On Buffy The Vampire Slayer, characters could be queer and supernatural
Buffy’s bisexual vampire foursome the Whirlwind is just as significant to its depictions of queerness as Willow and Tara
Image: Graphic: Allison Corr TV Features Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Nearly 25 years since its debut in 1997, Buffy The Vampire Slayer remains one of the most celebrated series when it comes to early depictions of queerness on television. When lesbian witches Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara (Amber Benson) first kissed in “The Body”, it marked the beginning of one of the first long-term lesbian relationships on American TV. Though the debate rages on about whether or not Willow and Tara make for good representation, the prevalence of queer characters on Buffy The Vampire Slayer sets it apart from many of its contemporaries. Even non-canon couples like Faith (Eliza Dushku) and Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) have ardent sects of fan support, and make for compelling allegorical examples of the queer experience—a narrative mostly unexplored by the vast majority of its contemporaries.
But while discussions abound about the strides for lesbian visibility made by Buffy The Vampire Slayer, many academic and fan conversations surrounding queerness and representation on the show often neglect to mention the four queer characters who made up the Whirlwind. Composed of Angel (David Boreanaz), Spike (James Marsters), Darla (Julie Benz), and Drusilla (Juliet Landau), the Whirlwind was a quartet of mischief-making bloodsuckers who put a twist on the longstanding tradition of using vampirism as code for queerness. Crucially, though, the vamps on Buffy aren’t just coded as queer— they’re canonically bisexual. Darla and Dru even had a threesome with The Immortal in Angel’s “The Girl In Question.” That revelation is either ignored by fans or simply unknown to more casual viewers because of how little fanfare their bisexuality garners over the course of the series. Despite falling into some unfortunate cliches in horror and fantasy media, the Buffyverse’s presentations of vampire sexuality offered early examples of queerness being treated with the kind of casualness that most queer couples aren’t afforded in modern media.
Many authors have opted to use science-fiction and horror/fantasy elements to queer-code their characters, masking them beneath “otherness” and spectacle to throw mainstream readers off the scent, while still being recognizably queer enough to appeal to LGBTQ+ audiences. Authors and filmmakers have used every creature from cat people to shapeshifting aliens to code characters as queer, but no other sci-fi, horror, or fantasy creature has such notorious and longstanding ties to queerness as the vampire. Beginning with Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampiress Carmilla, continuing on through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and skyrocketing in popularity with Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire and the subsequent film adaption, the queer-coded vampire is a staple of early LGBTQ+ characterization. But Buffy The Vampire Slayer takes the coding out of the equation entirely and presents audiences with four bisexual vampires, an updated but imperfect approach to queer characters in horror and fantasy.
It’s worth noting that all of the major LGBTQ+ characters on Buffy The Vampire Slayer are “others” in some capacity—Willow and Tara are witches, Kennedy is a Slayer, and, of course, the four members of The Whirlwind are all vampires. The choice to make only non-human characters canonically queer carries on the tradition of using mysticism as code for queerness; on Buffy, characters are allowed to be both supernatural and queer.
Where Tara and Willow’s sexuality is explored with tender care and depth, the Whirlwind’s queerness is almost entirely referenced in off-handed comments and casual remarks—a fact of everyday life for vampires as opposed to a revelatory breakthrough. Even before they’re united onscreen, it’s established that the Whirlwind has a notorious reputation for wreaking havoc across the globe and having lots of kinky sex along the way. Throughout the series, Spike and Angel walk in on Drusilla and Darla having sex, Spike makes reference to having been “intimate” with Angel, and the quartet is implied to have enjoyed many an orgy during their time terrorizing Europe. The Whirlwind’s quiet, but unmistakable bisexuality was basically confirmed by series creator Joss Whedon, who said in a DVD commentary track:
“I’ve never seen a more intense or beautiful romance. We finally found the right girl for Angel, and I’m sort of kidding… They were hanging out for years and years and years and years. They were all kinds of deviant, they were vampires. Are we thinking they never…? Come on people, I’m just saying. I’m just saying. They’re open-minded guys. They may be evil, but they’re not bigoted or close-minded.”
This informal attitude towards queer vampires persists throughout the series. It’s generally understood, both in the context of the show and among fans, that most if not all vampires are sexually fluid. Even straight-as-an-arrow Harmony (Mercedes McNab) starts musing about threesomes with Spike and Charlize Theron after she’s turned. But the two characters most often at the center of this discussion are Spike and Angel. Though most of the conversation surrounding Spike and Angel revolves around who’s a better match for Buffy, to analyze their relationship with each other solely through their respective relationships with the Slayer is to ignore the history the vampires share. Spike and Drusilla are introduced as a pair and remain that way for the majority of the show’s modern-day scenes, yet Spike and Angel share their own electric connection. Their first encounter is so steamy (literally), it establishes a near-instant bond between the two, who rampage together for the next few decades. It’s implied in Angel’s fifth-season episode “Power Play” that, during this time, Angelus and Spike had an intense physical relationship alongside their deadly cavorting, which adds context to the tension between them once they reunite in the early seasons of Buffy.
Homoerotic “bromances” and rivalries are certainly nothing new to TV (especially teen dramas). But in the case of Angel and Spike, their history and chemistry are a significant part of their characterization—even canon, not fan-generated fervor—and their intense connection can easily be recontextualized as an epic, volatile, centuries-spanning love affair. On first (or second, or third) viewings of Buffy, though, it’s easy to miss the queerness of the show’s vampires entirely. Unlike the lesbians on Buffy, Angel, Spike, Drusilla, and Darla aren’t afforded the same painstaking care and season-long arcs exploring their sexualities. Of course, this is probably mostly due to the fact they’re villains and thus don’t often warrant the type of empathetic coming-out arcs heroes get, but the lack of fanfare surrounding their sexuality is an oxymoron of representation. They’re notable because they’re not notable.
For Spike, Angel, Drusilla, and Darla, queerness is just a fact, an element that frequently goes unmentioned, but isn’t invisible or forgotten. For all the fuss Buffy makes over Willow’s coming-out, the queerness of the Whirlwind is remarkable in its simplicity. They’re queer, everybody knows they’re queer, and that’s that. As wonderful as their casual queerness may be, the depiction of queer vampires on Buffy The Vampire Slayer has been criticized throughout the years. Such close and constant associations of queerness with depravity and villainy (what vampires represent in both the literal and allegorical sense on Buffy) reinforces negative stereotypes, particularly that queerness itself is inherently depraved or evil.
As ahead of its time as the casual depiction may have been, it’s hardly a perfect example of inclusivity, and raises questions about why the series was willing to put straight and lesbian sex scenes on TV, but not gay ones. Visibly bisexual characters, especially men, are far and few between even on modern TV, so it’s worth wondering why Buffy The Vampire Slayer didn’t give its male queer characters any sex scenes. The show certainly wasn’t prudish for its time; quite the opposite—Buffy spends nearly as much time hooking up with her revolving door of boyfriends as she does slaying, and once Tara and Willow get together, they’re treated to their fair share of magical sex scenes as well.
The way The Whirlwind is matter-of-factly presented as queer and then accepted as such without fuss from the rest of the show’s characters is still progressive for the time. Even Buffy herself “wigged” when Willow first came out to her. And, in 2020, Whedon revealed to Metro in that he was told he couldn’t make Willow bisexual because viewers might interpret bisexuality as a phase instead part of the character’s identity. Considering the sheer, unabashed amount of sexual tension between Angel and Spike, on both Buffy and Angel, the fact that both characters were bisexual leading men is remarkable. Willow and Tara will likely always remain the first couple that comes to mind when audiences think of LGBTQ+ representation in the Buffyverse, and for good reason—their onscreen visibility is a landmark for queerness on TV. But just as there’s more than one way to slay a vampire, there’s more than one way to portray queerness on television, and with The Whirlwind, Buffy The Vampire Slayer gave audiences a set of delicious, dastardly vampires whose bisexuality was a fact of (eternal) life.
