15x20 Carry On - The Beautiful Room is Empty
Edmund White’s novel of that name, is about growing up gay in 1950s America. It ends with the protagonist and his lover at the Stonewall riots. But, when they check the morning papers the next day, after their momentous experiences from the night before, there is no mention of those queer events in the news.
So it goes… comrades, veterans in the subtextual trenches of Supernatural.
Was it bold to dream that the rubber horror mask could be ripped off, to fully reveal the queer romance between an Angel of the Lord and the outward embodiment of nostalgic, alienated, rebel road-trip, all-American masculinity?
It was, my dear queers and fellow-traveller dreamers. It was.
That holy blasphemy may have had its tongue cut out; it may not appear in the papers, but those of us who were there? We lived it; we will always have lived it.
And so, Dabb tells us, (by means of a final mirror-monster) - more than a hundred years after the Wilde trials, there is, still, a love that dare not speak its name, in a Biblical fan-fiction genre-show, about heroic, monster-killing brothers-in-arms.
But what lies beneath, in that place of narrative in-dwelling which we have haunted in this story together?
Beneath the rubber mask, is another, familiar, monstrous visage. The final villain is a vampire; that rich repository of sublimated queerness in gothic fiction, since Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Dean tells us that the masks are, “Bad Wes Craven porn.”
Scream (1996) is a metanarrative text which invites us to reflect on the conventions of the genre it draws from.
In my wish-list for the finale, I wanted a quote from Kerouac’s On the Road.
The entire episode is a quote from On the Road.
If Supernatural is a metanarrative text about masculine American road-trip mythology, which Kerouac burned into the consciousness of Boomer rebel youth; then, sublimated homoeroticism is the prima materia of the romance of homosocial bonding, in the masculine frontiers of the American imagination.
Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, holy bums on the open road.
Sam’s sweet hetero life is a hazy mirage with a nameless, faceless woman on the porch.
While Dean waits on a parallel porch at Harvelle’s, in the New Heaven, for both his true loves to return to him.
Dean: “It’s almost perfect…”
Bobby: “He’ll be along…”
The doubling structure, inherent in the Supernatural narrative to The End, allows the audience to choose which, “he”; Castiel or Sam.
Sam is the surface text reading, because we see the Winchester brothers reunited in Heaven, at last.
Castiel, who became queer subtext half-manifested, in his “coming out” speech in 15x18, must remain in the final fan-fiction gap.
Love and…. love.
In Heaven, the heart is a lonely hunter.
This is a queer story written in the old language (visible to some, invisible to others, by design) and so, it contains old pain.
If you speak your queer truth, the emptiness will come for you.
Beat God and the Devil, but you can’t, really, truly, escape your (queer) trauma; death becomes you.
The glass closet remains.
But we must remember that queer poets are freer than queer television writers.
So, I’ll close, not with Kerouac (also subject to the censor’s pen) but with Ginsburg’s Howl:
“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…
…who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim”
These are the words I found, for now.
Don’t despair; this story, still, belongs to us.
