'Dexter' Villa Ray Stevenson: My Character Was a Gay Mobster, Not a Deviant

In morn media, characters whose sexualy li outsi of bary genr and sexualy reprentatns are few and far between. Most queer characters mastream Amerin televisn are labeled as eher gay or lbian, and a few rare s bisexual. Bisexualy, while least visible among sexual mori that f wh the prcribed LGBT acronym, is most visible outsi of the gay/straight dichotomy. Meanwhile the spectm of non-bary sexuali is largely ignored. In this say I will exame one character that breaks this mold and forc the morn viewer to nsir non-bary sexualy, Dean Craig Pelton of NBC/Yahoo’s Communy. The an is known for his somewhat flamboyant personaly, and throughout the seri his sexualy is revealed slowly, through small piec of rmatn that seem to ht, pecially at first, that Dean Pelton is gay. At first glance this may seem like the tired trope of “dg” a character as gay orr to appeal to queer dienc whout alienatg ls acceptg viewers. However, Craig Pelton is not merely d gay. What mak the an different is the fact that while his sexualy go unlabeled, he is still addrsed outright as non-heterosexual. Over the urse of the show Pelton reveals sexual tert men and women, and mak several statements that place him somewhere outsi of bary sexualy. In this paper I will show how Dean Pelton breaks new ground for sexualy polics televisn by challengg viewers’ unrstandg of what means to be queer.