LESS SUB, MORE TEXT: A Queer Tale of Buffy Fandom and Fan Fiction

I wrote this, my very first feature story, in 2007 for The Hipster Book Club, which like so many other great sites, has since been poofed off the face of the internets. So I'm reposting it here. Still another five years later, I still haven't written or read any W/T fanfic. But to say that this fandom experience shaped my core values as a writer is—well, kind of an undersell. 

Update, January 2013: this article was required reading at UC San Diego during Fall Quarter 2012, for an undergrad Communications class studying user-generated web content and fan fiction communities. In December 2012, I did a brief Q&A with the class via Skype about fan fiction, fan communities, and the state of queer visibility on TV. So awesome!

LESS SUB, MORE TEXT
A Queer Tale of Buffy Fandom and Fan Fiction
By JULIA WATSON

Before the summer of 2000, I had never heard of fan fiction. A recent graduate of UC San Diego's undergraduate writing program, I spent that summer in self-imposed exile in the middle of nowhere, an hour east of San Francisco. I was three hundred miles from my family and friends, living away from my hometown and completely alone for the first time in my life. I had left with the intention of finding, in three months of blessed solitude, a way of recovering and unwinding from the combined chaos of school, work and my youthful demons. I was resting. I was writing. And I was watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Watching the show started innocently enough—just a little background noise to keep me company while I ate dinner. But the more I watched, the more hooked I was. The show offered a variety of draws: tight, snappy writing; direction which was unusually nuanced for television of its time; and feature creatures who stood as metaphors for the cultural and internal demons battled in the very scary world of everyday life. But most notably, the show featured a cast of characters with whom I fell head over heels in love.

There was Buffy, the heroine: righteous, glib-tongued, and unfailingly committed to saving the world. There was former librarian and mystical mayhem expert Giles, her charmingly tweedy British mentor. One can't forget Xander, the doofy but steadfastly loyal boy-next-door. And there was my favorite, Willow, the insecure, nervous-babble-prone computer geek. Willow, the bumbling novice witch. Willow, the budding lesbian.

Alyson Hannigan as Willow.
Photo property of Twentieth Century Fox.

Initially, I had been excited enough just to find a relatable character in Willow because she was nerdy and interested in metaphysics. But gay, too? It was enough to make my bookwormy, astrology-studying, dykey self all but plotz with delight.

Openly gay since 15-years old, I was used to getting my cinematic kicks in the subtext. Gay folks are experts at this because, up until recently, there were no gay folks or gay relationships on TV. Subtext was all we had. As a wee queer thing, I crushed on Nancy McKeon, who played the smoky-voiced babybutch Jo on The Facts of Life. Jo's tension-laden interaction with snooty, preppy Blair made my babydyke head spin with mischievous, if slightly clueless delight.

As I grew up and started to figure things out, there was the odd film about lesbians. But there were virtually no happy endings for gay women in the movies. They all somehow came to similar bad ends. They went crazy, went on murderous killing sprees, or ended up dead—often by suicide—or all three: crazy, murderous, and then dead. The film landscape was pretty bleak, and television wasn't much different. Up until Willow and her girlfriend Tara, the only non-tragic "lesbians" I'd seen on TV were of the sweeps variety—straight female characters who tempted the dark side of the force by flirting with and maybe even kissing another girl, only to scamper quickly back to the safety and conformity of heterosexual lovin'.

By the time I finished college, I had seen this enough, and the eye candy novelty of it was beginning to wear thin. I wanted real storylines about women loving one another. I wanted romance. I wanted characters who were actually lesbians! There were plenty of gay boys as regular characters on TV at that point. Sure, they were relegated to snarky celibacy in Bestfriendlandia, but they were here and they were queer. Where were all the gay girls?

So like every other lesbian who watched witchy Willow and Tara lock eyes and hands and wills, telekinetically sealing themselves into a laundry room to keep out the bad guys, I knew by the way they held on to one another longer than necessary that there was more afoot here than mere spellcraft. I saw it coming, but I was prepared for Willow and Tara to turn out to be just another Sweepsbian flash in the pan.

Only they weren't. Over the course of nine episodes, they spent more and more time together. Willow started lying to her friends about where she was spending the night. And the intense way these two were looking at each other while they held hands and "did spells" had increasingly less to do with getting their Wicca on. They were quietly, unobtrusively falling in love. And then they were girlfriends. Officially. Willow had a coming out scene with best pal Buffy and everything.

Amber Benson as Tara.
Photo property of Twentieth Century Fox.

