#i would like this to be longer but i also already included a sedgwick quote

[steveyockey]

you've talked in the past about whether dean is aware that he's in love with cas, and i was just wondering if you think he's aware that he's gay/bi? i feel like he has to know on some level. also i am curious about whether you read him as gay or bisexual? but i understand that answering that might start discourse so feel free to ignore that question lol

I think dean, if he has had sex with men, thinks he’s a guy who has sex with men. if he did it for money, he definitely thinks he’s a guy who has sex with men for money. if he fucked benny in purgatory, he was a horny guy effectively in a warzone. I don’t think, in any case, whether he has had sex with men before (I respect fic or headcanons around pre-series boyfriends or late series experimentation, just like, for the sake of keeping this ‘canonical,’ I would say he hasn’t aside from possibly hooking) or felt anything towards any man before cas (alternately the show does nothing to suggest he hasn’t had crushes on men and everything to suggest he has had many crushes on men, mostly unattainable men or in passing so he doesn’t really have the chance to actually understand what those feelings mean) he’s going to process his attraction to men as anything aside from a) bromance/appreciation or b) a slur any time before the confession. on some level he’s aware it means he’s a faggot, but the dude is a repression machine. there’s eight or ten lines of reasoning going on in his brain about how he’s not gay he just enjoys cowboys and john wayne and hanging out with his best buddy, or he is in love with cas but it’s not a gay thing, or he’s in love with cas and it’s a gay thing but he’s not gonna let it be a gay thing which is basically the same thing as it not being a gay thing. it’s not like, a conscious process. there’s a bit in sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet (audience groans) where she’s talking about john marcher of henry james’s the beast in the jungle and basically says marcher’s secret isn’t that he’s gay, but that he has a secret that he might be gay; he’s not closeted because being closeted would require a perception of the self as the thing the self cannot be. “it is not a closet in which there is a homosexual man, for marcher is not a homosexual man. instead, it is the closet of, simply, the homosexual secret—the closet of imagining a homosexual secret. yet it is unmistakable that marcher lives as one who is in the closet.” and so it is unmistakable that dean lives as one who is in the closet.

after the confession is up for grabs on this. he could come out to sam literally the next day and I don’t think it would be that off base as part of his grieving process. probably more likely that it would take a while for him to really accept being a member of the lgbt community, even after rescuing or being reunited with cas, and he still might never give himself a specific label. confidently identifying as a guy who likes dudes in and of itself would be a big deal for him, as it is for like, anyone trying to understanding their sexuality. which probably sounds like I’m dodging the last question and maybe I am but honestly cas is The One for him and I don’t think he’ll ever work through all the messy baggage around the way he has coached himself to have sex with women as a coping mechanism, so it doesn’t actually matter a ton whether people online think he’s one or the other and a lot of the reason anyone thinks any character is any sexuality is because they share that sexuality or they have some configuration in their head they are trying to match. perfectly reasonable! I’m just tapping out of that.

#love the idea just anything i say could kick off a round of discourse #anon #answered #spn #i would like this to be longer but i also already included a sedgwick quote #so i've done enough damage today