Spoilers ahead for the shows 9-1-1 and Supernatural.
What does a show about firefighters have in common with a show about hunting monsters and fighting God? According to fans, both shows have a main bisexual male character who’s in love with his single-dad best friend. The difference? The firefighter is canonically gay, and the hunter is dead.
Last Thursday, season 7, episode 4 of the ABC show 9-1-1 aired. I’ve never watched the show before, but when I logged online and saw fans screaming about their favorite character Buck, I investigated. The episode is a Bachelor crossover, following Buck’s jealousy as his friend Eddie grows close to an ex-firefighter Tommy. The episode culminates with Tommy kissing Buck, a moment that was clipped and shared to millions of views.
And it wasn’t just 9-1-1 fans getting in on the action, but fans of the CW show Supernatural. Why? Well, Buck is a rugged player with a penchant for saving people and a friendship with Eddie, the single father of a young boy. Supernatural’s Dean is a compassionate, flirty, flannel-wearing monster hunter with a “weird dorky little guy” (his words, not mine) angel friend Castiel who’s the adoptive father to an Antichrist son. Both pairings have been a big subject of shipping, a fan term for thinking characters should date. These pairings are known as “Buddie” and “Deancas” respectively. Once fans started making the connections, it only spiraled from there.
Supernatural fans were vocal not just for the similarities, but also the differences. Let’s compare. The relationship between Dean and Cas peaks in episode 15×18 “Despair”. Castiel sacrifices himself to save Dean, which requires him to come out and proclaim his love for Dean. With tears in his eyes, he says “The one thing I want…it’s something I know I can’t have”. Then Castiel is promptly dragged to hell. Despair indeed. Conveniently, this quick departure also allows the writers to sloppily sidestep what this means for Dean’s sexuality (Although some fans swear that he reciprocates in the Spanish dub). They never discuss the confession again, even when Dean anticlimactically dies in the finale. Despair. Reactions were understandably mixed.
Comparing these episodes and the audience reactions is difficult without discussing certain tropes. “Bury-Your-Gays” refers to the trope in which queer characters are viewed by writers as more expendable than cisgender/heterosexual characters. Often, a character will come out and die before they can fulfill their storyline. This can be traced back to the infamous 1930s Hays Code, a set of guidelines created to censor scandalous subjects in film (read: gay people).
Another result of the Hays Code was the influx of subtext and coding, which is a way to tell stories while bypassing censorship, trusting that a queer audience will ‘get it’. However, recently, another form of this has emerged known as queerbaiting. As it became more fashionable to market queer storylines, many showrunners played up the chemistry between same-gender characters to tease unfulfilled representation. In response to this, fanbases may call out queerbaiting, but get dismissed. Queer people are often only perceived as representation when directly addressed as so.
Some people might argue that Supernatural queerbaited, while others might say that the one-sided confession was the network submitting to fan pressure. Meanwhile, many 9-1-1 fans feel very happy and vindicated. As writer Tim Minear said, “It’s 2024. I didn’t want to make it the bravest episode of 1983.”
We have yet to see if ABC will pull through on a Buck-Eddie relationship, but they’ve already committed more by embracing complex queer characters and not immediately killing them. The next episode shows Buck and Tommy enjoying a lovely date, so hopefully we can look forward to more queer storylines in between cruise liner crashes and Bachelor crossovers. The moral of the story? Don’t bury your gays, or else your fanbase will haunt other shows for all eternity.