On the Buffy of My Boyhood
"In the third grade. Nine years old. Laying in bed with tears streaming down my face."
November 20, 2004
Freehold, New Jersey
I was 10 years old
Hello there! It’s just me. Buffy season 7 came out! Of course I have it. It’s excellent! Yet there’s a lot of computer glitches on the photos for the box set. Ah well! But it’s upsetting! I now have the complete Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. Seasons 1 through 7. Episodes 1 through 144. How depressing. I got it yesterday and I’m already on episode 13. How sad. Call me if you find me a life!
May 20, 2008
Gilford, New Hampshire
I was 14 years old
So, five years ago today, I was in the third grade. Nine years old. Laying in bed with tears streaming down my face. Five years ago today: the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired. The show that went hand-in-hand with my early childhood. I have just recently re-discovered the amazingness that is that show. I can relate with Buffy now. I can decipher the metaphors. And Buffy and Madonna go together spectacularly: two super women! Hello!
And now, five years after “Chosen” first aired, I’m watching it once again. I’m in an entirely different state, Jillian is 400 miles away, but I still have Buffy. And that makes it a little bit easier.
March 9, 2022
Brooklyn, New York
I am 28 years old
Somewhere around once a week—maybe in regards to a movie we’re watching, though just as likely apropos of nothing—I’ll turn to Austin, my middle-distance stare conveying somber and imminent revelation, and I’ll say: “I have no nostalgia for childhood.” If he’s feeling generous, Austin will respond, “Oh, completely.” Because of course, it’s not the most novel idea, and for gay guys in particular, so often growing up with taunts to suffer and secrets to keep. As a kid, around classmates, at best I felt unusual though, more often, too on display but it wasn’t only some school time thing. It’s adults I remember being the cruelest, the dads of my friends and the coworkers of my parents who’d look at me—this pudgy, swishy, adultified little boy—with queasy, embarrassed eyes. A spurning that felt particularly hard for a child who was just starving for adulthood, a child who, I swear, was so crushingly conscious of how little control he had over his life. Because my sisters, the kids I’d play with next door, most every hero of mine, they were all older. Jillian, Lindsay, Hannah, Oprah—these seemingly grown women exerting a daily kind of agency I could only dream about. And while I envied and worshiped them, these heroic idols of mine, there could only ever be one superhero.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For as long as I can remember, I loved this show. Twenty-five years ago this week, it debuted on The WB. I was three years old. So while I myself, a toddler, might not have been tuning in every week, aforementioned hero and oldest sister Jillian certainly was, laying a foundation for fandom that I’d build on for years to come. Not despite being the youngest so much as because I was the youngest, I always had a TV in my bedroom, and long before either of my sisters did. An inequity that only made the rich richer, because Jillian and Lindsay needed to come into my room to watch their favorite, universally age-inappropriate programs. If I was scarred by any steamy goings-on of Melrose Place or Party of 5, I don’t remember. Because too many of my earliest televised memories instead have to do with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy Summers, killing demons and surviving adolescence every Tuesday at eight. It eventually went into syndication, two episodes playing on FX every weeknight, providing me suddenly with my very first extracurricular: fastidiously recording each and every one onto blank VHS tapes, stopping and starting around every commercial break, neatly labeling them to display proudly around my room. A DIY collection that proved obsolete, though no less cherished, as soon as each season was released on DVD. And while the end of the series, evidently, was wrecking enough for this third grader, I think it was a deeper, more acute kind of melancholy when I finally had my hands on that final season’s box set. In an age before reboots, not to mention Joss Whedon’s cancellation, I had no reason to believe anything to the contrary: Buffy was over.
Obsessive as I am, as swayed and influenced and shaped as I’ve been by Evita and Six Feet Under, by Jane Fonda interviews and 19th century immigrants to the Lower East Side, it really is saying something that I can look to Buffy the Vampire Slayer as the most formative of them all. In ways I didn’t recognize, ways I couldn’t have recognized, all those nights in the bedrooms of my childhood watching a show that evolved from sneaky entertainment into something closer to solace, I was latching onto themes and characters and turns of phrase that would inform nearly every part of who I was becoming. My predisposition to superhuman blonds, for one. But more generally, a sensibility that was so attractive to me then and so ingrained in me now. And for so long, I kept it all to myself. Too embarrassed to admit that I liked this show with a goofy name, that I loved something so girlish. Afraid that some concerned teacher would get wind of it and tell my parents, once and for all, that I was watching something much too mature for me. I’d hidden enough of myself away in this television show, curled up safely inside any one of those 144 episodes, that the idea of ever losing it felt like a risk I shouldn’t take. Buffy became something dear and coveted, cloistered away, secretive enough that still I can feel a little surprised, a little hot-in-the-face whenever I cross paths with someone else who loves it. Mostly because I hardly ever watch the show anymore. Like a first marriage, integral and enlightening, it was everything until it wasn’t. And trying to talk about something that once was so central to who I am can feel almost pointless, like trying to express gratitude that my heart continues to beat in my chest. Like, of course. Duh. What now?
Which isn’t to say I never watch it anymore. Because when I’m looking for a good cry or I’m in the mood for a Christmas episode or I’m feeling sick enough to actually rest in bed instead of fascistically subjecting myself to my usual miles-long daily walk, nothing sounds better than Buffy. So, every now and then, I’ll log onto whatever streaming platform owns the rights and I’ll watch a show that looks very different than it used to. The aspect ratio was changed a couple years ago, its original 4:3 dimensions butchered into a widescreen it was never filmed to accommodate. And the contrast got messed around with too, its spooky and noirish original palette brightened into something more appropriate for Dawson’s Creek. Remastered into something awful. But maybe it’s a good thing. That even though I can watch these episodes, with dialogue I can still recite word for word sometimes, they’re a little unrecognizable. Altered and warped enough to ensure that it’s a place I can’t totally come back to, at least not easily.
Because I still own all those old box sets, those DVDs capturing the series precisely as it was intended, tucked away on my bedroom’s bookshelf in New Hampshire. My parents, sanely, have made my old room into a second bedroom for themselves, keeping their off-season clothes in my closet and increasingly morbid life insurance documents on my dresser, but they’ve never touched my bookshelf. My many balms to a lonesome childhood still encased in the stacks. And there, on the lowermost shelf, seasons one through seven, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don’t think I’ve even touched those box sets in years, and not only because there’s not a functioning DVD player in the house. They’re just too precious, too powerful, like golems that, with the slightest prod, would speak aloud all that I felt then but only have a vocabulary for now. I suppose I could get rid of them, selling them or giving them away to someone who could watch the series just as I remember it. But I’d parting ways with more than just DVDs. So instead, they’ll remain just where I left them, out of touch but never out of mind, Buffy and my boyhood—collecting all the same dust.