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“raises questions about why the series was willing to put straight and lesbian sex scenes on TV, but not gay ones”I *really* think we know the answer to this one (and it’s not an indictment of Whedon alone).
90’s stuff, because this actually charted and got airplay. Gay men, ehh only when it comes to drag. To add: fuck off Katy Perry
Holy *crap* I can’t believe I’d not seen this before, thanks. Fuck off Katy Perry indeed.
Yeah and even in drag, I want to say it used to be pretty chaste?
I argued with a human sexuality professor because she said this song was great. My point was that it was only popular because it had a pop beat to it, and if you wanted to actually listen to a lesvian love song, you’d go for “Come to My Window.” She hadn’t heard of that.
How is that possible? I haven’t heard Come to My Window in decades but it was so ubiquitous in the early 90s that I can sing it from memory.
I honestly don’t think she was in an English speaking country in the early 90s, but I agree, it’s a weird thing to not know for a Human Sexuality professor.
I have both albums. They were both important to me as I was coming out. It’s not a competition.
If they’re important to you, wonderful. I was making a “pop vs folk rock” point, but I don’t mean to put down your experience and I apologize.
But what a weird and pointless “argument” to even have. As you point out, the songs are in different genres and have completely different narrative content and are only “alike” in that they both (nominally) address LGBTQ subject matter.Is “Brokeback Mountain” “better” than “RuPaul’s Drag Race?” Or is that a completely meaningless argument given that they are completely different animals in every sense?
I’m no fan of Perry’s song. It gives off the strong “pretending to be a lesbian to cater to the male gaze” vibes that were all the rage circa 2008, but it does have one advantage against “Come to My Window:” it was unambiguously about two girls making out. Melissa Etheridge is a lesbian, and it’s easy to read “CtMW” as a lesbian love song for that reason. Still, there are no gendered pronouns used in the song or any overt reference to lesbianism. (That’s not to suggest that Etheridge was trying to hide anything; she was out publicly, and everyone from George Michael to kd lang was singing ambiguous, don’t-offend-the-folks-in-middle-America songs to “you” at the time.)
That to me is part of what makes “Come to my Window” a better song. There’s a craft to the way it’s written, rather than just coming out and saying it. You feel her passion for her lover. It’s the same issue I have with a lot of mainstream movies, books, and songs. Show me what makes it special, don’t tell me.
yeah, that line really worked to be ignorant. nobody who writes about LGBT representation in TV more than a few years ago should ignore the networks’/advertisers’ influence on what could or could not be shown. (there are years of examples, even after Buffy, of network directives blocking same-sex characters from kissing near a bed, or making sure the girls’ hair obscures the kiss, or flat-out refusing to let characters be gay)
And of course, easily the most uncomfortably dated part of the show where this subject is concerned is Andrew, at least half of whose scenes revolve around “He’s a guy, who never seems to be into ladies, but he does keep talking about how attractive other guys are. Isn’t that hilarious?” It’s like Whedon saw a couple Ambiguously Gay Duo sketches and thought that would be plenty to base an entire long-term character on. And then Angel’s final season made it worse with his giving a big speech about evolving past your flaws while escorting two women around.
Whedon always insisted that the script for “The Girl in Question” called for Andrew to be greeted by a party of mixed-gender friends for his night on the town, but wires got crossed somehow in production and it ended up looking like Andy had a date with two hot Italian ladies.I tend to believe him, since Joss was never otherwise much for straightwashing. Indeed, I think he tended in the opposite direction, toward facile queerbaiting. Things like Spike’s admission that he and Angel were intimate “that one time,” or Angel being called a “pathetic little fairy” and replying “I’m not little!” often struck me as awkwardly shoehorned ways for Joss to be like, Check it out, guys, I’m super cool with gay stuff! Isn’t that enlightened of me?
It never occurred to me that being met by two women in that episode meant that Andrew was now straight. They were his friends. Andrew was gay. He was in love with Warren. I always assumed that the “past flaws” had to do with, you know, killing his only friend (at the time) in cold blood.
For whatever it’s worth, they finally had Andrew come out in the comics.
Though the coming-out in the comics kind of played up the idea that he was in denial all that time–that the Italian ladies in that scene were supposed to be his dates. Even after he came out in the comics, there was still closeting drama. It still seemed based mostly in the humor of homophobia to me.
I always assumed they were Slayerettes as that was part of his new role
As disappointing as it was to learn what an asshole Whedon is, I think the fact that people were so disappointed is arguably a compliment to the quality of his work as far as representation goes. I doubt anyone heard about the revelations about, say, Brett Ratner, and reacted like “Damn, I expected better from him.”
Were they called “The Whirlwind” on the show? Possibly I just missed that. Cool name though
It’s a fandom nickname. Darla and Dru didn’t have a threesome with Dracula either, it was with a comedic one-off character called “The immortal,” whose schtick is that he’s the coolest guy in the universe. And also immortal.I have questions regarding the accuracy of this article since in the fifth season Angel episode “The girl in question,” Angelus complained pretty bitterly that HE could never get Dru and Darla to participate in a threesome and he’d been trying for years.
A retroactive fan theory (especially since the character probably didn’t exist at the time of the episode) identified the Immortal as Captain Jack Harkness which is several kinds of perfect!
Oh, there’s a bunch of inaccuracies in this article.Witches and Slayers are not non-human characters.Larry came out as gay with nothing supernatural about it.
Willow and Tara’s relationship didn’t start with their first on-screen kiss, which was heavily implied to not be their first kiss. When Oz returned in season 4, he detected Willow’s scent on Tara.
Willow and Tara weren’t allowed to kiss when the show was airing on WB except for in that obvious non-sexual context, and they still had to fight tooth and nail for its inclusion. The writers were willing to explore gay and lesbian relationships (and they considered making Xander gay instead of Willow), but their hands were tied from heavy network pushback.
Vampires aren’t depicted as evil because of their queer coding, vampires are evil because they lost their souls. A soul gives characters empathy and morals, so taking it away means they can feed and explore their desires without remorse. There’s some nuanced discussions to be had about internal repression keeping people closeted because of strict Christian societal standards, but it’s easier (and lazier) to just say bad=gay therefore problematic.
I totally missed the sentence about Tara and Willow’s relationship starting in “The Body,” which was an entire year into their relationship. Man, this article has problems.
Less a correction and more a clarification of point 5: a vampire is a dead body in which a demonic spirit is residing. The demon has access to the body’s memories and basically “thinks” that it’s the person, but it’s a creature of remorseless hunger and sadism. The ensouled Angel and Spike still struggle with the desires of the monster, because they have a soul AND a demon inside.
Yeah, though in other parts exactly what a soul was wasn’t clear- for example, when Darla is sharing her baby’s soul, she has the same personality but she’s more empathetic and able to worry for her baby. Her suicide is portrayed as her making an informed sacrifice out of legitimate love, not like Cordy’s death. So in that case the soul is just something that makes you nice but isn’t your personality?
My understanding is that the human soul is what makes you a person with moral agency and the capacity to do selfless, altruistic good. It is considered the purest form of yourself—the vampire may retain aspects of your personality, but they are not “you”—they are your body inhabited by a demon but retaining your memories and many aspects of your personality. The demon is what drives them to do evil and not care though.
Of course this becomes complicated when the show inexplicably introduces good demons without ever mentioning souls, and then gives not even one single shit about whether Anya has a soul at any given moment, so there’s that.
