Fiona,

...

The problem is that I didn't see anything like that happening regarding this aspect of Willow. For example, there wasn't any evidence that she had fantasies involving or was attracted to members of her own gender, or that she felt 'unlike' other girls.

What about the Vampire Willow-- that seemed to be a big hint, esp. when Angel pointed out that people's personalities don't change when they become vampires (contrary to what Xander thought).

Well, Buffy said in the relevant episode that a vampire's personality had 'nothing' to do with the person it was. Angel replied 'Well, actually...' before being stoped by her from going further. My own take on the exchange is that a vampire's personality has _something_ to do with the human whose body it uses; but it still isn't the human.

Giles said that the first vampire was 'a human form possessed, infected by the demon's soul' (_The Harvest_); and Buffy told Ford that when he becomes a vampire, 'You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it's not you'.(_Lie to Me_)

Obviously, the vampire has the memories of the human, looks like and acts like the human, and can pass itself off as that man or woman; but that doesn't mean that it subscribes to that person's code of conduct. It appears that _all_ vampires deliberately went out of their way to mock the ethics of the humans who supplied their bodies, including their sexual ethics. Due to this, and being immortal, my opinion is that _all_ vampires get up to all kinds of sexual behaviour, including bisexuality.

The vampire that looked like Willow might be bisexual; but that didn't mean that Willow Rosenberg was bisexual, any more that the vampire's torture and murder of people meant that Willow was a torturer and a murderer.

Dunno about that. My experience of American television has suggested to me that they have to be more circumspect than most of the rest of the world with regard to how they present homosexuality-- I mean, Babylon-5 caught flak for having what has to have been the most understated lesbian scene in history. Even after they come out, Willow and Tara barely even hold hands, after all. So I suspect that there wasn't much scope for the writers to do a whole blown-out and properly dealt-with lesbian storyline; they had rather to keep it at a level which would keep the network happy.

After the relationship became public, I didn't mind the understatement; because I felt that the hetrosexual relationships in the fourth season (Buffy and Riley, Xander and Anya) could have taken some lessons, they being so overstated as to deserve a Bad Sex Award. For example, Anya's sex talk was funny at first; but it later got so boring that I felt like screaming.<bg>

Murray