I see your false equivalency.
Furthermore, on the note of this post:
Yesterday, an interviewer in a national publication essentially suggested Charlie Bradbury, the only recurring queer character on the show, should convert, by saying they ship this lesbian with a male character, Castiel.
This interviewer then decontextualized the joking "heh yeah” of an actor the queer community trusts--for the most part, and erased his disagreement, his then adding no, Charlie wouldn’t, and by extension, she shouldn’t.
That left much of the queer community feeling very upset and abandoned by someone we trust. We felt alone again, isolated, distanced from someone we value as an idol and a person. Some of us were compelled to wonder if he even cared about us after all, and it made us a little aggressive, asking him.
The relief that swept through many of us was palpable, when he confirmed our trust was not misplaced, because no, he does not agree Charlie should convert.
Yet, people are, as we speak, talking about how they’d like to convert Charlie, to ship her with Castiel, following the oppressive, erasive institutional lead, in order to void both a single queer character and a queerbaited pairing being romanticized in subtext for several seasons. They see no problem with this.
They are then comparing this to the phenomenon of people shipping Dean with Castiel--of calling for the queerbaiting of this ship to cease with a textual resolution that allows these characters to stop repressing for the sake of institutional heterosexism, claiming that Charlie is repressing being straight, as though that is ever a thing. As though therapy exists to convert straight people.
Note how our queering Dean did not commence in a manner with institutional strength behind it. Note how “straight-washing” happens on a hugely powerful, publicized, socially acceptable and even societally condoned scale. Note that straight people are oppressing queer people, and erasing us, and our allies, is part of that--part of the way they isolate us and make us feel unwanted so we will, as mentioned, convert. Note how that’s the difference, the stark difference; most rebellions against that oppression, any facet of it, are never equal to it.
Note how people who compare these with any seriousness are full of shit, and every time they ignore that conversion therapy goes beyond the therapist’s office, that it’s a society-wide thing that includes homophobic propagandizing via media representation (to which queer people show the finger, by demanding ‘baiting result in text), they’re on the side of conversion therapists. And if you agree with them, you’re walking that line too.
