#the only jally I don’t like is like ‘older brother dally and younger brother johnny’

[boysborntodie]

When I say I ship Jally, I don’t mean they have to be romantically involved. To me, they’re each other’s person(tm). They’re truly in love, and it doesn’t matter if itself romantic or platonic or anything. They’re just everything to each other<333

[writersriot]

The Outsiders Queer Subtext ft. Jally - Part 1

Sunday, January 8, 2017

This is the start of my series looking at queer subtext in The Outsiders, mostly focusing on Johnny and Dally. Some of it will be character-focused, some of it will look at the interpersonal relationships of the gang, and some of it will be about what goes unsaid.

I was twelve when I first read The Outsiders on my own. It deeply influenced the types of characters and stories I love to read and write about. I think Johnny/Dally was one of my first queer ships. I see a lot of their characteristics in many of my other ships, too. They are important to me in a way that is unlike any other queer ship. I’ll try to explain why throughout this series, but I don’t know how successful I’ll be -- if I can even put it into words.

This won’t be organized thematically or anything because I’m not that organized of a person, honestly. This will just be me picking out specific parts to talk about and sharing my love for these boys as I go through the book for the billionth time. I have at least 80 separate notes, some of which I might combine if they are short enough. My aim is to post at least twice a week, which would have me finish sometime in October. 

Lol I’m in it for the long haul. I hope you’ll be with me, sharing all your feelings and opinions and analyses as well. Let’s do this thing.

All quotes are taken from the 2008 edition from Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group. Because even though I have three different versions of the book, this was the one I chose to take notes in. It looks like this:

So let’s jump into it with the description of Dallas Winston, shall we?

If I had to pick the real character of the gang, it would be Dallas Winston -- Dally. I used to like to draw his picture when he was in a dangerous mood, for then I could get his personality down in a few lines. He had an elfish face, with high cheekbones and a pointed chin, small sharp animal teeth, and ears like a lynx. His hair was almost white it was so blond, and he didn’t like haircuts, or hair oil either, so it fell over his forehead in wisps and kicked out in the back in tufts and curled behind his ears and along the nape of his neck. His eyes were blue, blazing ice, cold with a hatred of the whole world. Dally had spent three years on the wild side of New York and had been arrested at the age of ten. He was tougher than the rest of us -- tougher, colder, meaner. The shade of difference that separates a greaser from a hood wasn’t present in Dally. He was as wild as the boys in the downtown outfits, like Tim Shepard’s gang.

In New York, Dally blew off steam in gang fights, but here, organized gangs are rarities -- there are just small bunches of friends who stick together, and the warfare is between the social classes. [...] So Dally, even though he could get into a good fight sometimes, had no specific thing to hate. No rival gang. Only Socs. And you can’t win against them no matter how hard you try, because they’ve got all the breaks and even whipping them isn’t going to change that fact. Maybe that was why Dallas was so bitter.

He had quite the reputation. They have a file on him down at the police station. He had been arrested, he got drunk, he rode in rodeos, lied, cheated, stole, rolled drunks, jumped small kids -- he did everything. I didn’t like him, but he was smart and you had to respect him. (Pg 10-11)

First off, I love this description. I feel you, Pony, cause just hearing about Dally makes me itch to draw him. He’s described to look so different compared to the other boys, and I get the feeling Pony doesn’t find Dally attractive at all, considering the way he waxed poetic about his brother Soda being movie star handsome.

But honestly? Dally is described the way a number of leading men in fiction have been recently -- granted mostly in supernatural genres where the guy might be a faerie or vampire or what have you. He sounds ethereal and maybe a little odd-looking to be considered attractive for the time period. But since Dally is likely 17 here, I figure he would grow into those looks and probably be like the models we see around now. That’s what comes to my mind, anyway.

So, Dally is the ultimate bad boy to me. When I think of a bad boy in fiction, he is the first to pop up probably because he is my first experience with that character type. He is described as dangerous, wild, with a cold hatred of the world. Sounds like my favorite type of character. Because he is also damaged and vulnerable, and that gets me every time.

His outward behavior is a survival mechanism Dally needed to utilize since he was a kid. That’s unfortunate and terrible, and thinking about it hurts my heart. Dally is one of the younger members of the gang, but he acts like the meanest and toughest because he learned he had to be that person in order to survive. I think he learned much of the other bad and wild behavior from older boys he ran with starting back in New York. It’s kind of that mentality of, well the world won’t look out for me, so I’m going to take whatever I can for myself. And he has street smarts, for which he’s respected even if a kid like Pony doesn’t like him.

This rough, rebellious behavior is expected and learned from his circumstances, yet Dally -- much like the rest of the gang -- would rather the boys like Johnny and Pony not turn out to be as hard and cold as the rest of them and keep some of their innocence and kindness, which we’ll see examples of later in the book. That means as much as the tuff greaser lifestyle is at times idolized, it wouldn’t be what these boys would wish on other people.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This parallel I see for Dally (and the other greasers) learning to protect himself by breaking bad in the footsteps of others can be compared to trying to follow the heteronormative status quo, especially as a young queer person in the 60s at the time of this book. It’s an idea I’ll look at more closely in other parts of the book.

Okay, that’s kind of it for now. Next part, I’ll be looking at Johnny’s introduction. 

Let me know what you guys think about Dally’s description and how you feel about his character.