It was always strange that Angel had completely different personalities depending on whether he had a soul, while Spike and Darla were more or less the same. Then again, Spike didn’t have a long-term struggle with his new soul the way Angel did. Maybe we were supposed to glean that Angelus really was that evil and that he had to do more work to be decent when he had a soul but tbh it’s just the kind of thing that happens when one-off characters end up sticking around. I remember when Angel was spoken about as someone who was just brutally violent and sadistically evil, and then Spike was later introduced as someone who had killed two slayers. It was a twist when Spike ended up not being about the bigger picture even though he was the one with the bigger impact on slayer “history.”
I think you could maybe say something about Angel and Druisilla being more ‘suppressed’. There was definitely a thing that “good” characters were much more evil as vampires. Willow was also way more evil as a vampire. Though I also thought it was kind of a missed opportunity Spike doesn’t really confront his crimes. He was crazy and felt guilty and then it was gone. His confrontation with Principal Wood could have been a perfect time to make amends, but he just blames Nikki for being murdered.
I think Spike did a bit of penance (or at least earned his keep) by remaining loyal to Buffy during season 7. There’s also that final moment of acceptance during his sacrifice that’s just wonderfully played by Marsters. Once he was resurrected on Angel, things took on a tone of “someone saw fit to bring me back so I guess I’ll figure out what to do with it,” even if that was deflated a little later on. Maybe it was the sense that Angel was the hero of his own show while Spike was in the corner making sarcastic remarks about having casually earned something that still eluded Angel.
Personally I found his heroism on Angel a bit more notable since on Buffy it often seemed connected to wanting to impress Buffy
I have to admit to being an unabashed Spike fan (if we can segment off Angelus’ actions from Angel’s redemption, we can certainly do the same with Spike’s rape attempt, and it was hinted that Angelus had done worse than that anyway). I think that heroism probably wasn’t part of his mental landscape during the last Buffy season. The whole “champion” thing was part of Angel’s slightly different mythology, and that’s where he also had to reckon with (if I recall correctly) having been resurrected just because Lindsey wanted to fuck with Angel. When your whole existence is just one piece of someone else’s game, either everything matters or nothing does. To bring it back to Buffy, the way Spike and Angel are characterized have a lot to do with how their respective relationships with her were written and where she was in her life. The quieter moments in “After Life” are my favorite moments in all of Buffy. There’s something deeply bittersweet about the connection you form with someone when you’ve both done a lot of living That said, Spike’s Sid Vicious/Paul Simonon thing hits me right where I live.
I thought the final-season Angel episode “Damage” did a great job of laying out why Angel/Angelus were so different while Spike/souledSpike were so alike: Angelus was into evil as an artform and labored over every detail of ever crime he perpetrated, while Spike was a thrill killer who didn’t think much about the damage he left in his wake. So when Angel got his soul back, all his victims were burned into his brain and he recoiled at everything he’d done, whereas Spike could just go on not thinking much about them.Though I remember that back when season 7 was first airing, there were rumors that the writers has originally intended to make souledSpike’s personality more distinct, and perhaps even to have him revert to calling himself William, but the studio/network freaked out about completely retrofitting their most popular character and made them pull back. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but certainly the writers themselves were ultimately pretty squeamish about changing Spike too much—to the point that they couldn’t even have him stop wearing Nikki Wood’s goddamn coat to signify that he wasn’t a Slayer-murdering monster anymore. (Hell, they even blew it up in one episode and had a whole dumb gag where they replaced it with an identical duplicate from W&H! Just let him change up his wardrobe a little, for Chrissake!)
Regardless, it makes sense to me that different vampires would respond differently to regaining their souls, the same way they respond differently to tuning into a vampire in the first place. Sometimes, I think, people try too hard to come up with metaphysical explanations for psychological differences between the vampire characters; the only metaphysical change is the loss or gain of the soul/conscience, and everything else is just the result of that change interacting with the vampire’s specific psychology.
Yeah- they didn’t even do a one episode thing where he gives Robin back the coat and then Robin gives it to him when he proves himself heroic or something. The way he blames Nikki for Spike killing her and making her son an orphan especially didn’t age well with Joss’s attitude when Charisma got pregnant.
“I have questions regarding the accuracy of this article since in the fifth season Angel episode “The girl in question,” Angelus complained pretty bitterly that HE could never get Dru and Darla to participate in a threesome and he’d been trying for years.”
Oh yeah! I had completely forgotten about that. What a ridiculous and unbelievable line.
If anything, the show rejected the idea of the Fanged Four (as I have most often heard them called rather than the “Whirlwind”) having a polyamorous or bisexual relationship as often as it suggested it. Angel and Spike hate each other. Darla is incredibly dismissive of both Dru and Spike during most of their flashbacks. They’re two hetero couples that maybe swing sometimes, but in canon they really don’t seem to have much interest in anyone outside their hetero partners.
Yeah I don’t really consider that episode canon since it’s dumb. The comics even retconned it to be not really Buffy because her hooking up with a random soul-less vampire and not even contacting Spike to break up with him was really out of character. It’s a bit complicated with whether it was real because they illustrate that all the relationships are kind of turbulent and lacking true love and caring – Darla readily abandons Angel when a mob is after them and she just rejects him and runs off when he gets a soul instead of immediately working to do something to fix it (compare that to how Buffy and Angel Investigations react when he loses his soul). Druisilla mourns the loss of Angelus but kills the person they needed to interrogate without thinking. Druisilla and Spike break up multiple times. That’s kind of how losing your soul works in the Buffyverse- it makes you very impulsive and shallow. And Darla and Druisilla seem very flirty and touchy even when they’re hanging out on their own. But yeah I don’t know if I’d consider the Angel/Spike thing true bisexuality because it was more characterized by competition and conflict than anything
Was the Immortal a soulless vampire? I don’t think they ever confirmed exactly what kind of supernatural being The Immortal was—the vagueness was supposed to be part of the humor (and it did not work). Although I’m not sure what the etiquette is of calling someone to break up with them when you were never officially dating, and they died in front of you the last time you saw them. Did Buffy even know Spike was alive again at that point? Either way, as any of the Bluths would say, “That’s a freebie.”
Yeah- I think they would have mentioned if he did, it was a big thing that there was a second vampire with a soul. He just weirdly acted neutral like he was in True Blood or Vampire the Masquerade or something. It made no sense. Buffy knew because Andrew talked to Spike before this. Buffy just never calls or sends a message. I know they weren’t officially dating, but it was pretty cold when they were definitely together in some sense and he sacrificed himself for her cause
Doesn’t Spike tell Andrew not to tell Buffy he’s alive? Or am I misremembering?
I don’t remember. Andrew was pretty aggressive against Team Angel since they thought they had gone dark.
Yeah- I think they would have mentioned if he did, it was a big thing that there was a second vampire with a soul.
I don’t think we have any particular reason to believe he was a vampire at all. He was some mysterious being, “straddling good and evil, serving no master but his own considerable desires.” Which . . . kind of sounds like the Buffyverse definition of evil, but whatever; the point was to half-assedly explain why he’d be a rival to both soul-having and soulless men and an object of lust for both soulless and soul-having women.
I think Andrew had a line about Buffy not trusting Angel and co. once they took over Wolfram and Hart. It was a little clumsy but it explains why the expected conversations never happened.
That episode in general is considered among fans to be pretty bad, especially to those of us who watched it at the time. We all knew that the show was coming to an end, and one of the remaining hours was wasted on that junk, which trashed Spike’s coat (it had special meaning throughout the shows) and did weird things to Buffy’s character – after the lifechanging and formative relationships with both Angel and Spike, she’d just lightly run off to Rome with the Immortal? It’s the type of episode that I half-consider to be non-canonical because it throws a lot of “damaging” character retcon stuff at the wall at the 11th hour and expected us to take it seriously.
