The Sexuality of Willow and Giles

In his younger days, Giles summoned a demon used in “bacchanals and orgies.” During the series, he and Joyce Summers “had sex ... on the hood of a police car ... twice,” and later in the episode, Joyce produces a pair of handcuffs. Later in the series, in This Year’s Girl, Buffy reveals that Joyce thought Giles was like “a stevedore” during sex, which seems to be a favorable comparison. In The Freshman, Olivia acts around Buffy very much like she doesn’t expect her to actually be just a *student* of Giles’s, and to me, she seems to either be staking her claim to Giles or expecting Buffy to join in. And when she arrives in Hush, she isn’t there for the small talk. We also see them asleep and naked in bed together both nights in that episode. Also, Giles shows none of the stammering nervousness around her that he did with Jenny, he’s quite self-assured, possibly because Olivia is an old friend, who he knows well. However, here it should also be noted that canonically, it does appear that Giles and Jenny never did consummate their relationship, although it isn’t impossible to say otherwise.

Willow begins the series as an innocent, but her experience increases considerably as the show goes on. She loses her virginity to Oz, of course, in Graduation Day. Before that, though, we get a glimpse of Willow as a vampire who is “evil and skanky, and... kinda gay.” Angel agrees, to make her feel better, that vampires’ personalities are nothing like their former, human selves, but this is clearly a lie, unsupported by any other evidence on the show (The personalities of Jesse and Harmony are both very similar to their human personalities, and Spike and Angel certainly show evidence of their human personalities, although both attempt to distance themselves from them). Plus, there’s the fact that Willow is proved to indeed be “kinda gay” in the next season. It is with Tara that she seems to discover her own sexuality and sensuality, much of it tied to the magics that she and Tara work together. By the end of the series, she is comfortable enough with sex and sexuality to make comments like “This is losing control, and not in a nice, my-girlfriend-has-a-tongue-ring kinda way.” Also, Willow gets off on power. This is a canon fact, most obvious in Grave, of course, but also in all of season six.

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