I became more and more starry-eyed over Willow and her shy girlfriend, Tara, utterly delighted and very much aware that I was watching two girls fall in love on television for the first time ever. A big fan of the internet, too, I searched there for more information about my new favorite show. So it was that I stumbled across The Kitten Board, an active fan community dedicated to the Willow/Tara relationship. There I discovered a group of folks who found this couple and their budding romance every bit as magical as I did.

Elsewhere in online Buffy fandom (already the biggest internet TV fandom ever, surpassing the efforts of even the Trekkies), the response to Willow and Tara was less enthusiastic. Buffy websites and message boards were awash with homophobic vitriol directed towards Tara in particular, for "converting" Willow, and calling for "the fat dike [sic]" to be booted off the show. But Willow and Tara were here to stay: Even the show's creator, producers, and writers said so, courageously taking a stand in support of Willow and Tara and gay relationships in general.

I was disturbed by the harsh reaction on the part of some fans, but after six years of being openly gay, I was used to seeing and hearing that sort of ignorant, poorly-spelled drivel. It didn't lessen my excitement about Willow and Tara one iota. I was enchanted—ecstatic even. And I wasn't alone. I threw myself into online Willow/Tara fandom at the Kitten Board with gleeful abandon. We were a group comprised largely of gay and bisexual women from all over the world, but we had our resident lesbros (friendly, mostly non-pervy straight guys), too. For those of us to whom the relationship meant so much, The Kitten became an oasis of calm within Buffy fandom, a safe space to celebrate how amazing it felt to finally see ourselves and our relationships represented week after week on the little screen.

Still, I couldn't help but notice the glaring disparity in the way the Willow/Tara romance played out when compared to the other relationships on the show. Buffy and her boyfriend, Captain Cardboard (Riley), boinked like sex-crazed bunnies, as did Anya and Xander. Even crusty old Giles was seen with a naked woman in his bed around the same time Tara was introduced. Willow and Tara? Months later, still doing "spells."

For an entire season and a half, we never saw them kiss. We never knew when or even if their relationship had been consummated. They flirted tamely. They held hands and exchanged sweet smiles. They danced together at the Bronze like the uncoordinated dorks we knew and loved them to be. But due to strict network censor rules about homosexual content, Willow and Tara's physical relationship was relegated entirely to metaphor and "magic." Their identities as witches became code speak for their being gay. This was a running gag on the show, an example of the kind of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that made Buffy one of the smartest shows of its time.

Because I was so hungry for gay female visibility onscreen, I happily ate up the metaphors. Certainly, this was further than any other show had dared to go in exploring an onscreen lesbian relationship, and the makers of Buffy were folks well known for dealing with metaphors most exquisitely. They pulled them off in ways that were creative and visually appealing, if lacking in outright smoochies. In the place of a first love scene for our girls, we saw Willow and Tara, mid-spell ritual, lightly stroking each other's arms and chanting breathily—until Willow finally falls back onto strategically placed cushions, writhing and moaning in "magical" ecstasy. It sounds a little silly, even to me. But it was sexy. And it was better than nothing.

But I wanted more. And on The Kitten, there was more. I discovered fan fiction, stories written by fans about their favorite characters, posing new storylines, new scenarios, and oftentimes in the case of Willow and Tara, long awaited, fully-fleshed out love scenes. Some of the folks writing Willow/Tara fanfics were incredibly talented. Others clearly didn't have much experience as writers, but their efforts were heartfelt. Even the poorly written stories were unfailingly interesting in the myriad ways their authors portrayed the emotional and physical relationship between Willow and Tara with less "sub" and more "text."

As a reader, I became fascinated. Here was a group of gay female fans taking matters into their own hands, re-imagining this relationship and what parts of it we as viewers were allowed to see. As a lesbian, I found this incredibly empowering. And as a writer, I found myself thinking I can do this.

By then, my sojourn up north had ended, and I was back in San Diego working part-time jobs and not making as much progress as I liked on my novel. I couldn't seem to connect with my characters in quite the way I wanted. The bulk of what I had on paper at that point was turning out to be more in the way of backstory and lackluster character sketches than useable prose. I was stuck.

I wanted to write something engaging and sexy but lacked the courage to try my hand at erotica. I wanted to imagine my two favorite TV characters finally being given free reign to be sexual with each other. It seemed only natural that these impulses should meet. So I wrote my first piece of erotica—my first fanfic. I called it "Vixens," borrowing one of Tara's lines from the show. She had dubbed Willow a vixen, flirtatiously calling the redhead out as temptress. It was one of the sexiest onscreen moments the girls had ever shared.

