Buffy Summers was the blond, bloodsucker-killing badass at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon's iconic series ran on the CW and UPN from 1997 to 2003, fueling video games, comic books, and an entire fandom that's still thriving twenty (yes, twenty) years on.

For a lot of gay men, Buffy, as immortalized by Sarah Michelle Gellar, was more than an great character: She was the teenager we wished we could have been in high school. Fearlessly navigating the living hell of adolescence, pulverizing bullies, cascading from gorgeous hunk to gorgeous hunk, and serving up one-liners that out-Meat Girls Mean Girls.

“I would say the high school setting accounts in part for the show’s appeal to a gay audience — the scene of the trauma, so to speak,” says writing instructor Will McCormack. “The show was good at externalizing internal states; when I was in high school, I think I was rather shut down emotionally and was generally perceived as bookish and geeky. The show found a way to ennoble a similar set of characters.”

For Buffy super-fan Steven Lawrence it about was making the outsider the hero: "The popular students were just snack food for ghouls. They lacked interest or distinction. The outsiders had the power.”

Buffy’s status as a slayer—a secret she had to keep from almost everyone—forced her to grapple with an isolating loneliness that could easily be a metaphor for the traumas of the closet. That subtext pretty much became the show’s text in the Season 2 finale, when Buffy comes out to her mom.

"It’s because you didn’t have a strong father figure, isn’t it?” Joyce insists, later asking, “Have you ever tried not being a vampire slayer?" The words echo for so many queer kids, as does Buffy's response: "Do you think I chose to be like this? Do you have any idea how lonely it is?"

"The interesting thing about Buffy was she came from an experience of being very popular, but then found out something about herself that she felt couldn’t be known by others," says Lawrence. "She came to this new high school carrying that knowledge but managing to build a circle of trusted friends. That directly tied into my own experience coming out, and that of many other gays and lesbians."

The Show Comes Out

Buffy dealt with more explicitly LGBT characters and themes once the Mystery Gang graduated from high school. Willow (Alyson Hannigan), who had previously been paired with Oz (Seth Green) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon), fell in love with Tara (Amber Benson). This was no mere sweeps month stunt, but a nuanced long-term relationship.

At the time, Willow and Tara were the longest-running lesbian relationship on network television, and the pair developed a dedicated following from queer women overjoyed to finally see a glimpse of themselves on the small screen.

But gay boys were overjoyed, too.

“Just seeing a same-sex relationship being represented with such tenderness and passion was important," Lawrence insists. "As a gay man, I take positive representations where I can get them. Any time a same-gender relationship is portrayed in a positive, but very real, light benefits us all.”

Tara and Willow’s relationship was at its most heart-swooning in the Season 6 episode “Once More with Feeling.” Not only did Tara serenade Willow with the beautiful, Shawn Colvin-esque ballad, “I’m Under Your Spell,” Willow apparently pleasured Tara so skillfully that she literally floated above the bed in ecstasy.

Beyond the hot and heavy (for network TV anyway) same-sex action, that episode might be considered Buffy at its gayest for another reason: It was a singing, dancing, very knowing and very loving treatment of the musical format, with nods to everything from Sondheim to Les Misérables.

"I’m a gay man—I love a good musical," Lawrence says. "Buffy as a musical? It doesn’t get better than that.”

"Once More with Feeling" even pulled non-Buffy aficionados to the show, like avid Broadway theatergoer Norman Cherubino. “I loved it,” he recalls. “It showed a true understanding of musicals and was a great way to showcase a lot of different types of music. Now I listen to the CD all the time and know all the lyrics.”

Sing Out, Giles

Cherubino’s not the only one: The musical episode has spawned midnight screenings where fans act out parts, Rocky Horror-style, as well as musical episodes on shows like Grey's Anatomy, Community, and pretty soon The Flash. (It also opened the door for musical shows like Glee and Smash.)

This means that on any given night, there just might be dozens of Spike wannabes thrusting their pelvises in public — something else gay fanboys can thank Buffy for. The Buffy Sing-A-Long is just one example of how the Buffy universe has taken on a gay-friendly life of its own beyond the original series.

Buffy also aired at the dawn of Internet slash fiction, allowing fans of every orientation to mix and match characters in erotic (and sometimes explicit) encounters. Check almost any shipping site, and you’ll see Angel/Spike pairings that equal, if not surpass, Kirk/Spock. Even Whedon, on the DVD commentary for Angel, acknowledged "they were hanging out for years and years and years—do people think they never...? Come on, they’re open-minded guys!” (And that's not even counting the Xander/Oz/Giles/Riley ships.)

Buffy Didn’t Get EVERYTHING Right

Despite the homoerotic imagery, Buffy was sorely lacking in depiction of actual gay men: Lawrence does remember one stereotype-busting character who appeared early in the show's run: Larry, a jock who mercilessly bullied Xander before coming out to him (and then coming on to him).

Larry showed up again a few episodes later, so comfortable with his sexuality that he proclaimed, “I’m so out, I got my grandma fixing me up with guys.”

Far more problematic was Andrew Wells, one of a trio of geek villains introduced in Season 6. One of Andrew’s crimes was unleashing flying monkeys to attack the school play. (Nothing says gay like a Wizard of Oz reference.) Everything about Andrew screamed queer, from his gushing over almost every guy on the show, to his sophomoric dialogue: Looking for hidden transistors, he tells fellow villain Jonathan, “I’ll find it if I have to check every hole in my body — and yours!”)

Emblematic of the times, Andrew never demonstrated any kind of self-awareness about his sexuality. He remained a long-running variation on what has become a maddening television cliché: the girlie guy everyone but knows is gay but him.

If he were to get his own spinoff today (and we would LOVE to see Tom Lenk in that), Andrew would be out, proud and have a boyfriend. They'd probably still be plotting murderous plots, but, y'know, together.