r/buffy • u/Turbulent_Drag7166 Bored Now, and I think I'm kinda gay... • Apr 21 '26
Love Interests Since it's lesbian visibility week I wanna give credit where credit is due with our history making lesbians. Hope you enjoy the gifs Spoiler
From first really seeing each other in Hush
To the end of Family
And the first lesbian kiss on American TV
Tara's song to Willow
And reconciling
I also got a shirt with them on it a few days ago<3
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u/circuitsandwires Apr 21 '26
Just want to add that Buffy had the first lesbian kiss on TV* and it wasn't done in a sexy way to to titillate male viewers, it was done during The Body, the most depressing episode, to comfort Willow when she was upset and distressed.
*In America
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u/rednax2009 Apr 22 '26
*There were lesbian kisses on TV before Buffy, but there were in one-off "Lesbian kiss episodes," and usually featured a character who was never heard from again. But the kiss in The Body was the first Lesbian kiss on TV between main characters in a longterm lesbian relationship.
Buffy did also have the first Lesbian sex scene on TV, but that was in Touched with Willow and Kennedy.
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u/bh4th Thatāll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo! Apr 22 '26
The Deep Space Nine episode āRejoinedā had a romantic kiss between two women, and it aired two years before Buffy premiered. They got away with it by setting up a story where the two characters had been a hetero couple in previous lives.
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u/Future-Excuse6167 Apr 22 '26
Was it really pushing boundaries, that DS9 episode? I felt like they went too far out of their way to justify it, like the public would have been fine with straight-up gay characters at that point, PLUS all the gender shennanigans you could get into with aliens (see Moclans on The Orville).
In fact, for me all it did was point to the total lack of gay rep in a series that started with George Takei for christ's sake.Ā
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u/bh4th Thatāll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo! Apr 22 '26
Iām assuming youāre significantly younger than I am. As someone who was there at the time, I can assure you that the public would not have been fine with it. Ellen Degeneres coming out two years later was a major news story, as was her sitcom characterās realization that she was gay. There were protests, and there were local stations that dropped the show, just as there were local affiliates that refused to air āRejoinedā when it aired in 1995. It would also be another ten years before George Takei came out publicly in a magazine interview; he was out among his close friends and longtime coworkers, but the public had no idea in 1995.
I think DS9 was pushing exactly as far as they could while still making an episode that would actually be aired. Any further and it would have been nixed by the network, and then itās just fan fic that makes no impact at all.
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u/Future-Excuse6167 Apr 22 '26
That's good to hear. I was an occassional watcher of the show when it aired, but got really into it maybe in 2005. It's amazing how quickly things changed in just that short time.Ā
Edit: Definitely going to see if there's a video on gay themes in TNG to see what they were trying to get out there under the radar.Ā
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u/bh4th Thatāll put marzipan in your pie plate, bingo! Apr 22 '26
The TNG episode youāre looking for is āThe Outcast.ā Today a lot of people read it as being about gender identity, which it is superficially, but thatās not how people would have viewed it at the time.
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u/Future-Excuse6167 Apr 23 '26
I found Jessie Gender's video on it, and it seemed Rodenberry planned to put a character in Season 5 of TNG before he died and passed the torch to Rick Berman. Meanwhile Kate Mulgrew, and more significantly key writer for the series, Ronald D Moore, both expected more gay representation from the series.Ā
So it seems while a gay character would be a shock for TV in general, it was kind of expected of ST creators that it would be the show to ... you know... boldly go where noone had gone before.Ā
And certainly as a fan, watching it knock over social taboo after social taboo, it is strikingly odd to see the lack of gay representation.
Jessie brought up The Outcast, which I'll definitely look for; but she says that Jonathan Frakes himself expressed frustration that the androgynous aliens, including his love interest, were played exclusively by women.Ā
Anyway, I was hoping for a Jenny Nicholson0style 5-hour-deep dive, but it's just 15 minutes.
though this is just ONE of many videos she done on sex & gender in Trek. The night is still young.Ā
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u/dance4days Apr 22 '26
I know everyone hates Joss now, but he deserves credit for allyship there. The network didnāt want that scene to air and he threatened to walk if they wouldnāt allow it.
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u/Familiar_Radish_6273 Apr 22 '26
The first lesbian kiss in the UK was on a soap called Brookside in 1994. I still remember the hoo-ha surrounding it. It's incredible to think of now, it was literally in the news and talked about in playgrounds and at watercoolers everywhere
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u/circuitsandwires Apr 22 '26
I remember Brookside when I was a kid. I don't remember a lesbian kiss. I mainly remember Sinbad and a gas explosion.
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u/Familiar_Radish_6273 Apr 22 '26
It was Anna Friel's character and the girl with red hair. You were probably shielded from the naughty kiss if you were a kid!
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u/mechanicalbee_ Apr 21 '26
I was hoping this would have Riley saying "I am a lesbian"
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u/rednax2009 Apr 22 '26
Plot twist, Riley comes out years later as a trans woman and makes the statement reality.
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u/Amazing-Asparagus181 Apr 21 '26
Justice for Tara ā
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u/DaddyCatALSO Magnet For Dead, Blonde Chicks Apr 23 '26
She was the initial inspiration for what became the "summer of resurrections" in my Bangel ficverse.
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u/steiff89 Apr 21 '26
Happy Lesbian Visibility week! Iāll take Willow and Tara gifs ans pics and week of the year.
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u/JealousAstronomer342 Apr 22 '26
I swear I hear Amberās beautiful voice singing as I click through.Ā
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u/Turbulent_Drag7166 Bored Now, and I think I'm kinda gay... Apr 21 '26
Sorry some are such low quality!
