What I hate the most about Superwholock fandom bloggers: they flip out when ½ of their creepy fetishised gay ship has a relationship with a woman. “No! John/Castiel/The Doctor can’t be with Mary/Meg/Rose! He loves Sherlock/Dean/Captain Jack!!” Well, mewling infants, I have some news for you. A. bisexuality exists. It’s bi erasure and plain ol’ misogyny to say that your character could never ever be bi even though he’s had relationships with women and then to shit talk any woman he’s been with. B. ship whatever you want but your ship is not canon and never will be. Ever. Yeah there was that time captain jack kissed the doctor and we were all overjoyed but tbh that was the punchline of a bad joke. And all that shitty queerbaiting in Sherlock is going to remain just that: queerbaiting. So get over it.
((C. All three of these shows are misogynistic, have absolutely no representation, and are just poorly written. Moffat can eat a bag of dicks.))
Except…Captain Jack’s kissing the Doctor wasn’t the punchline of a bad joke?! Not remotely? I mean – this was a scene written by a gay man of a bi/pansexual man played by a gay man kissing another man. It was the first gay kiss in Doctor Who’s history (and remains still only one of two, sadly). It was one of very few gay kisses on British TV to be broadcast before the watershed and on a then explicitly ‘family’ show, and was written and acted specifically to undermine the concept of bisexuality being a joke:
“I thought that’s it, however I kiss Rose, I have to kiss him [the Doctor] in exactly the same way…I kiss them basically with the same tenderness. So it wasn’t like a kiss of ‘I finally get to kiss them’, it was a kiss of ‘I really care for you, I love you deeply and I have to say goodbye.” [John Barrowman, Doctor Who Confidential 1×13]
I won’t think too hard about your motivations for labelling that ‘the punchline to a bad joke’ – it’ll break my brain – but on the subject of whether Doctor/Jack was canon (as opposed to ‘a creepy fetishised gay ship’), it was, albeit one-sidedly: Jack flirts with the Doctor [Boomtown], speaks to him tenderly, cups his face and kisses him on the lips [The Parting Of The Ways; see above], and sympathetizes with Martha’s unrequited love for the Doctor with a ‘you too, huh?’ [The Sound Of Drums]. No, they weren’t in a official romantic relationship, but it certainly wasn’t a platonic relationship either. All those episodes were written by Russell T Davies, who is gay, as I mentioned before. His motivation for creating Jack was:
‘It’s time you introduce bisexuals properly into mainstream television” [source]
And Jack’s reactions to the Doctor – the flirting, the kiss – were a big part of that. So –
-I have no idea why everyone’s so up for erasing his importance these days. There are negative aspects to his portrayal, negative aspects to his creators and negative aspects to his fans – but, er…
…even if you accept the premise that a disproportionate amount of Doctor Who fandom is pushing Rose aside in favour of Doctor/Jack, otherwise erasing his bi/pansexuality, or treating Rose as a threat or an irritant (ten pages into the Doctor x Jack tag and I’ve still got nothing) – this post still doesn’t make any sense with regards to actual representation and fandom’s reactions to it! Bloody hell, the Doctor/Jack kiss wasn’t that long ago! How the hell are people finding it ‘a joke’ already?!