Listen… Dean Winchester doesn’t think he’s straight
I agree that Dean knows he’s attracted to men, he’s probably even slept with plenty of them. But it’s also possible that Dean doesn’t believe he’s gay or bi.
I obviously can’t speak for him because I’m not writing the show, but let me tell you, I have lived my entire life as a bi person and didn’t realize that the attraction I had to the same sex made me a real life gay until this year. It’s not something I actively squished down either. I just didn’t think about it much until it hit me over the head that I was ignoring another side of myself.
Sexuality is complicated and there is a reason that Dean isn’t out and proud. His biggest problem has always been that he denies himself happiness because he’s always worrying about everyone else. Selflessness has kept him in the closest just as much as shame.
I mean, this is real for sure, but there’s also an important difference between not thinking or realizing you’re queer and thinking that you’re straight.
Dean has self-confessedly felt like a ‘freak’ his entire life on more levels than one, so thinking that he’s straight is likely a privilege he never had, regardless of who he’s felt attraction toward or had sex with. He was barely an adult when he canonically flirted with cross-dressing as a sexual fetish. I think Marghe is right in that he’s never thought he was straight, what ever he did think of himself. Because straightness does impliy things above and beyond heterosexuality, of a non-deviant, unquestioned normative status, you know. The stuff of privilege.
I agree with both of you. I don’t think Dean thinks he’s straight.
The reason I replied to this post in the first place (which I should’ve clarified) was because I didn’t agree with @postmodernmulticoloredcloak ‘s tags
the interpretation of him as repressed or in denial is getting more and more grating to me that boy knows his shit okay dean is bi spn
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Dean isn’t in some form of denial or that he isn’t repressing part of his identity (which is why I think it’s possible that he doesn’t apply bi/gay labels to himself-yet). I mean, performing!Dean exists for a reason. If denial/repression wasn’t an issue we would see a much more open Dean.
Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted what you really meant @postmodernmulticoloredcloak. I know we’ve discussed Dean’s struggle with performing, toxic-masculinity and internalized homophobia before.
Yeah sorry I didn’t elaborate on that, in the tags I was referring to interpretations of Dean as so deep in denial that he is convinced he’s straight, and that kind of vision is kinda grating to me because that’s not Dean’s character. Dean has built up this entire system of façades and performances because he knows what he is (re: sexuality and many other things) and because he knows, he knows what to hide and how. I hope I’m making sense because I’m not functioning much tonight lol.
My interpretation of Dean is that he’s muuuuch more aware than most part of the fandom seems to give him credit for, and as I always say that’s the tragedy of Dean, that he chooses to sacrifice emotional needs he knows he has for self-preservation and family-preservation, so to speak. And there’s also that aspect of self-deprecation @f-ckyeahfutbol has pointed out which I think it’s all connected, he self-deprecates because he knows he has emotional/sexual/whatever needs that make him a freak in the context of the cultural and mental frame he’s grown up in. So yeah I think he’s been quite self-aware since day 1. I see his journey more about self-acceptance than self-discovery tbh, while is Sam’s case there’s a process of self-discovery and Dean-discovery so to speak.
Dean may not have been up to date with the latest elaborations of queer theory in 2005 and he may not be up to date with the latest elaborations of queer theory now, but he has had a journey of connecting with queer people with various different experiences (look at who has shown or taught Dean about hacking stuff throughout the show. Could hacking be a metaphor? Yes I think so.) and I’m not sure where I was going with this exactly but yeah, I believe that Dean knows his shit, he simply has self-preservation mechanisms deeply ingrained and he’s basically fighting a silent fight against them.
I think identity construction and especially queer identity construction is an interesting question and @aslightsgoflashing brings up important points. While Dean Winchester clearly has some knowledge of non-mainstream queer culture, the environment he was brought up in is far from ideal for the construction of a strong identity of any kind – something that we saw him struggling with in main text in the early seasons. I’ve written before about how I think meeting Charlie Bradbury was something that started him on the journey of constructing an actual queer identity, but how far along that road he is still remains open.
As an aside, I had a conversation with my partner when we were starting to date about when we knew we were queer, and they introduced the topic of conversation with “Well, that’s always the kind of thing you ask another queer person, isn’t it?“ We all have a… journey, and for ourselves we write a story about it.
But I was actually thinking about all the other connotations of ‘straight’ when I first saw Marghe’s post, and something about that is still trying to take form in my mind. Dean Winchester fancies himself a renegade, took much joy in being counter-culture, explictly said that he’d rather be a part of the Munsters rather than main-stream society. With no regard to his sexuality at all, I find it difficult to reconcile with his character that he would ever have thought of himself as any manner of straight just because bucking the system was his way of dealing with the burden placed on him.