I think Darla called them that once, and it wasn’t so much a title as a description? I don’t know, I feel like this article is stating so many things as fact that were just kind of implied or even half-implied.
Darla says it once in a sentence, but I believe beyond that it’s mostly been used in talking about them.If you do look it up on like a Wiki, it is used as if it’s an official thing.
No, they were not. I’ve been a part of the Buffy fandom for close to twenty years, too, and I’ve never heard them called “the Whirlwind.”
No, they are never called that on the show, and it’s one of my major fan pet peeves that it’s become the default fandom way to refer to them. What happened was, there was an episode of Angel where Darla is trying to convince Angel to come and be evil with her again. That episode also had a lot of flashbacks to the gang wreaking havoc in the past. Darla said to Angel in the present that if he joined her they “could have the whirlwind again.” She clearly is not referring to the old group with Spike and Dru here; there’s no suggestion whatever that she and Angel get back together with them in the present. She’s instead making a reference to the phrase “ride the whirlwind.” But some culturally illiterate fan didn’t get the reference and assumed that because the phrase was used in an episode with a lot of flashbacks it must be referring to the flashbacks. Then the usage spread through the fandom like herpes and here we are today.
I am straight, so please take this comment with a grain of salt and let me know if I am missing something here.
My understanding is that simply having a sexual experience here and there with the same gender is not enough to make someone “queer.” Many men and many more women report having had isolated same-sex sexual encounters, but still identify as straight and not as being anywhere on the LGBT+ spectrum. My (again, limited) understanding is that self-identification is what constitutes queerness, not mere experience.
I think this article exaggerates on some of the evidence to make its points and gets some of it dead wrong. There is a total of one explicit reference to Angel and Spike having been “intimate,” and if I recall, Spike doesn’t exactly sound proud of it. Of course that could be because his and Angel’s primary emotion toward one another is hatred. Do I believe they fucked? Yeah, that didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Like Joss said in that interview, they are “deviant” (which is a problematic trope in and of itself when it comes to LGBT representation) and were incredibly close for a very long time, everyone fucked everyone at some point. But the fact that Spike specifically qualifies they were only intimate “one time” actually goes *against* the queer reading. If they were truly bisexual, they would have been intimate a lot more than one time. (And even if they weren’t, I’m surprised it only happened once!)
There’s also the fact that throughout both shows, Spike and Angel exclusively romantically and sexually pursue women, without ever showing even a remotely similar interest in men.
Same with Darla and Drusilla. I don’t think the author is right that Spike and Angel ever walked in on them having sex just between the two of them, though they did walk in on them after having a threesome with the Immortal (not Dracula as the article inaccurately states). But two women having a threesome with a man is not evidence of bisexuality. Straight women engaging in threesomes with men does not make them bisexual, even if they make sexual contact with each other.
This is not to quash anyone’s head canon. I am all for a queer reading to these characters, as I certainly think the *subtext* is there, and it occasionally *almost* becomes text. But it’s not the full embrace of canonical bisexuality that this article makes it sound like. It would be nice if it were! Queer representation is important. But I actually think the treatment of these four characters was, if anything, often queerbaiting, and at times (like Spike revealing that he was only intimate with Angel once) actively rejects queerness as canon.
Again, queer viewers (and allies), if I am mistaken on anything here, either on Buffy canon or LGBT+ issues, please let me know and I will listen. But from my limited and privileged perspective, I just think this article massively overstates its case.
You can have a gay experience without identifying as gay.
I agree with some of this, but my biggest problem is how you seem to miss that bisexuality IS a spectrum. A bi woman may have fifty female partners and one male one, or vice versa, and both hypothetical-women are equally bi. “If [Angel and Spike] were truly bisexual, they would have been intimate a lot more than one time” is just an inaccurate sentiment. But, yeah, the Buffyverse doesn’t exactly have a great track-record with bisexuality. Touching on something I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention even in-passing: In the canonical Season Eight comics, Buffy does have sex with a woman named Satsu, but it’s treated as a fling, and some of the other characters’ responses are… a bit yikes.Xander, in #35: “I’m a potential romantic interest! I’m on the list – right after being gay. I rate almost as good as trying to change your sexual orientation.”Oh, and just so we’re crystal-clear: Joss Whedon himself wrote that issue, and it was published in 2010. Bisexuality just isn’t an option in the Buffyverse. It’s just straight, gay, and nothing in-between.
“I agree with some of this, but my biggest problem is how you seem to miss that bisexuality IS a spectrum. A bi woman may have fifty female partners and one male one, or vice versa, and both hypothetical-women are equally bi.”
I didn’t intend to imply otherwise, which is why I said self-identification is what makes someone queer, rather than the gender of one’s partners and the frequency of certain sexual experiences. Maybe all four of the “Whirlwind” do self-identify as bi, but there’s no evidence of that on the show, and fleeting sexual encounters with members of the same sex (which, canonically, are established to have actually happened way LESS than one would assume based on the subtext) aren’t enough to make one assume they identify that way, as the article does.
“If [Angel and Spike] were truly bisexual, they would have been intimate a lot more than one time” is just an inaccurate sentiment.”
That one was certainly badly phrased. What I mean by that is that given their close proximity for such a long period of time, the intense relationship the vampires had with one another, and their lack of inhibitions, the fact that Spike and Angel were only intimate “one time” according to Spike almost has the opposite effect on me as it had on this article’s author; it takes the subtext of their relationship that many picked up on (“Spike and Angel must have banged a lot!”) and flattens it into “Nope, one time only deal, don’t worry they are still straight.” In fact, I remember this debate happening online immediately after that line was said on the show. Some saw it as their ‘ship having been confirmed and some saw it as a weirdly backhanded form of queerbaiting that decanonized what a lot of people had assumed (that they fucked a lot). Like I said, I feel like the treatment of queerness on this show is way more complicated and problematic than this author lets on.
I’m sure someone will tell you you’re wrong, but, as a queer viewer (admittedly I did not watch Angel faithfully as I got sick of it during season 3, so I may have missed something), I also did not ever get any great sense of a sexual desire or relationship between Spike and Angel. Yes, the implication was that Darla/Angelus/Spike/Dru were a marauding quad, and likely did have some vaguely mentioned encounters together, but I don’t really remember any real emphasis on f/f or m/m dynamics. When Angelus returns in season 2, the emphasis is on Darla and Dru being his playthings while Spike is very much bitter and resentful. Most encounters between Spike and Angel are based on machismo and on love rivalries (like the endless melodrama over their love for Buffy). I absolutely adored Juliet Landau’s work as Dru, and at times I was interested in Spike and in Darla. With that said, I never connected to these dynamics in a queer way because, frankly, I never thought the writing for any of the characters was strong or interesting enough, and the actors never really had the time together to mesh into a consistent dynamic (hell, watching the clips above, the continuity was so bad that in the clip where they first see Spike, Angelus in speaking in a flat American accent, then soon after Spike turns, he has a cod Irish accent). I just was not interested in winking and nodding, and I never saw this as any canonical moment to be proud of – it was just a variation of the same crumbs that you could get in many places, and in some places, much more satisfying crumbs. I never even thought of comparing this vamping (no pun intended) and othering on top of othering with Tara and Willow, who were canonically queer and who were able to be together and be in love for several years, with Tara becoming the heart of the group before the heinous exit for her character. If we are going to take winking and nodding that I might compare to the central canon, then I would go with the Faith/Buffy relationship, which was incredibly fascinating and layered to me.
