It Gets Better Project Inspired Creation of Billy the (Gay) Vampire Slayer

“It’s funny. When we started seeing what Marvel and DC was doing, we thought, ‘Damn. They’re racing to get these stories out one after the other, so it’ll look like we’re chasing them. But we’d had this story planned for quite a while,” Allie said. “But I think you can see this as a natural extension of stuff Joss has done all along.

Getting a gay male character doesn’t seem unusual for ‘Buffy.’ And it wasn’t so much that we wanted to get a gay character out in the mainstream for whatever reason. It was more that this is a story that Jane Espenson and Drew Greenberg wanted to tell. When you read the story, you’ll see that it’s responding to things in the culture beyond just representing gay male characters. There’s a bit of a response to the whole ‘It Gets Better’ campaign in a way that’s more than subtext.

For Jane and Drew in particular, with the kinds of stories they’re used to telling and what they care about, the Buffy mythos was an extremely appropriate place to empower this young guy who needed to find a way to stand up for himself.”

Typically, only women can be slayers in the world, but Allie said Billy’s status is different than being hand-picked by the powers that be to fight bloodsuckers. “That is part of the story. But part of the story too – part of Buffy’s story and a typical trope in a story like this or even Hellboy is that any character who is a ‘chosen’ character tends to not want to be chosen.

The chosen one or the anointed one is usually a reluctant hero. They don’t want to be a hero. Buffy wanted to be a cheerleader, but she was chosen to be a vampire slayer. And a little bit what ‘Season 9′ is about, one of the recurring ideas in the season, has to do with self-determination,” he said.