Current mood:	contemplative
Entry tags:	angel, buffy, meta

Willow and Tara and gay stereotypes
Okay, as promised, here's a discussion of gay cliches and Buffy and Angel.

Before I get into it, I want to say this: THESE ARE JUST INTERPRETATIONS. I'm not saying they are my interpretations. I'm not writing this to revive the "Tara's death was the worst homophobic act on TV EVER!!!!!" debate or anything like that. I'm writing it because I was refamiliarizing myself with The Celluloid Closet and while I was reading I couldn't help but draw some comparisons to Buffy and Angel. These are some of the comparisons. You're welcome (nay, encouraged) to draw your own. =)

That being said, let's get started:



Part 1: Willow, gay in reality, not so happy symbolically

Was season 6 really the start?

The Willow/Tara arc of season 6 is, I think everybody can agree, the thing which caused the biggest hue and cry about homophobia in the Jossverse. In season 6, the two gay characters either died (Tara) or turned evil (Willow). This caused many to protest, saying that Joss had sold the girls out to the Evil!Dead!Gay stereotype (see link for more info) instead of allowing them simply to be healthy, happy lesbian lovers.

Now naturally this raises the question of whether anyone on Buffy is ever allowed to be "healthy" or, for that matter, "happy" (didn't Angel teach us our lesson there? ;) ), so honestly it can be said (and I agree) that forming some kind of protective bubble around Willow and Tara which kept their relationship from all harm would have been singling them out for special treatment because of their gay status. After all, it's not like Xander and Anya were in raptures over their broken marriage-to-be, or like Buffy and Spike thought that their relationship, such as it was, was perfect happiness for either of them. (And let's note that heterosexual Anya also went evil in response to her relationship problems.) So, IMO, Willow/Tara simply fit into the grand scheme of things, which is that that nobody on the show is allowed to be happy for long.

However, this isn't to say that those who had a problem with the way Willow and Tara were treated are totally making things up either. Because while they arguably were as unhappy as the heterosexual couples, the manner in which they were unhappy - and even the manner in which they were happy - is where the problem lies.

The other cliches

That Willow and Tara can now be added to the statistics of evil!dead!gay characters everywhere is indusputible. Tara was gay and died. Willow was gay and went evil. We can't argue that. They now add to the numbers of evil!dead!gay characters in the same way that Buffy adds to the number of strong heterosexual female characters, Angelus adds to the number of charismatic, handsome evil male characters and so on. Whether or not Joss & co did this on purpose is the thing that's up for debate.

Personally I vote no. I don't think that they purposefully killed Tara because she was gay, or made Willow evil because she was gay. I think they killed Tara and they turned Willow. But, at the same time, I think they were - or at least I hope they were - painfully unaware of the symbolism involved that they themselves used - symbolism that goes beyond the evil!dead!gay stereotype.

Culturally speaking (and here we're talking about US culture), there are certain cliches and stereotypes that surround gay characters and have surrounded them for almost all of Hollywood history. The evil!dead!gay stereotype is one of them, and saw its heyday in the 1960s and 70s.

There are, however, other cliches, and these cliches are in evidence with Willow and Tara's characters. Most notably of which is the cliche that the gay character can't be, simply, a character who happens to be gay. Intstead, the character's sexuality completely defines them and rules every moment that they are on the screen.

What did Tara contribute to the Scoobies, other than being Willow's girlfriend? Any resemblance of a personality outside of Willow was woefully hidden until season 6 when Tara, as so many doomed Buffy characters before her, suddenly became sympathetic and interesting merely because she was going to be killed off in the end.

The show itself acknowledged this in the episode about Tara's birthday - none of the Scoobies knew anything about her, other than the fact that she was Willow's girlfriend and into magic. It's worth noting, too, that the birthday episode was a rare episode that featured Tara prominently (I want to say the only episode that focused entirely on her for a main plotline but as I'm not the queen of Buffy canon I bow to someone else who can correct me) but in a storyline that was nothing but a metaphor about, again, her sexuality. (And we'll talk about those metaphors in a sec)

And what about Willow? She became gay and was suddenly cursed with Lesbian Tourette's syndrome - helplessly spouting sentences related to breasts in the most inappropriate moments because, of course, all lesbians speak like that. We could argue that this was only done to help the audience recognize that Willow's sexuality had changed now, but wouldn't the constant presense of her girlfriend, the Scoobies repeated mentions of it, and "gay now" have also done the job? Any attempts to try to gloss over Willow's new "gay" dialogue with some meta explanation are also pretty much shot to Hell by Kennedy, who apparently suffers from the same illness (although in her case it's with the word "wood" and not various forms of "breasts" but then again the season is still young).

