Buffering the Vampire Slayer: Prom 2019 – Ace Hotel NYC
CW: use of the word queer, spoilers to season four of BTVS, LGBTQ issues, brief mention of breakups & parental death
Season Three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer details Buffy Summers’ dramatic & peculiar senior year of high school, which includes an episode featuring her Senior Prom or the Prom of 1999. In the Prom episode, Buffy’s ensouled vampire boyfriend breaks up with her because he wants her to do better than date an immortal rapid-fire gun. Our girl, our hero, crumbles under the weight of a broken heart with more vigor than when she faces the apocalypse, an entirely relatable set of emotional priorities. It’s a palpable and devastating breakup but has one moment of reprieve. At the prom, when her recent ex shows up to give her one last dance. He knows she deserves to feel for a few minutes that she’s a normal girl. Throughout the seven seasons, Buffy’s yearns for what she calls normal. A life where she isn’t responsible for the fate of the world, but only the fate of her prom dress, of creating high school memories, of her graduation. Buffy deserves to not kiss death’s magnetism, but life’s. On the literal level, this is translated with her living-dead boyfriend breaking up with her, but on the deeper level, it is Buffy Summers excited, emotional, invested in her senior prom, in something other than her destiny of risking her life, nightly, slaying demons.
Buffering the Vampire Slayer is a fan podcast where two queer, feminist, former ’90s teenagers recap and reflect on episodes of the show, one at a time, with humor and insight and vulnerability. Each episode concludes with an original song written by the hosts exploring Buffy Summers psychological state in the discussed episode, very often with analogous messages to their queer followers that things will be okay in this uneasy world we live in.
A year ago, Buffering the Vampire Slayer concluded their recap of season three by hosting a Prom of their own. The Los Angeles event sold out in three minutes. In selling out the event, the pod’s fans, most of which are queer & othered, clearly expressed a need to come together. Recognizing this, the podcast has made hosting prom an annual occasion. The second prom was hosted in New York City and was last night. I went to both of these prom events.
Last night’s party is still revolving through me, not because of a hangover, but because of how immensely meaningful this community and these events are. In this dream-like state, I wonder how strange the present is, always is, continues to be. Last night’s glitter continues to squint from my pores, as my memoir rotates in my mind with the random chaos of a child’s first try at a Rubix Cube. It’s like, after growing up feeling unsafe, and still frequently bristling up to places and spaces that don’t respect me, there’s nothing small at all about a queer, nerdy space filled with kind, compassionate people whose passions include fighting the good fight by day, watching open gay witches fall in love with each other, by night.
I don’t know how to phrase it to those who have not grown up yearning for what Buffy Summers phrases as a normal life, but I would phrase as a life that’s not catastrophic, but celebratory. I fully detest the idea of shedding my queerness for a “normal” heteronormativity. I do understand what it means for Buffy to not want a secret life. When Buffy is secretive about being a Slayer she is secretive about her feelings, her internal world, her profession, her responsibility, her identity, and her sacrifices. She’s secretive because she’s trying to protect the ones she loves and herself. This secrecy is something so much of us queer people relate to as well as the result. It takes some of us our entire lives to detangle shame from our identity.
The Buffering prom events, like the Buffering online community, are spaces where I can be myself and not have this shame. It’s not completely random I came out of the closet the day I flew out to San Francisco to celebrate Pride with Bay Area Buffering fans. It makes complete sense that I committed to healing from my breakup after going to LA prom and witnessing so many happy, queer people. It’s actually quite chronological that I was open to joining the community while grieving my mother, wanting so much to feel cared for again.
Jenny Owen Youngs and Kristin Russo, the hosts of Buffering, have become as important to me as the staff of Mutant Enemy, the studio that produced BTVS
Life’s not all headstones and shame. Life’s also queer bodies joyfully dancing to ‘90s music, me dressed to kill in a gender-bending suit I never would’ve worn at my prom. At my prom, I was petrified and mute,