This morning, my friend Sarah asked me to answer some questions for a paper she’s writing on Willow Rosenburg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s best friend) and her sexuality. I’m pretty happy with my responses, so I figured I’d share them with you guys! I’m always up for a conversation about Buffy, so I was pretty excited to do this.

First of all, I hate labels. Labels should be chosen by the person themselves, not chosen for them, least of all by me, and maybe not at all. I’m aware that Willow not a real person, but let’s for the sake of this conversation pretend that she is. Who she is attracted to and who she wants to end up with is completely decided by her. Whether people label themselves as bisexual or lesbian depends on how they feel and what they are comfortable with sharing with the general public. As far as I’m concerned, labels are an intimate look into the way someone thinks and feels that shouldn’t necessarily be accessible to, say, complete strangers.

That said, there are stigmas attached in both cases. Identifying as lesbian implies that a woman has no interest, emotionally or sexually, in men, while identifying as bisexual leaves either open to the possibility. Parts of the gay community has some issues with bisexuality because of the ridiculous and assumed notion that bisexuals cannot be monogamous. The idea that a bisexual who has committed him or herself to one person is choosing a sexuality in addition to choosing a significant other is belittling the complexity of that person’s feelings and sexuality in general.

Willow seems to identify as lesbian publicly, but we know that she has been attracted to at least two men in the past. When I did a basic google search, most of the responses involved people asserting that Willow should have considered herself bisexual because she has proven herself able to be attracted to men in the same way that she has been attracted to women. The purpose of the label in the first place is primarily to choose the way that people who know of your chosen label will relate to you. That seems like something important and personal enough to be trusted to the person who has the label and not to the general public. If Willow wants to be viewed as a lesbian, then Willow should be labeled as a lesbian.

At the end of the day, sexuality, like gender, is complex. You cannot simply place people into boxes and expect that they’ve always been there or even if they’ll stay there; there will almost always be exceptions and as an outsider, you might not even know that they exist. In fact, you shouldn’t. What matters is which box each person is most comfortable placing themselves into or if they even want to be stuck inside one to begin with. It does not mean that Willow “became gay” all of a sudden out of nowhere, it does not mean that she will never be attracted to another man again, and it does not mean that people can be “cured” of homosexuality OR heterosexuality if their box has changed over the course of a lifetime. It means that Willow is learning who she is, chose to be placed in the lesbian box, and we should respect what she chose to label herself as.

I just want to throw out there that Joss Whedon himself puts this brilliantly and in far less words than I have: ”My hope is that people won’t be so anxious to put a label on it like she’s become a lesbian, or it’s just a phase, or she’s bisexual. I didn’t want to make it a big issue. As soon as you start to hammer out a definition, it becomes kinda icky. It stops being just about these two people.”

I think Willow and Tara are absolutely wonderful. It was really about their love and their relationship more than anything else, which is rare for television, even today. There are few gay characters in mainstream pop culture whose main struggle is not simply being gay. For Willow, she just realized it at some point and went on to live her life and that is truly admirable. Granted, this is not always the way that things happen because our society often forces these struggles on people who realize that they are gay. Like the way Joss handles gender dynamics, not only with strong female characters but also with male characters who respect those women, he portrays the development of sexuality in a way that I really wish existed in real life; with acceptance, confidence, and love.