Agreed re: Buffy and Faith. And Faith was coded as queer even beyond her relationship with Buffy; there’s that scene on Angel where Lilah lures her away from a bar under pretext of a hookup; there’s even a note in the episode script: “NOTE TO DIRECTOR AND ACTORS: Mind the lesbian subtext—keep it very ‘sub.’”I always thought one of Buffy’s big missed opportunities was in not going for a Faith/Willow relationship in the final season. It could’ve been not just a strong example of queer representation but also a compelling dramatic development, as two characters who thought they couldn’t be more different realize how alike they actually are, with Willow acknowledging that she shares Faith’s dark will to power, and Faith admitting the value of Willow’s sweetness and decency.
That would have been a great idea. I didn’t really mind Kennedy, but a Faith/Willow relationship has so many dynamics to explore, especially as they were both slowly rebuilding their lives and also because Faith had not ever had a stable relationship, while Willow had mostly just had relationships she idealized and then tended to end abruptly and painfully.
I found Kennedy so annoying that she was the one slayer I was rooting for to get killed. And talk about zero chemistry between Alyson Hannigan and whoever forgettably played Kennedy. Now Faith and Willow would’ve been a stroke of genius.
When it later came out that supposedly the plan was for Xander/Willow to reunite after Tara’s death but the vocal backlash made them decide not to put her with a man (I think that was the claim), the somewhat half-hearted material for Kennedy made more sense to me. I didn’t mind it but yeah, not really the show’s best…
How could Xander and Willow reunite? They never actually united in the first place.
I was thinking of their thing in season 3, but you’re right, they were never a proper couple.
In the season 3 episode they had exactly one kiss before Cordie and Oz busted them. At any rate doing a Xander-Willow love relationship after Tara would have been a disaster, especially after the show had gone out of its way to deny Willow was bi. Even an Oz reunion would’ve been a hard sell at that point, but probably more acceptable to the fans.
“In the season 3 episode they had exactly one kiss before Cordie and Oz busted them.”
Before that they had been making out constantly for several episodes.
Which is strange because it definitely seems like the beginning of Season 7 is teasing a Buffy/Xander relationship (which is what SMG wanted).
This writer misses that the Buffy/Faith dynamic reflects a lot of intense teen friendships that suddenly curdle. There’s also the ego/id thing. To state that it’s simply queer doesn’t strike me as an honest take on the material.
It can be two things. But I definitely saw more lust/love from Faith toward Buffy than vice versa.
I just don’t think that “they had a moment of sexual attraction and maybe even love and then they both went on to have lives that were more or less hetero” justifies taking a queer lens to the whole thing. Plus, in an age where queer characters are more and more common, what’s the actual value in imposing a false identity on characters who simply aren’t queer? Does any person or discourse benefit from that? Why not just work to find or create characters who are truly queer?
Right. I feel like if someone looking for queer representation read this article and then watched these shows after, they’d end up very disappointed.
If anything, Lorne was queer-coded, which apparently went right over the author’s head.
Yeah, and if I remember correctly, the Angel writers were even willing to portray Lorne as canonically gay, but his actor, Andy Hallett, pushed for him not to have a romantic interest at all, since the character was based so heavily on him and that better reflected how he lived his life.
I did not watch Angel faithfully as I got sick of it during season 3, so I may have missed somethingYou did: a FANTASTIC final season. And Wesley becoming a ruthless badass.
As a bi, the biggest missed relationship in my opinion is Giles Ethan. No way there was nothing going on there and Ethan disapearing season 4 was disappointing. So much could have been done with it, especially considering Willows path where addiction breaks down relationships. I may have accidentally posted similar message as a reply below, techical problems.
This is so tiresome. There are a huge number of bisexual people (not in TV; in the real world.) The denials are absurd. It’s just bigotry.
I am not understanding your objection. Of course there are a huge number of bisexual people in the world. If someone says they are bisexual, they are bisexual. Questioning a real person on that is wrong; questioning the bisexuality of characters that never identified as bisexual or were even implied to be dating someone of the same gender is not.
I think there should have been *more* bisexual representation on the show, not only with Angelus’s crew (which were confirmed by the show to have had way fewer bisexual experiences than one would naturally expect, in dialogue that the writer of this article takes out of context*) but with Willow as well.
I also said I don’t have any problem with the author reading these characters as bisexual. My problem is that with lines like “they’re canonically bisexual” and “For Spike, Angel, Drusilla, and Darla, queerness is just a fact, an element that frequently goes unmentioned, but isn’t invisible or forgotten,” this author is giving far too much credit to a pair of shows that had a far more complex and problematic treatment of these characters’ potential queerness than this article can admit.
*For instance, as stated by several people in the comments, the author mentions that Spike says he was intimate with Angel, but leaves out that he immediately clarifies that this only happened once. Darla and Drusilla do have a threesome with a man (not Dracula as the author incorrectly states), but in that same scene Angel says that they never let him and Spike do that with them. The author uses both scenes to illustrate her thesis while ignoring that the full context of these scenes actually *hurts* the reading of the four of them as being particularly sexually fluid; the reading of them as queer characters would actually be stronger if these two (fairly nonsensical) scenes did not exist!
“My understanding is that simply having a sexual experience here and there with the same gender is not enough to make someone “queer.” Many men and many more women report having had isolated same-sex
sexual encounters, but still identify as straight and not as being
anywhere on the LGBT+ spectrum. My (again, limited) understanding is
that self-identification is what constitutes queerness, not mere
experience.”VERY glad someone said this. A one-off threesome doesn’t make someone gay.
I am gay and I 100% agree with you that this article overstates its case. Bisexuality is absolutely a spectrum, but if “bisexuality” means “anyone who has had sexual contact with both the same and the opposite sex, no matter how often or how they feel about it,” then it’s a meaningless category. I have found women sexually attractive, and would probably have sex with women if the opportunity fell into my lap, but I don’t think of myself as bisexual because 95% of the people I am attracted to are men.
As someone who’s been through the grad school grind, I absolutely hate this “death of the author”/reader response crap. It avoids an honest and deep engagement with the material in favor of “well these are my immediate associations with the text,” which puts you in a bind later on when you realize you don’t have the tools to research or write your thesis because you spent the last two years writing your first impressions. Somewhere along the line it became unacceptable to admit that very often the author’s intentions really do matter. I mean, here we have someone writing about canonically hetero characters as if they DEFINITELY were queer, and she’s using the language of academia, which means we’re slotted into also using the language of academia…which means we can’t flat-out say that she’s wrong. Which she is.
“The choice to make only non-human characters canonically queer carries on the tradition of using mysticism as code for queerness; on Buffy, characters are allowed to be both supernatural and queer.”Pour one out for Larry – so out even his grandma was fixing him up with guys!
Darla – at least – had a very spicy life before becoming a vampire. As a ‘Lady of the Evening’ in her former life it’s fairly certain she developed an appreciation for sexual flexibility. It’s also interesting to note that Angel, Spike and Drusilla were all quite virginal at the moment they were turned. Were they all ‘infected’ (Darla was dying from Syphilis when she was turned) by Darla’s unrepentant lust?Btw: This is such a cool piece. Thanks.
I mean Angel was apparently hanging out in taverns, drinking a lot, and womanizing/going to a lot of prostitutes when he was turned (that’s why his dad kicked him out). But you’re right about Druisilla and Spike
I had to think about that for a while. Angel certainly was a scoundrel, but I could have sworn he told Darla that he hadn’t been with a woman yet (and that she loved that information). Or… maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part, lol.
I don’t think I saw that? Unless it was in one of the comics, I’ve only read some of them. Angel was a scoundrel, but basically in a rebellious teen way – he wasn’t a killer and didn’t consent to become one. I always wished they examine the fact that Angel was a rebellious son and then had to deal with a rebellious son, but he also is not-living proof that ignoring his father’s advice got him and his entire family killed. There was some cognitive dissonance in that the slap they showed would be considered abusive today, but back then hitting children and even employees with large wooden paddles was considered appropriate child rearing. Maybe if they emphasized his father used to do much worse when Angel/Liam was a child and this was triggering? The post-show comics had some great features of season 5 healthy!Connor so they could have discussed it at some point before the reboot
I thought part of the point of “The Prodigal” was that Liam’s father wasn’t actually that bad—that he said some hurtful things in the heat of frustration, but when it came down to it he actually cared about Liam and genuinely wanted what’s best for him. “I was never in your way, boy!”
