The subtext gave "Xena" an added edge; it also resonated with vast numbers of lesbians who saw the heroines as role models and felt empowered by seeing what was, to them, a same-sex couple at the center of a television show. Many say that the series helped them come to terms with their sexuality, such as a 24-year-old British nurse who says that she found strength and happiness in the fact that everyone involved with the show thought that "one woman being genuinely in love with another is fine and lovely and beautiful." For others, the subtext had a flip side. From the start, many straight female fans were concerned that it played into some vexing stereotypes: that a tough, independent woman in a traditionally male role must be a lesbian, that two women who have a close relationship and no boyfriends must be lesbians, or that a woman's story must be a romance. Even some fans who appreciated the subtext saw it as a mixed blessing. One woman, a 28-year-old bisexual New Yorker, told me that while she's "glad the characters became gay icons," the disadvantage is that this can overshadow everything else that made "Xena" so great: "I hate it when I tell someone I love 'Xena' and I get the response, 'Oh yeah, the show with the lesbians, right?'"
One might say that Xena's sexual ambiguity adds to her larger-than-life quality: She is beyond labels, all things to all people. And yet it's a pity that so much of the buzz generated by a show about a mythic female hero has ended up focusing on who she's sleeping with. As openly gay "Xena" producer Liz Friedman once said in an interview, the show was "not about the romantic foibles of Xena and Gabrielle," it was about redemption and friendship.
The fan-driven growth of the subtext illustrates another "Xena" phenomenon: the special relationship between the show and the fandom. Other than "The X-Files," "Xena" was the first cult hit of the Internet age: the face that launched a thousand Web sites. One of the producers and principal writers on "Xena," Steven Sears, participated in discussions on "Xena" message boards (and occasionally still does); other staff members and actors reportedly lurked there as well, and seemed well aware of fandom debates. In the last season, popular fan-fiction writer Melissa Good was hired to write several scripts for the series, two of which were made into episodes.
This involvement with the fandom turned out to be a double-edged sword. Almost from the start, the fandom was bitterly divided among various factions, particularly subtext fans pitted against those who saw Xena and Gabrielle as friends. Fandom wars over relationships are nothing new: "X-Files" fans clashed vehemently over whether Mulder and Scully should do the deed. In the "Xena" fandom, though, these wars had the added angle of sexual politics. Some of the anti-subtext sentiment was undoubtedly driven by bona fide bigotry. Some lesbian fans, on the other hand, approached the argument as a real-life gay rights struggle and labeled all dissent as homophobic: To them, denying a sexual relationship between Xena and Gabrielle was tantamount to denying the reality of their own lives, and the "Are they or aren't they" tease was an insulting way to keep the characters in the closet.
In a way, knowing that the staff paid attention to fan opinions may have made matters worse: There was an incentive for the rival groups to out-shout one another to make themselves heard. Many fans who had no appetite for these wars fled the online fandom. Story lines that were seen as betraying the subtext, particularly the Xena-Ares relationship in the fifth season, were met with intense hostility from a small but vocal group; at other times, non-subtext fans grumbled about what they saw as pandering to the pro-subtext fan base (such as several sixth-season episodes emphasizing Xena and Gabrielle's transcendent bond as soul mates). At the end of the series' run, the Internet fandom exploded in a hysterical backlash against the finale, in which Xena died to right yet another past wrong and Gabrielle was left to travel alone. The official Xena forum at the Studios USA Web site filled with cries of betrayal and profanity-laced rants against the producers -- who attempted appeasement by releasing a "director's cut" version, in which the poignant final shot of Gabrielle alone on a ship was replaced by a hokey image of Xena standing next to her as either ghost or imaginary friend.
Yet, like "Xena" itself, the fan base, on and especially off the Internet, transcends the stereotype. Most of the fans, for instance -- including some devoted subtext fans -- are straight, and quite a few are men. They are lawyers and stay-at-home moms, high school kids and Ph.D. students, white-collar workers and artists, soldiers and college professors; East and West Coast urbanites and residents of Midwestern and Southern small towns (not to mention Australians, Europeans, Israelis and Russians); Wiccans and churchgoing Christians. They include a middle-aged psychology instructor who first started watching because she thought Xena looked cool and now regards the show as a philosophical guide to living, and an exploration geologist in his 30s who discovered "Xena" when he wanted to tape a baseball game and set the VCR to the wrong channel.
The afterlife of "Xena" has been a mixed success. Its ability to attract new fans has been hampered by the fact that for the past four years it has aired exclusively on Oxygen, the Lifetime Channel's poor relation, its limited market access now compounded by the indignity of an 8 a.m. Eastern time slot. Its DVD sales have lagged far behind those of "Buffy," "Angel" and "The X-Files."
In spite of it all, "Xena" lives and thrives. Fans still flock to the annual convention. On the Internet, several "Xena" boards remain active; with no new battles to fight over the show's direction, what remains of the online fandom is a far more peaceful, live-and-let-live kind of place that continues to draw new members. And in the wider culture, the impact of "Xena" is definitely still felt. In fact, "Xena, Warrior Princess" has become a kind of generic term for "tough chick." (Condoleezza Rice, who does a pretty good Xena-style steely gaze herself, has been nicknamed "Warrior Princess" by her staff -- much to the dismay of many left-leaning "Xena" fans.) Recently, a Chicago Daily Herald review of a gender-bending, nearly-all-female production of "Henry IV" was titled "Shakespeare Meets Xena," and the reviewer noted that today's audiences can easily accept the feminization of the play's power struggles and battle scenes because of "familiarity with battling babes like Xena."
And just last month came the news that a team of astronomers at Caltech who discovered a new heavenly body that may be the solar system's 10th planet have nicknamed their find "Xena." It's not going to be the object's official moniker -- the astronomers have already applied to register it under another name -- but for now, it has already made headlines as Planet Xena. Take that, Buffy.