As a writer, I used that first story to expand on what I had been allowed to see, but also to play with the idea that as a viewer, I had long been teased by the use of "spells" in the place of real love scenes. What started as a bit of musing about how Willow and Tara might have consummated their relationship quickly turned into twenty or so pages of Tara teasing and tempting Willow to get over her sexual "shyness." Yes, she used magic. But she used sexier magic, and she used wiles and wickedness, too. I included several steamy scenes of foreplay that were suddenly cut off, leaving my borrowed heroines aching for more. There was even a semblance of a plot, and plenty of fun bringing the other characters into the background, trying on their various voices for size. And in the end, there was the gloriously frisky lesbian lustfest that we never got to see onscreen.

Satisfied with my virgin effort into the genre, I posted my story on the fan fiction board at the Kitten, using the penname "Dumbsaint," a nod to my favorite obscure Kerouac quote. The response floored me. I was a hit. I had instant, self-proclaimed fans. I had folks requesting permission to repost the story elsewhere on other fan fiction sites. People actually thought my work was good—and they weren't shy about saying so or asking for more. For a young, frustrated, unpublished writer, it was a uniquely gratifying experience. And it was surprisingly easy to write these characters about whom I cared so much.

Willow and Tara in Buffy season 6

I wrote more stories about Willow and Tara, and their fondly imagined sexcapades. My initial efforts after "Vixens" took up where the show would leave off, imagining those spells scenes that I saw onscreen evolving into more physical explorations. I wrote about what their first kiss might have been like. I penned still another version of how they might have consummated their relationship. In some of these stories, I dispensed with plot altogether and just focused on character development along with the romantic and sexy, sensory stuff. I was having more fun as a writer than I'd ever had in my life, and for the first time, I found myself part of a community of other writers who supported and applauded one another's efforts with a uniquely loyal and heartfelt brand of appreciation. We wrote for ourselves and for each other, brought together by our mutual adoration of these characters, and for many of us our shared experience of being gay women in a mainstream culture that often made us feel invisible. Watching the continuing adventures of Willow and Tara every week gave us hope.

So I kept writing. My stories even won a couple of fan awards, though those never meant as much to me as the comments and emails I got from people who enjoyed reading my work. I had an audience that wrote back. The same day that I would finish and post a story, I would receive instant feedback. Any ideas I'd had about what transpired between authors and readers were forever altered. And through the experience, I was developing a wholly new sense of confidence in myself as a writer.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of its sixth season, Buffy made the move from the "family friendly" WB to UPN, a flashier, edgier channel that was gradually allowing the writers and producers a bit more leeway in what they could show on screen. Even so, magic was still the vehicle by which the sexual relationship between Willow and Tara was expressed. The increasingly silly nature of this was not lost on me.

"Once More, With Feeling," the much-celebrated, tongue-in-cheek musical episode of Buffy arrived. In it, Willow and Tara came the closest they had yet to having a real sex scene. At the climax of their sappy love song, Tara falls back on the bed she shares with Willow, as the latter crawls down her body and disappears from the frame. Tara begins to levitate off of the bed, her head thrown back, singing about magic and how Willow makes her "complete." It was clear enough that we were watching them in the act of lesbian sexing. But still with the spells and innuendo!

Unfortunately, the musical episode spelled the beginning of the end for Willow and Tara. Their relationship took a turn as it was revealed that Tara really was, literally, under Willow's spell. The redhead had been magically "erasing" Tara's memories of fights they'd been having about Willow's using magic irresponsibly, and too much. Suddenly, magic wasn't just a metaphor for lesbo loving anymore. Now magic was drugs, and Willow was an addict. The subtext had begun to make its way into some rather alarming territory. The witches broke up, and Willow's life began to spiral out of control. In the fandom, we gnashed our teeth and pined for reconciliation. Lots of fanfic authors, including myself, tried their hand at those kinds of stories.

It was no secret that the show had been planning to explore an "Evil Willow" storyline—the writers had been carefully foreshadowing this arc for years. I was game enough to follow along, sure that I'd be in for a thrilling ride. After all, an alternative universe "evil vampire" Willow had showed up a few times during season three to great comic effect, and those were some of my favorite episodes. I had complete trust in the brilliant writers and in executive producer (and mad genius) Joss Whedon: Willow would venture down the dark road, but in the end, her love for Tara would pull her back. And they'd be together again.

But alarming rumors in the form of spoilers began to trickle down into the fandom: Tara was going to die. Her death would be the catalyst that sends Willow off the edge into evil with a capital "E." Stubbornly, I was one of many fans who insisted that even if Tara did die, they'd find a way to bring her back. Heck, Buffy had already died twice on the show. She'd spent the entire previous summer decomposing underground, only to be magically resurrected by Willow.