Great reply!
While I agree that Liam wasn’t a killer as a human, it was his decision to leave home that resulted in him becoming a vampire and killing his family.
Fun fact: Christina Hendricks played the bar maid that Angel killed.
Minor correction: his dad didn’t kick him out, he chose to leave.
IIRC, Tara and aren’t witches like Bewitched witches.They’re witches because they study/practice witchcraft, but they’re still human.That’s different from being supernatural like vampires/Slayers/demons.
Sort of. Witches in the Buffyverse are like Jedis. Sure, you need training, but you also need inherent skill. Willow is the most powerful witch on the show not because she’s read more magic books but because of her talent.
Sure, you need training, but you also need inherent skill.That’s also true for getting good enough at basketball to play in the NBA, but LeBron James is still human.
Sure, but nearly anyone can play basketball, even if done poorly. Magic and The Force don’t seem to be universally accessible.
In the Buffyverse, literally anyone can do magic. Whether they survive or not is the question.
The key difference is that basketball is an actual thing, and magic isn’t.
There’s literally nothing that indicates that you need natural talent to perform magic, just to perform it well. Those dopes in The Trio were able to perform some magic.
Were they dopes? Assholes, sure, but they were able to make robots (technological? magical? both?) nearly indistinguishable from humans, which is pretty damn impressive.
I can’t actually quibble – the arc of Willow’s witchcraft through the first five seasons makes it pretty clear that witchcraft is a skill people learn. As with so many things, though, the sixth season makes it confusing, since magic is kind of different in that season compared to the rest of the show.
Witches in the Buffyverse are like Jedis. Sure, you need training, but you also need inherent skill.Xander once spoke Latin from a magical text and made fire. “Xander, don’t speak Latin in front of the books,” said Giles.Xander has zero skills.
I would say Buffy witches count as “supernatural” but it is really weird that the article refers to them, as well as Slayer Kennedy, as “non-human.” This site really needs to invest in editors again. This was a good premise for an article and it was fun to read, but there were just so many factural errors and misrepresentations of scenes in it, and that seems to be par for the course these days.
Why wouldn’t Slayers count as non human?
Wait, are we allowed to say nice things about Joss again? Nobody tweeted me that we could again
The article’s talking about Whedon’s work. Acknowledging the man’s talent and contributions to pop culture isn’t the same as endorsing his flaws.The popular talking point that progressive writers are trying to erase problematic creators is largely a myth; otherwise we wouldn’t still be talking about HP Lovecraft.
I don’t know about that; in pretty much any thread about HPL you’ll get the people that jump in with “OMG! Why are even talking about him? Don’t you know he was a racist?” as if anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Lovecraft didn’t know that. Yes, there are attempts to extract the cosmic horror from the racism, or even to incorporate the racism as part of the horror (as in “Lovecraft Country”), but it is hardly a myth to say that there are people who would prefer that all of Lovecraft’s works be forgotten.
If you look hard enough you can find people espousing any view; but the sort of pervasive cancel culture that people decry just doesn’t exist.
You don’t need a large number of people to succesfully promote any view so long as they are loud enough. I wish I was joking, but at my former university there’s a serious attempt to remove the campus statue of Abraham Lincoln of all people because despite leading the Union to victory over the Confederate traitors and freeing the slaves, he still said some racist things. There’s good chance they’ll succeed.
What’s wild is that I still say a lot of nice things about Joss’s writing, but even I think this article gives him too much credit and makes these shows out to be far more progressive on LGBT issues than they actually were.
Even at the time, I felt the show was really patting itself on the back for its “representation.”Lesbian supporting characters were the safest choice for LGBTQ content in the 90s. Buffy didn’t truly break any new ground whatsoever.
Is that your take-home? My friends and I all agreed back in the 90s: Joss Whedon’s treatment of LGBQ people was a particularly obvious and offensive failure. Compliment him for other things, if you like, but not this.
Go ahead – it’s a free country – but you’ll look absurd.
AND complement his LGBTQ character choices? Where is the outrage about killing tara? I’m also so confused by the lack of screaming about queerbaiting (I know it’s mentioned, but where is the anger?) And it almost sounds like now we think all the queer characters being “othered” non human is a great metaphor instead of being exclusionary and pandering to make queerness acceptable and safe. I am so old and out of date apparently.
I still love Joss. He’s my god.
“Beginning with Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampiress Carmilla, continuing on through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and skyrocketing in popularity with Interview With The Vampire and the subsequent film adaption, the queer-coded vampire is a staple of early LGBTQ+ characterization.”No mention of FRIGHT NIGHT? I haven’t seen the remake but the original was pretty darn unambiguous. Also, THE LOST BOYS.
“The Lost Boys” was queer-coded?Wow, do I suck at picking up on this stuff!
Im curious about that one too..
It was 100% David and Star competing for Michael’s affections.
David had a job to do first and foremost
I drifted in and out of Buffy until I videotaped a random episode of Buffy (I really wanted to tape over an episode of Ally McBeal that someone else had taped).It was Doppelgangland and I was hooked on Buffy and then Angel ever since.Favourite episode ever, must have watched that tape twenty times or more!(Did laspse slightly in Season 6 and due to a weird turn of events because of that, I’ve yet to see the musical episode – only one I’ve never seen! I was meant to see it in 2015 at the Sydney Opera House courtesy of the AV Club but I couldn’t find my bus pass so ended up seeing James Badge Dale fight engrams or something in Eastern Europe.)
That is my favorite episode too.
Vampire’s have always been homo-bi-erotic. It’s part of the job description
It’s the other way around: gay people are assumed to be sinful / evil / possessed. Always.
Except Bram Stoker was a “suspected” gay man himself, even if never really got clear.
“Buffy and Faith being extremely hetrosexual gal pals.”
It wasn’t Dracula, it was The Immortal.
Can you not with “Whirlwind” bullshit? It’s a fan term. Nothing more.
Darla uses it in one episode of Angel.
She uses it once, in one episode. Not even in relation to the Vampire foursome. She’s far more likely talking about the whirlwind of violence her and Angelus can reap at their best. At no point does she indicate she’s even thinking about Dru or Spike or even does before Dru comes back after the Trial. Darla especially does not at all seem like the kind of person who would give the people she hung around with a terrible, cringey team name.
Seriously, the article makes it sound like they had freaking jerseys with that team name on them. Darla clearly couldn’t give a shit about Spike or Dru up until Dru re-sires her in the 2000s.
It’s weird…I love the flashback episodes, especially the ones involving Spike, but as Buffy/Angel progressed, they really tried to make it seem like the group was more of an established entity than the story warranted. Darla was always out for herself and deliberately simple in her evilness. She didn’t care about carving out a legacy or orchestrating torturous death scenes for her victims. She just wanted to move through the world and stay young and beautiful. She certainly never gave much of a crap about Spike, from what I can recall. She only seemed to have bothered with Angel because he was handsome.
Darla doesn’t say it, Angel does and Angel is trying to convince Darla to get back together with him after he gets his soul. He says, “We can have the whirlwind back,” i.e. “we can have our whirlwind romance back.” It was never a reference the four of them.
I thought I’ve heard “the Fanged Four” before which was fun. The Whirlwind is a bit pretentious.