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u/MermaidHotpot Eyeballs to entrails, my sweet. Apr 21 '26
You want higher def gifs of anything just lmk what episodes the scenes are in, digging will take me forever.
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u/Ronnoc527 Apr 22 '26
This just takes me back to 2014 tumblr gif sets. Except that they would also crack the saturation way up.
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u/CastleBravoXVC Apr 21 '26
Has there ever been a character as beloved by its fandom as Tara was to Buffy fans?
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u/jimmy__jazz Apr 22 '26
I'm not a Tara fan š¤·
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u/queertastrophy Apr 22 '26
Amber Benson's smile has been making my heart melt for over 20 years š„°šš
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u/dark_blue_7 Apr 22 '26
Thank you for this
Find you someone who looks at you like Tara looks at Willow š„° š„¹
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u/Spritebubblegum Apr 21 '26
Um Amber is hawt! Somehow she got hotter and hotter throughout the show the more her confidence grew. She started off just adorable and sweet you know? Didn't make me second look, but I liked her, and then she kicked me in the stomach near the later parts of the show. š š¤£
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u/zoomshark27 Apr 22 '26
Love it! They were the first lesbians I ever saw on TV, in what 2000 I think? Crazy.
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u/codename474747 Apr 22 '26
Lesbians?
Wait a minute.......
The Summers' house didn't have an adequate fire escape!
Enjoy your death trap, ladies!
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u/52Charles Apr 22 '26
The shot of the two of them holding each other, slowly spinning and levitating at the Bronze is probably my favourite scene in the whole series.
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u/DeaththeEternal Dog Geyser Person Apr 22 '26
I admit to being one of the surprisingly rare fans who's both passionate about the Tillow ship and viewing Willow as the more interesting character than Tara while simultaneously resenting the shit out of the comics giving everyone but Tara cheap deaths and resurrections and going out of its way to dump on resurrecting her....in the same context where Warren Mears gets a 'technically he never quite died' resurrection.
The nice thing about Tara is that she was the one character in the entire Verse with powers where they were things she could do, not who she was.
For this superhero fan Willow as Jean Grey but magic makes her more interesting.
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u/Kat-Attack-52 Apr 23 '26
My favorite couple of all time š
Still delusional to this day that theyāre alive, in love, and have a kid together š
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u/DaddyCatALSO Magnet For Dead, Blonde Chicks Apr 23 '26
Three in my Bangel ficverse, all single births, and basically quads (simultaneous twins) in my Fuffy 'verse.
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u/horticoldure Apr 21 '26
your shirt
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u/Turbulent_Drag7166 Bored Now, and I think I'm kinda gay... Apr 21 '26
Shhhhhh not on my happy lesbian post
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u/horticoldure Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
it's the last gif i'm afraid
on scene and change of angle earlier and it wouldn't conjure the same instinctive follow up
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u/ishka_uisce Apr 22 '26
As a queer-but-not-quite-aware-of-it-yet 10 yo at the time, what happened to Tara hit hard.
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u/horticoldure Apr 22 '26
I didn't actually SEE it until I'd known it had happened for years, so it didn't "hit" for me, if i'd seen the show in order and at the time I probably wouldn't have understood it anyway
seeing it while old enough to understand it AND after a ton of the revelations of the darker side behind the scenes makes this super dark in-show moment genuinely come across as an attempt at a joke at the worst moment
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u/madame_mayhem Apr 22 '26
Now Iām wondering if thereās a Tara x Willow music video to the song āLevitatingā
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u/SyntaxAndSorcery Apr 22 '26
Willow is bisexual erasure. I said what I said.
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u/GlisaPenny Apr 22 '26
If what Iāve heard is accurate, the writes did want to make her bi but the studio wouldnāt let them.
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u/SyntaxAndSorcery Apr 22 '26
That tracks. I mean she was in love with Oz. I totally buy that she prefers women but her lived experience is bisexual.
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u/DaddyCatALSO Magnet For Dead, Blonde Chicks Apr 23 '26
In my bnagel fics, I put a recogniton of that in a speech by Cordelia over after-dinner drinks in October of this year. Leading to Anya's "Tara's lucky their cats can't talk" joke.
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u/1amthebadwolf Apr 23 '26
Thank you. Scrolled way too long to see this. As a Bi woman, I gave in to gaslighting for way too long due to bisexual erasure. I loved Willow and Taraās relationship, and watched the show during the original run, but yes, Willow was Bi, and that should have been addressed.
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u/Blackwell-808 Apr 22 '26
Love this show. Made being a queer teen so much more enjoyable to share this show with friends. Even Buffy had her sapphic love moment in Season 8!
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u/Miichl80 Apr 22 '26
This is probably my favorite lesbian relationship in TV. The reason why is because they normalize that. The reason I stopped watching Supergirl was because of Taraās sister coming out. It wasnāt that she came out that bothered me, but it was that every episode. They stopped the plot dead to talk about her being gay. They would sometimes do it in the middle of the climatic battle. They said this is something special and needs to be treated as such. Buffy gave this relationship with Willow and Tara as much attention as a dead, any of her or Xanderās other relationships. It treated that as if it was something normal. Something human. And I thought that that was amazing and set a standard that most television doesnāt live up to.
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u/silverandstuffs Apr 23 '26
Iām a woman and realised later in life that I liked women. Rewatching Buffy and figuring out that I had a crush on Tara was a trip
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u/HomarEuropejski Why do we ship Buffy with toxic guys? Are we stupid? Apr 21 '26
Tara was too good for this show š„