Alyson Hannigan as "Evil Willow."
Photo property of Twentieth Century Fox.

Like so many other folks to whom this fictional relationship meant so much, I had faith that the girls would be together in the end. The creepy new undertone to the subtext would be resolved with the show's characteristic brilliance. They'd make it right. I was sure of it. After all, the folks who made Buffy were aware that they had staked out a brave new, positive precedent in the way gay people were portrayed onscreen, and they were proud of what they had achieved with the relationship. Echoing previous statements by executive producer Joss Whedon, one of the show's other writers publicly promised that Tara wasn't going anywhere.

And so it was with mounting horror that I watched the end of the show's sixth season play out. We fans got the Willow/Tara reunion we had hoped for. It was a bit rushed, but for the first time, there was a truly passionate love scene that began with hot and heavy kissing and ended with the girls naked in bed, flushed with loving afterglow. And then there was more kissing. Naked-in-bed-kissing! It was intimate, sensual, and beautiful, and long, long overdue.

So it was especially upsetting when, later in the same episode, Tara is dressing next to the bed in which they'd just made history as well as non-subtexty love, and she is struck by a stray bullet meant for Buffy. She looks down at the bloodstain slowly expanding over her heart, appears puzzled for a moment, and falls to the floor dead.

And she stays dead. The resulting "Vengeance Willow" goes on an evil, murderous rampage, and she is saved in the end not by her love for Tara, but by the selfless love of Xander, a humble male carpenter. And a story about a yellow crayon. The imagery was truly upsetting. Whereas before, the show had always been so cleverly subversive in their use of metaphor, now the "evil, crazy, murderous lesbian" and the world to boot were being "saved" by the newly appointed Jesus figure. And a yellow crayon.

Let's see. Evil and crazy. Check. Murderous. Check. Dead. Check! Where had I seen this before? Oh, yes. Everywhere.

The Kitten board imploded. We gay fans in particular felt misled and betrayed. Willow and Tara were literally all we had in terms of a committed, long-term lesbian relationship on TV. Now they were gone, and to add insult to injury, it had been done in the tritely clichéd manner we were all too accustomed to seeing.

Joss Whedon finally admitted that Tara had been marked for death from the very beginning. But he was puzzled by the sense of betrayal expressed by many of the gay fans. On UPN's "The Bronze," a fan-site often visited by Joss and some of the show's writers, Whedon expressed his indignation at some of this criticism: "I knew some people would be angry with me for destroying the only gay couple on the show, but the idea that I COULDN'T kill Tara because she was gay is as offensive to me as the idea that I DID kill her because she was gay."

Long-running debates ensued throughout Buffy fandom—nowhere more passionately than on the Kitten Board—weighing the value of artistic license against social responsibility in storytelling. Some folks at the Kitten even put together a beautifully-worded Lesbian Cliché FAQ to explain to other fans, the show's creators, and the world at large, just why Willow and Tara had meant so much the show's gay fans and why it hurt so keenly to lose them in the way that we did.

After the smoke had cleared, Tara stayed dead. A few of the writers from Buffy eventually made conciliatory comments to the press in response to the fan outcry, conceding that "maybe" the show had "done something bad." "Maybe" they had unintentionally invoked the old negative clichés. That was as much as the fans ever got by way of any indication that the creators of the show understood how the end of the Willow/Tara storyline, text and subtext alike, read to its queer viewers, and how hurtful that was. In the end, I had to own up to giving the show's creators too much credit; sure, they had shown themselves to be clever, culturally savvy and progressive, but everyone makes mistakes. I was disappointed, but I forgave them and moved on.

Eventually, I was once more able to enjoy the show as much as I ever did, and to revel in my Buffy geekdom with the best of them. It helps that now that there's Showtime's The L Word and cable networks like Logo that feature all gay-themed programming. The queer media landscape has come a long way.

But after Tara died, I stopped writing Willow/Tara fan fiction. I stopped reading it, too. I know there are new stories out there, some of them written by friends who are incredibly talented writers and featuring alternate endings for season six with continuations of Willow and Tara's story. I've heard many of these are quite good. I'm not ready to read them yet, even five years later, but chances are that I will someday. Just knowing that those stories are out there gives me a sense of comfort; it means that there are still fans out there with heart enough to keep rewriting, re-imagining, and expanding upon the realm of the possible, and on what we're allowed to see. If I learned anything from the experience of participating in Willow/Tara fandom, and as an author of fanfic, it was that stories and characters belong as much to the people who love them as the folks who originally created them.

And if you ask me, that's still magical.

(Reposted from The Hipster Book Blub, October, 2007.)