I wanted to say a final thing about Chu's essay. She writes, in the beginning, that heterosexuality is always a "dream." Then, at the end, she writes about weeping in response to this episode, and about how her girlfriend experiences it very differently.
She came to
Buffy (the whole series) knowing that (1) Willow would be gay in college and that (2) Tara, her girlfriend, would eventually die, a meaningless, brutal death. She even knows when that will happen (she counts down the episodes left until Tara's death: 53, 42, 20.)
But "My girlfriend does not know yet that Tara will die. She thinks I am cutely obsessed, to the point of being annoying about it. She doesn't know that all I can see is a winding sheet, a pall." She says she is "increasingly likely to cry during the credits." Her girlfriend doesn't know why. It's actually a very serious story: this is "the summer of my suicidality; this my girlfriend does know." She wants to tell her girlfriend about Tara, but she doesn't want to "ruin it for her."
So what is going on here? By definition, Chu's girlfriend is also queer. But she doesn't know the same thing Chu knows. That's one thing. Another is the fact that Chu is so sad, so upset - "the summer of my suicidality" - and she talks as if it's entirely about
Buffy. But it can't be: right?
Early in the essay, she writes that "It's no accident that one of the first major lesbian relationships in television history began in an episode where no one was able to talk." I would argue that this is the key sentence. Chu's sorrow and grief is absolutely lived and experienced through empathy for television characters and through the expectation of loss. But it's about much more than that. It's about much more, even, than whether or not queer characters and queer love is represented on television. It's about whether you are allowed to talk about or show that you are queer at all--in many ways an even bigger challenge for trans people than for cis-gay or cis-bi people. Hence, her mourning is enormous, much bigger than a response to a TV show: the TV show captures a history and an ongoing reality of silence, of the closet, of violence.
Some side observations about the writing on the way to my conclusion:
"people's voices will wisp out of their mouths and fly" - is "wisp" a verb? Do voices normally fly? I would suggest that by playing with language, she is finding a way to render a visual effect in writing.
"She's too busy thirsting after her TA, Riley, a 20-fl.-oz. bottle of Sprite Zero" - first, a consistent metaphor (thirsting/Riley is a drink). Second, "Sprite Zero": think about this in relation to identifying Riley and his "Initiative" buddies in terms of a cliché, "locker room talk." For Chu, the vacuousness (empty, Sprite Zero) of Riley is part of her argument that the episode *is* an elegy for its gays: even though it isn't, even though it's not that for her girlfriend, even, let alone the typical viewer. But that's because they don't get it: heterosexuality is a dream. Silence is real.
The Initiative's "facilities gleam aluminumly": not a word. Moving words from one part of speech to another (from noun to adverb, from noun to verb - wisp) is one of the signature linguistic effects of
Buffy as a show: she is adopting it, showing rather than telling her understanding of
Buffy.
So my conclusion is this: the broad dreams - romance, love, heterosexuality - Chu is not immune to them; she's thoroughly in them, enraptured by Willow/Tara. They just look different to her. She writes about the "ballooning loss" after the voices vanish, and says, "They do not know it [the characters and extras], but they are mourning for Tara." Her
girlfriend doesn't even know it: it's not just the characters, or the straight people. The mourning for Tara is her own, her dream, but it's also in the world: in the silence that surrounds some identities and sexualities and the violence against them that enforces silence.
Make sense? Feel free to comment! I encourage it. :)
PS note I used a different icon! I put up multiple icons: you can too.
ETA: In case you're interested, I recommend
this autobiographical piece by Chu on being/becoming a trans lesbian, with lots of juicy stuff about radical feminists of the late 60s.
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