And what about Kennedy? What is her personality? We know facts - she's a SiT, her Watcher died, she's older than the others, she comes from money. These are facts, they're not a personality. The only thing that's been done to give Kennedy any non-Big Bad related depth was to make her gay. Yes, arguably the fact that she's taking something of a leadership role with the younger SiTs adds to the depth. If more of this is shown then good. But so far it's been snippets of her leading surrounded either by her spouting off facts about herself or her doing "gay" things. What are her likes? Dislikes? Favorite hobbies? What makes her laugh? What attracts her to Willow? What, in short, defines her as a person other than "SiT who is gay and attracted to Willow" just as for years Tara was defined as "Witch who is gay and attracted to Willow". In short, nothing. Kennedy and Tara fall into the same cliche Hollywood has used for years - gay characters who are defined by being gay. And Willow, a main character, has stumbled along with them. When she turned into a lesbian Willow turned into a character who was also defined by her sexuality. Except, of course, for when she was defined by her magic.

And there's those pesky metaphors. Watch the cliches surrounding Willow now turn into a mobeius strip.

Magic as Metaphor

Back on the WB Joss was not allowed to show Willow and Tara actually doing gay things. It wasn't until season 5 that a wisely unhyped kiss was allowed to sneak in. Until then, they were stuck with metaphor, a grand Buffyverse tradition. The metaphor chosen? Magic.

Okay fine. It makes sense, right? Willow and Tara "do spells" together - wink, wink, nudge, nudge. We all get what that means, right? Hell, even Xander got what it meant. And as a metaphor it worked - their relationship was magical, they were more powerful together than apart, sparks fly when ever they're near each other - and so on and so forth. Metaphorically it's fine. The metaphor even worked well in Tara's birthday episode, when magic and demon heritage substituted for homosexuality in Tara's dealings with her family. So far so good.

Then came season 6.

Season 6, the season that caused the hue and cry about Willow and Tara turning into homophobic cliches. The season in which not only did Tara die but Willow turned evil - because of her magic.

The lack of Standards and Practices on UPN gave way to a new world of hot Buffy on Spike and Willow on Tara action. Our favorite witches were allowed to nest together and to be as blatent sexually (albeit not as frequently) as Buffy and Spike did. No more magic metaphor was needed. The girls were just gay. And, in theory, this is okay too.

In practice though I think the folks at ME didn't step out of the meta-level enough to realize what they were doing. Or, again I hope that's what happened. I think ME realized that they didn't need magic for the old metaphor anymore and therefore retrofitted it into a new one. I don't think they realized that in spite of the channel change, the two metaphors were actually still connected. They couldn't ask their audience to read between the lines on the WB and then act all surprised when the audience kept reading there on UPN.

Especially since the magic as gay love metaphor was still there.

Right up until Once More With Feeling, a UPN episode, the old metaphor is still with us. Tara sings of her love for Willow with "I'm Under Your Spell". Which on a superficial level shows us simply that - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - the metaphor hasn't gone anywhere. But on a deeper level is actually kind of disturbing.

Because "I'm Under Your Spell" - prettily sung though it was - is actually not that healthy a song. Tara is singing about her co-dependance on Willow. She has no definition outside of what Willow gives her - a romantic concept in the "Two can become one" ideal of couples, but a troubling one for a character who, accurately enough, has no definition outside of Willow. It's also a song of foreshadowing - Tara is, in fact, under Willow's spell - a spell of forgetting, which is the only reason why they're together for the song.

So, much though a quick scan suggests that this is a happy, romantic song, actually it's not and not on any possible angle for the Willow/Tara relationship. This then strikes the first blow against the magic as happy gay love metaphor. Joss himself uses the metaphor to show us that their relationship isn't happy, nor is it healthy, although we can all still agree that it's gay.

