It's All About Faith

There aren't many 90s kids that don't have a special place in their heart for Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It's fair to say that many an OG crush was founded from that show. Right now in 2020, people can still find new companions with the simple question, "Angel or Spike?" The correct answer often leading to a beautiful friendship. It's Spike by the way. That is the only acceptable answer. I mean Angel needed a soul to love, Spike was just a walking ball of passionate love whether he had one or not, but that's not really what I'm here to talk about.

Once a week, back in the days when you had to really love a show in order to sit through endless adverts and there was no option to tune in at a later date, so if you missed it you missed it, (kids today will never understand the commitment that was required) once a week I would fill up a glass with coca-cola, grab the homemade popcorn and plunk myself down on the sofa to get my fix of the ultimate Scooby Gang.

It was Buffy The Vampire Slayer that made me realise something very important about my sexual identity. I was able to answer another question, "Buffy or Faith?" Faith, hands down every damn time. Eliza Dushku the actress that portrayed Faith, was not only my OG girl crush, she was also the OG bad ass babe in leather who somehow managed to make made "5 by 5" a cool catchphrase. I mean sure she was technically a bad guy and yeah she murdered an innocent man and there was that whole thing where she tried to steal Buffy's boyfriend and her entire life, not forgetting when she joined up with her seasons Big Bad to take down Sunnydale, but still, she was a high kicking, no nonsense talking bad girl who in her defence, found the right side in the end.

Of course, I didn't know the word for bisexual back then. I didn't understand that that's what I was or that it wasn't what society might consider, "normal." I remember talking to my friends at school about my love for Faith and that was the first time I was introduced to the word Dyke. I didn't know what that was either but I knew it was bad and I stopped talking about Faith after that.

When I came out at fourteen, I was the first openly out member of the LGBTQ+ community at my Grammar school in my small, very conservative, town in Northern Ireland and the only openly out female at that time. I made a pact with two of my friends that if I came out first they would quickly follow after me and they did becoming the first openly out males. I can still feel the nervous tension between us as we huddled in the corridor of the technology building and agreed that we were going to do it. We became like our own little version of the Scooby Gang. We still fought monsters together, they were just a different kind. They were the kids who called me Dyke and called them Fags, who pushed us into lockers and pulled our school bags on the stairs. They were the voices in our heads telling us we were unnatural or broken. They were the teachers who said, "maybe if you didn't flaunt it you wouldn't get bullied." Our monsters didn't come from hell, the place we were repeatedly told we would end up, they were right in front of us every day, getting away with it because we were different. They're the same monsters that the LGBTQ+ community still have to fight just to have the same basic rights as everyone else. While the heteronormative community fights to keep them out of our reach.

Recently during lockdown, Channel 4 began screening Buffy every weeknight (including adverts just like old times) and I've found myself settling in to watch them. There was something very therapeutic for me when Faith first appeared on my television set, in turning to my partner and saying, "Faith is how I knew I was into women." He just smiled and said, "I had a thing for Willow." The fact that we could so casually talk about it and there was no judgement coming from him at all, it was just two adults, indulging in a nostalgic conversation about times gone by and that is exactly how those conversations should go. They shouldn't be shocking or treated as abnormal. Coming out shouldn't even have to be a thing.

I'm glad it was Faith that was my OG female crush, because when those monsters began to attack me, I just thought, "What Would Faith Do?" And I was more than happy to kick ass and fight back. 5 by 5 B.