It is well-known that in the original conception of the TV series Supernatural, road-tripping monster-hunting brothers Sam & Dean Winchester are inspired by road-tripping beatniks Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, who themselves were based on Kerouac and his real-life friend Neal Cassidy.
To my delight, the Tik Tok algorithm has decided that I am a lesbian nerd, so I recently stumbled across a clip arguing that Dean’s bisexuality in On The Road bled into his Supernatural counterpart even before (some of) the show’s production team decided to lean into fans’ enthusiasm for reading Dean that way. The Tok further speculates that this was a big part of why there was so much “Wincest” fanfic about a romance between the brothers starting very early on: actors Jared & Jensen had great screen chemistry, Dean’s bisexuality is Just There, and Dean didn’t have a standing love interest because the show wanted him to be a ramblin’ man, so fans with a taste for slash fiction (non-canonical gay romance, created by and for women fans) just took the next step on the love Dean had already demonstrated, just as they had done when creating the first slashfic about Kirk & Spock.
I said “(some of) the show’s production team” above because for the entire fifteen-year run they were divided about how to respond to queer readings by fans. Some of the team fought against it, others enthusiastically embraced it. Episodes oscillate between deliberate homophobia and the Xena: Warrior Princess thing of maxxing out the Subtext it could fold in while maintaing plausible deniability.
That Tok creator also speculates that the character of Anna The Fallen Angel Who Loves Dean was an attempt to neutralize queer readings by providing the missing love interest for Dean. It didn’t work; either Anna wasn’t compelling enough on the merits (I had forgotten that she existed!) or the audience refused to accept him loving a girl that much. The show abandoned Anna, figuring whaddaya know, it did have another angel on hand whom the audience did like. Castiel got Anna’s planned storyline, minus the explicit romance … but the romance tropes were still there in the story, leading to infinite “Destiel” fanfic.
Persuasive.
That got me thinking about my favorite passage from On The Road, in which Carlo Marx, based on the very gay poet Allen Ginsberg, joins the story:
⋯ And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes — the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn’t keep up with them.
[⋯]
They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. “Now, Carlo, let me speak — here’s what I’m saying …” I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.
I doubt that anyone on the Supernatural production team ever connected Castiel to Carlo, but now I cannot un-see it.
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