From this blow, we plunge headlong (with a Tabula Rasa break) into magic's new metaphor - drug addiction. Gone is the happy gay metaphor. Now there's a new metaphor, and a not exactly hidden one either. Willow's use of magic is inappropriate, it's unhealthy, she uses magic to escape her responsibilities, her use of magic puts a minor in danger.

Which, as a metaphor for drug addiction, is at least in the neighborhood of apt. But the metaphor for gay love was only two episodes prior. Was Tabula Rasa supposed to symbolically cue us in that we were supposed to abandon the old metaphor for the new? Did ME think enough of its audience was actually aware that UPN had no S&P division to make the connection on their own?

Can we really say that those who felt betrayed by Willow's season 6 arc as a slap in the face to gay fans were that off in their interpretations? Especially when Willow's use of magic was the thing that ultimately brought her to the dark side? Yes, her darkest moments were with the good goal of helping her friends (attacking Glory, bringing Buffy back from the dead, getting revenge for Tara, etc) but honestly does it contradict the theory when the thing that kick-started Willow on the black-eyed Eeeeeevil magic was Glory's attack on Tara, her girlfriend? And when Willow's ultimate descent into Eeeeeevil, period, was in response to Tara's death?

What to say, then, to the show's contention that the only way Willow can be "healthy" or trustworthy is if she completely and totally abandons magic? Again - as drug metaphor, fine. But that spector of the old metaphor is still there.

Now, granted, Tara herself managed to keep using magic in a healthy manner and managed to, other than the bullet through her chest, be a lesbian in a healthy manner as well. I'm not saying otherwise. But the show itself never really explained how magic was bad and horrible for Willow yet good for Tara. Even in the intended metaphor of magic as addiction this never really made sense. Were they trying to show Tara as the responsible, social drinker and Willow as the addict? Were they attempting something else? It's never explained on the show - at least, not in season 6.

In season 7 we suddenly get explanations all over the place which contradict what we were told before - magic isn't an addiction, it's not a matter of Willow going cold turkey. She can use magic, just "good" magic. Thus we finally understand why Willow's s6 magic was bad while Tara's was good. Okay - but this is after the fact. This is after the backlash against the s6 storyline. And, notably, this is during the same season in which Joss and Marti were entertaining the idea of giving Willow a new boyfriend - a fine nod to those who maintain that Willow is actually bisexual, but a disturbing move symbolically considering that thanks to the dead lesbian and the evil lesbian, the only goal left in this cliche hat trick was the cured lesbian - one who goes back to men again. So Kennedy, much though she has no personality outside of being gay and interested in Willow, is at least a step in the right symbolic direction. S7, at least, starts to show that ME finally picked up on the messages they were sending - however inadvertently - and started to correct them.

Final thoughts

So what do we get out of all this? We get that for all that Buffy had multiple canonical gay characters, and for all the "I'm not sleeping with Spike, but I'm starting to suspect that you are" type slash-friendly jokes, the show itself ironically - and, again I strongly suspect, inadvertently - made use of homophobic stereotypes and cliches that, in s6 especially, undermined all the gay-positive things they were trying to do, thus resulting in fans who felt that they - and Willow and Tara - had been betrayed. In s7, though, we see hints that ME may have clued in to what they were doing, and are now trying to rectify it.

Would fans have felt as betrayed if not for the abuse of the magic metaphor? Or if Willow and Tara had been defined outside of their sexuality (literally or metaphorically)? Or if the only other canonical gay character, Larry, hadn't been summarized in the two bullet points of 1) Gay and 2) Dead?

Basically what I'm saying is that while I don't think ME meant to destroy their gay characters because they were gay, I do think they managed to do it using the same exact tools as those who did destroy gay characters simply for being homosexual. Hence, I'm thinking, why there was such a fuss. Seeing Red, with the actual death and turn to evil, was merely the straw that - appropriately enough - broke the "metaphor" camel's back.

Of course the interesting flip side to this is that for all that Buffy, the show with the gay characters, tears them down, Angel, the show without them, actually supports them, and does so by flying in the face of the same cliches (or at least the same school of cliches) that Buffy bought into.

But I'll get into that in another essay. =)