“And, in 2020, Whedon revealed to Metro in that he was told he couldn’t make Willow bisexual because viewers might interpret bisexuality as a phase instead part of the character’s identity.”I was always annoyed how Willow’s sexuality was treated like a light switch—as in, not only is she no longer romantically interested in men but she retroactively never was. I understand wanting to avoid “just a phase” tropes, and obviously you can still identify as a lesbian while still having had (what are depicted as pretty intense) prior romantic relationships with men, but it’s weird how the show denied the existence of a spectrum in her case. Case in point, that weird S7 episode where she and Buffy and others fall under that high school dude’s magic letterman jacket love spell and her plan is to magically transform him into a woman so she can have sex with him.
That was obnoxious. We had this lovely bi coming out story and instead nope, she’s a lesbian and always was a lesbian, ignore the sexual and romantic attraction she had for multiple guys, she was just kidding. It was by far not the only media or other influence out there showing this attitude. The treatment of bisexuality on Buffy by someone who was touted as being a big progressive voice was part of the reason why so many people I knew, including my then best friend, had the attitude bisexuality wasn’t real. You were either a lesbian in denial or a straight girl looking for attention. It’s been over twenty years, I’m still bi, and I’m still mad at those conversations.
My take on that is that Willow likes neat and simplelabels, especially when it comes to her self-identity. So it makes sense for the character that she would identify as a lesbian at that time despite (or maybe even because of) the fact that she seemed to legitimately struggle between choosing between Oz and Tara and clearly still had some sexual attraction to the former. But she wouldn’t want Tara to know that–she is openly anxious at one point about worrying that Tara might think she will “switch” back to boys. But of course the erasure of bisexuality on a meta level isn’t great.
Ugh also the line where she was like “it’s a good thing I’m gay now!” – I think in context of Xander dating Anya. Even if they weren’t allowed to make her openly bisexual, they could have *not* had those lines.
Yeah, this retcon really annoyed me. It makes sense that Willow would be bi/pan, but I would have been just fine with her saying “I used to be into men, but these days, I’m really only into ladies,” so I identify as a lesbian. The whole Oz and Xander who? thing was annoying since those relationships were meant to be meaningful. I suspected all along that when the suits agreed to let Buffy go queer, they were fine with lesbianism but not bisexuality.
I could buy Willow’s unambiguous lesbianism if there was a better sense that she was initially into guys because that’s the default, and she eventually realized that she felt something deeper for women. That’s how it plays out for a lot of people. But the lifelong secret crush on Xander doesn’t really bear any of that out, nor does it seem right that Oz was the one to realize first that he had an uncontrollable sexual connection with another kind of person.
As a fellow lady-bi I’d generally be annoyed, but to be honest Willow’s journey almost exactly mirrors my best friend’s. Throughout her teenage years she had various intense relationships with guys – whom she often ended up cheating on, with other guys – and then when she admitted to herself she was more attracted to women it was like a lightbulb moment. The reason her relationships with men were so fraught was that she wasn’t ever 100% into it, even though emotionally she cared a lot for some of them, and heteronormativity had given her this idea that caring about a guy had to be romantic.
As far as representation goes it kind of sucks, but that doesn’t make it unrealistic.
I don’t see a problem with Willow being gay instead of bi.There’s no one size fits all situation where a person fidns out about their sexuality.
At the risk of sounding like a caveman, can’t a teen soap opera about vampires and witches and slayers just be a tean soap opera about vampires and witches and slayers? So what it had queer representation? That is great and all, but is that alone really worthy of of this many words?
Freud- Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
You’re a caveman because you don’t know how free websites work. They write these articles to generate comments and comments generate ad impressions and ad impressions help pay for everything.
Also because of your comment. Queer representation on broadcast TV in the late 90s-early 00s was a big deal, even for straight fans.
It’s kind of a reach to talk about the show coding of Spike as queer in a positive way, without commenting on the character’s frequent use of gay slurs. The show’s writers tended to brush that off as “British character uses British slang” and maybe they didn’t really think about it at the time… but if one are positing Spike as comfortably bi, his use of language seems a bit questionable.
It’s definitely weird and a reach to push the idea that there’s all this queer subtext if we’re also supposed to accept that the queer subtext never really lands anywhere, you know? For my money, Spike was always written as a deeply romantic vampire. Where Angelus was evil and cruel, Spike was passionate; he loved women, so much so that at the end of season 6 (and its examination of misogyny) he followed his rape attempt – he was a literal monster – with a journey that ended with him getting his soul back. To read an identity of queerness (as opposed to one-off dalliances) into that is a huge misunderstanding of the character.
Yeah, both Spike and Angel have these arcs where they are absolutely obsessed with women, and even when that isn’t the case, they constantly treat women differently than men. That they also occasionally have chemistry with each other or other male characters does not make them canonically bi.
Even going back to Cecily and then his relationship with Dru, Spike is defined by the power women hold over him. Plus, as someone who holds season 6 in higher regard than most do, i have to say that taking Spike’s arc in season 5 (just bawling at the sight of Buffy’s body), to the perfectly realized tone of season 6’s nihilistic relationship, to him and Buffy eventually coming to a certain kind of peace…it does such a disservice to all of that to say, “but what about the queer coding?”I have my MA in English. I completely understand the mechanism behind saying, “this isn’t what the story is largely about, but I’d like to explore this reference to evil trees on page 172.” A lot of academia is just loosely throwing around ideas with the understanding that many of the ideas won’t pass muster. That said, we’re getting to the point where a lot of these think pieces are being written by people who are too young to have watched the shows in real time. I remember there being some outcry against Willow’s gay arc. Not because of homophobia, but because this character started out as a nerd and eventually became coolly bookish and dated a hot guy, and the representation for that type of girl (which wasn’t common back then) was subsumed by the particularly Lilith Fair branding of the Willow/Tara relationship; a lot of girls who related to Willow from day 1 suddenly couldn’t, and we weren’t mad about it, but it would be dishonest not to note how that played out (we eventually got Fred Burkle so it’s all good). Back then, the show was providing representation for a different group of people that didn’t often have serious media directed at them, and just because that matters less now doesn’t change the history of it.
I remember reacting very strongly to the Oz erasure because he was such a great character and his calm confidence was a great foil for all the high drama going on.
Because I am a masochist who enjoys devouring the works of disgraced assholes (I listened to Astral Weeks recently and oh my god that shit is gorgeous), I’m doing a general Buffyverse rewatch, not having seen most of it for over fifteen years. Just finished the phenomenally satisfying BTVS Season 3 and am not into much queer-related content yet, so I have nothing to say about that. Off-topic, but I will mention Mayor Richard Wilkins is an absolutely inspired villain. Regarding representation issues, I can’t say we’re doing wonderful so far. It’s not just lack of non-white representation, it’s poor representation where it exists. From the deeply “tinking” Kendra who gets picked off with ease after three episodes to Mr. Trick, who is one step away from jive talking a la Airplane, the show displays its biases quite clearly. It’s particularly too bad because both those characters were genuinely interesting and deserved to be developed. I love the idea of Mr. Trick as a mercenary henchman who could have shown up to assist multiple Big Bads. Alas. Also, Xander’s gay panic with Larry (a great recurring background character I wish we’d seen more of) is so painful to watch now I find it hard to believe I ever took it as landscape. Respecting others’ mileage may vary, I happen to be OK viewing all this through a Two Things lens. The show, at least at this stage, is ingenious, fun, and completely involving. I’ll be interested to see how it handles its more uneven later seasons and how Angel plays all these years after my first viewing. Everything and everyone ages, heroes and villains alike.
