Saw the Bishagate video for the 1st time & I think he knew exactly what he was saying...
I am a late comer to Supernatural & all the behind the scene 'drama'. Having read about 'Bishagate' on Tumblr, I was curious to see the actual video where Misha makes his infamous 'I am all 3 statement'. I was expecting it to show him stumbling over his words & blurting out 'bisexual' by mistake (when in fact he meant to use a word such as 'ambivert'). But the video shows that this was no 'misspeaking'! he purposely uses the word 'bisexual' then pauses for effect to give the audience time to catch up with what he has just said, he looks a bit nervous and seems to be breathing heavily the smiles then says 'I am all 3''. He then uses the term bisexual AGAIN shortly after and says that it would have been weird of him to ask the audience about how many of them were bisexual from the start so he (bizarrely) chose to start with asking them about being introvert/extrovert... I mean WTF? how did so many people in the fandom/media actually believe & accept for a second his explanation that this was 'accidental' slip of the tongue, that things were 'out of context' and that he never meant to use the term 'bisexual'. He absolutely used bisexual on purpose and knew exactly what he was saying... So the only explanations I can think of for this mess is that he ever thought it was ''funny'' to pretend to be/joke about being bisexual to get some attention/publicity which is rather crappy (I am queer & I really don't appreciate that type of 'jokes') or he really meant what he said and for whatever reason decided to get back in the closet. Neither options are actually showing him in a great light & I find all this rather disappointing. I will continue to love the Castiel character but being asked to swallow this nonsense by the actor who plays him is not happening because it defies all logic when you watch the actual footage. The statement that Misha then put out on social media is also problematic because it starts with a claim that is simply not true: ''My clumsy intention was to wave off actually discussing my sexuality''. Again the video footage contradicts this. A fan asked a question about the Covid lockdowns and what Misha had learned about himself during that period which leads him to saying he discovered he was more of an extrovert than he thought. The fan's question made no reference to sexuality. Misha brings up bisexuality out of the blue, you can even hear someone in the audience say 'where did that come from?'. So if a statement starts with a lie, it is hard to then read anything else that it contains as truthful. Celebrities, like anyone else, don't owe others details about their sexuality but they do have a responsibility not to appropriate queerness as a marketing tool if they are not queer or to treat it as a joke. SPN has a long history of queer baiting and Misha should know better than to continue that sorry tradition. On the other hand if the reason for this mess was that he felt uncomfortable with the attention he received and decided to backtrack then that's incredibly sad. I also think that him claiming the network asked him to continue to pretend to be bi is misleading: instead it is very likely that their PR people pointed out that he had dug a rather large hole for himself and that the best way was to keep quiet, let the media interest die down & decline to comment further on his sexuality from then on. Because there was no way PR-wise that Misha could avoid a negative backlash if he had to admit that this was yet another queer-baiting stunt from him/he thought that joking about being bisexual was appropriate. This would also have brought the SPN existing queer baiting/homophobia issues under the spotlight and bring in more bad publicity for the network. To conclude I wish I had just continued to enjoy Supernatural, flawed, geeky but still funny & often moving, rather than look into the behind the scene (the conventions drama, the questionable behaviour/statements made by some of the actors) because it coloured the show negatively for me after that.
