The best way to put it that I’ve came up with is that yeah, they were laughing about it but they weren’t laughing at it. They were laughing with us and we were laughing with them. It was never to mock us or use us or exploit us. If anything - it was to do the opposite and take the piss out of the ones that went against it and didn’t want to see it but even that I think is too much.
I think what we can say however is that they didn’t fully understand the impact of it until years later when the show was off the air. Renee’s recent interview with Alexi Melvin kind of confirmed that for me. She said that she never really truly understood what was happening with it but through the years as people kept telling her the impact it’s had on them, she’s joined the dots and now sees, understands and fully supports it for what it is.
I think the people claiming the “queerbaiting” angle or even that believe the TV show creators/cast/crew were purposefully being malicious with their queer audience just haven’t really done enough research on the show.
There’s a ton of behind-the-scenes content where they not only confirm that Xena and Gabrielle were a couple or best friends in love but also that after a certain point they intended it to be that way, they just had to be very careful with it due to the strict censorship of the studio.
They themselves never personally had a problem with it and if there’s any audience they catered to above all in Xena, it was their female queer audience and I believe it’s because they absolutely agreed with that audience that Xena and Gabrielle were romantically involved in some way or form even if they weren’t in a relationship.
Because I think that’s kind of the takeaway with Xena and Gabrielle. You can absolutely see that they’re canon in the sense that they’re in love with each other and that R.J. Stewart absolutely wrote them to show that they had romantic feelings for each other but there is no way to tell whether that evolved into a committed romantic relationship at any point in the show. That’s the part of Xena and Gabrielle that stayed ambiguous and that’s fair enough because that still doesn’t negate that they were canon. Just that they were a couple.
That is for you to interpret for yourself. And even some of the writers pitch in with their own interpretations on that. Now if you’re basing them being “queerbait” on that… that’s just silly. Because even today queer people that love each other or that have feelings for each other aren’t always in a relationship for whatever reason. That has nothing to do with whether they’re canon or not. If anything that just makes the queer representation even more real and authentic because that speaks to queer experience in that queer people do have to be careful with who they love. It’s not an easy thing to be a couple.
So all I have to say to those people that are claiming that the show was mocking us is that they should dig deeper than the surface of what they see in the show.
Yeah, there was jokes about it. Of course there was. But those jokes were never maliciously aimed at us. Those jokes might have been funny, but they were not doing those jokes to laugh at us. They were doing those jokes to laugh with us because it was always a positive nod towards us that this is who the show and its characters are really for. The queer narrative was the true narrative.
And if we want to say “baiting” was involved, I think it’s more accurate that they were baiting straight people in to watching the TV show because gay or queer people were already there. They didn’t have to be baited in to watching it because they were already catered to from the start and one of the main reasons why Xena became popular beyond its predecessor Hercules. The audience that they had to entice to watch was not the queer one so I say it’s more accurate that Xena was straightbait.
The only thing I can say that is true to the way they were back then as opposed to now. They were very cagey in admitting that Xena and Gabrielle had feelings that were beyond friendship but that’s understandable.
It was the 90’s and they were mostly doing that to protect us more than they ever were to ignore us.
The reason why they were like that was very much to keep us safe and secure in a very homophobic world.
They were always in our queer corner from day one. And if it was the opposite, they wouldn’t be here now.
They speak out on it now because they know they can. But back then they had to be extremely careful with it.
And we should not be faulting them for that.
We should be thanking them for it.
They protected us. They loved us. And it’s remarkable to me that they still give us the time of day when the TV show has been off the air for a long time and yet they still always show up for us and they still care about us.
I’ve never seen support and solidarity like that since.
So no, people can make their insulting claims about it and them. But they’re entirely wrong about all of this.
The Xenaverse is a family that makes up both the creators/cast/crew and the community. It’s always been that way ever since the very first convention.
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