapologetically and peacefully realized in the identity he had fought for.
Who, among the audience, would have gotten to live along with him?
...What a statement it would have been for Supernatural to not only embrace Dean and Castiel for everything they were, but to reward them for it. Who deserves a happy ending, who can be a lead character, what queerness can look like, what identities have a place in self-enforced “masculine” or cis-heterosexual spaces.
What love can overcome.
Or, as we were reminded, what it can’t.”
-Supernatural and the Trap of Queer Tragedy