The interesting thing about Xander’s gay panic is that it was meant as setup for a potential storyline in which Xander comes to terms with the fact that he’s gay. Joss wanted to do a coming-out storyline for one of his main characters, and it wasn’t until Seth Green left that he settled on doing it with Willow, so there are little hints with the other characters—Xander’s discomfort with Larry, Buffy’s intense relationship with Faith—that didn’t end up going anywhere and get dismissed as weird little nothings.Meanwhile, the little hints re: Willow did get paid off, so in retrospect it looks like Joss was setting up that one revelation all along instead of sneakily hedging his bets.
Reportedly, Whedon wanted a black actress to play Cordelia, which is part of the reason he was so awful to Charisma Carpenter. But after seeing how minority characters tended to be written on Buffy and most other shows he was involved in, a black Cordelia would also likely been screwed up.
I rewatched Buffy a few years ago and i was surprised by how I reacted to it. Season 2 has the iconic story, season 3 is perfection in terms of quality (I found that a lot of it had gone over my head when it originally aired – that season didn’t leave an impression on me when I was 13). Riley is actually a great match for Buffy in the beginning, and season 6 surprised me by maybe being the best of all. It’s certainly the most agreeable to our current state of bingeing serial narratives.
Six eh? That’s surprising (except for that season’s obvious classic). I’ll see if I agree.
It surprised me too! It was very smooth and serialized even if the stories themselves weren’t always the best. In contrast, both 4 and 5 started out way better than I remembered but got weighed down in table-setting. S6’s “After Life” contains some of the most beautiful tv dialogue I’ve ever heard, and parts of the Spike dynamic spoke to some of my harder lived years. But yeah, you might find that 6 is easier to watch than you remember.
See, I don’t know if Spike, Angel, Drusila and Darla actually did have orgies, as in “The Girl in Question”, after finding they had a threesome with the Immortal, Angel and Spike are shocked and dismayed, because Dru and Darla never let them do it “concurrently” with them.
As everyone who actually watched the episode and has even an average memory recalls, the unseen character who has the threesome with the female half of the Whirlwind is always called “The Immortal” – who is clearly NOT Dracula, nor a vampire at all, but some unspecified-but-unique supernatural celebrity.I mean, there’s no real proofreading done on the Internet, so why bother with even Wikipedia-level research? I mean, you don’t get paid for it, right?
I don’t mind too much that they forgot this element of the episode (though it would have been nice for an editor to check the facts before the publication, because I am mentally stuck in 2012). It’s jumping from “they had a threesome to a man” to “therefore they are queer” that really irks me. Especially since that same scene says they never did that with Angel and Spike, which, while ridiculous and hard to believe, massively undercuts the thesis of this article.
Yeah, the tone of the scene is that The Immortal is so cool and irresistible that he persuaded Darla and Dru to do something that they otherwise wouldn’t have done.
This column refers to Angel as a villain. Really? In the context of Buffy and his own spin-off? I thought even that description of the character was off, much less the writer’s other opini0ns. As for the queer representation, it could certainly have been better by today’s standards. Yet in all, it was ground-breaking and praise-worthy at the time and worth celebrating today. Angel seemed super straight, Spike wasn’t queer so much as British 🙂 but the series shone when it came to Willow and Tara’s relationship on a show geared towards teens, let’s not forget.
Was Dracula queer-coded? I always thought it was more sex offender-coded myself.
Interview with a Vampire injected gay subtext into the vampire mythos in the mainstream, and i think people sometimes assume it was always there. I get that vampires are a natural fit for lust and sex narratives but the queer awareness thing just isn’t happening with a property from the Victorian era.
I mean, the one thing the article author is correct about is the lesbian subtext of the original vampire novel/lla. Interview may have RE-injected, but Le Fanu clearly went there in 1872.
It’s actually xenophobia coded. Dracula is the Eastern European other, the immigrant literally bearing a blood disease. The American, another foreigner, as one of the rescue posse is also presented as undesirable, uncouth, and problematic. But the original Irish Carmilla that Stoker pulls from?…. yup. Super gay.
And Lucy’s sexually wanton character change once turned and Mina’s sexual awkening? Thematically cannon from the original.
Characters in stories aren’t representatives, or ambassadors, or teaching aides, or snything other than the characters a writer creates for a story they want to tell. I hope one day that this idea if representation gets mothballed because its ludicrous and worse than that its dangerous. It demonstrates the ideology at work. It has become normal for people to think theres a way things should be, how people should be, how people should act, what we should watch, what it should mean. And who should define all this existance’s representation. Its all very authoritarian and fascist. Historically what comes down the pipe after the morality police is terrible and tragic. If it’s normal and comfortable for you to ask whether the characters in a story properly represent, its a sign you’ve absorbed and are reproducing authoritarian culture. And 8fvit is comfortable for you to write about whether or not a fiction is correct, it means you see yourself in this worldview as one of the generals or priests, one of the people in power who get to dictate what is right and proper.This is the kind of landscape that tolerates, and even cheers on partisan political censorship being wielded by unimaginably powerful private corporations, because for now, those being silenced are just the ones you think you disagreed with anyways. They’re only people exhibiting wrongthink and commiting wrongspeech, theyre not much different than wrong representations that just need fixing, like how the chinese do with reeducation camps for people who dont know how to be right.This ideology slunk in insidiously, disguised as the hero in the story, because it sang about tolerance and inclusion even while it instructed on who should not be tolerated and demanded who needs to be excluded. Authoritarian culture is now saturated, ubiquitous. Its so ingrained by now that it feels natural and proper.If it goes the way it has always gone, I hope all you who were proponents remember that you signed up for it.
Ok just to be clear, we’re wondering why this ostensibly feminist classic created by a person whose ex-spouse alleged used thier executive power and diety complex to proposition multiple female actors was cool with girl on girl but not guy on guy? Dawn wouldn’t have to know ancient Summarian to know it’s because that expression of liberation didn’t make Whedon’s dick wet. The clue is him using “open minded” in the explanation for both Buffy sleeping with Satsu and the Spangler acknowledgment in a DVD commentary. With the former, he got SMG to lez out in an “expanded Buffyverse that doesn’t rely on budget or consent of the actors. From his hetero POV why couldn’t he draw his actors having lesbian sex? Oh, but at the same time, if you think one line of homosocial Intimacy between Spike and Angel is gross, the problem is you!And the S5 Andrew appearance was straightforward queerbait and switch. Absolutely intentional to assume we would be fan disserviced by the dork that finally gets to pork, extravagantly. He didn’t want Willow to be bi for representation any more than he wanted to explore the beauty of interracial relationships with Faith and Wood. Cuck just wanted to have actors play out his new fantasies lampshaded with Nicolas Brendon’s lazy lips
I’ve been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for close to twenty years and I’ve never, ever heard them referred to as “the Whirlwind.”
Darla made an offhand comment in one episode, referring to the foursome as a whirlwind. Some fic writers picked it up, and Boom! A group name was born.
That’s how you can tell that this person only watched Buffy recently, and did so with the wiki fan pages open.
I don’t remember any of this from Buffy, sure Dru and Darla seemed kinda queer when they showed up together on Angel but i never got that from them in the original series.
I have never heard the term “whilwind” to refer to these characters before, did you just make it up?Tbh I think this article is really reaching for something that just isn’t there. Declaring something doesn’t make it so.
Buffy (and later Angel) fan since S1, and have never heard of the cycle of sires known as Darla, Angelus, Drusilla, and Spike (aka William the Bloody) called “The Whirlwind” before. Citation?
Doesn’t Angelus explicitly identify as straight when he’s brought back by his team to give information on The Beast in season 4? He’s talking shit to Wesley about his new rugged good looks and basically says “man, if I swung that way.” (Meaning that he does not find men sexually attractive). Then he outs Wesley’s affair with Lilah to the crew. I’m a gay guy. I would have loved to have seen Angel, Spike, or Angelus depicted as bi… but I don’t think that was ever part of the story… especially since they’re largest conflict was over a woman.