How Buffy the Vampire Slayer Continues to Inspire Generations of Fans

The floorboards in our one-bedroom apartment were massive, wide planks of honey-colored wood original to the brownstone, which had been built alongside Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery in 1910. The kitchen was small (when you opened the oven door it nearly touched the opposite wall) and we had only one closet—especially complicated given the fact that we needed room for two people, one cat, and Jenny’s fourteen guitars—but it was a magical space frequented by fire escape raccoons and a colony of parakeets that had been roosting in the neighborhood since the 1970s. Local lore maintained that a truck full of green monk parakeets had crashed on its way to a pet store and the birds, once liberated, took up residence in the cemetery’s many trees and spires.

The apartment felt so magical, in fact, that Kristin—always waiting for the other shoe to drop—was convinced she’d be hit by a bus for the first four months that we lived there.

“You aren’t going to get hit by a bus.”

(Jenny has always been a bit more grounded in reality.)

It was 2012, we’d been dating for three years, and things between us had become serious enough for Jenny to cohabitate with Kristin and her aging cat, Trey, despite significant feline allergies. So it was no surprise when, in exchange for this sacrifice, an ultimatum was introduced. For the partnership to stand, Kristin had to do what countless queer women had done before her: she had to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her girlfriend.

“It’s a show about a girl who kills vampires but also dates them sometimes!”

Jenny, encouraged by the slightest raise in Kristin’s eyebrows, continued, “It’s also the story of a group of individuals brought together by friendship and fate led by a preternaturally powerful young woman with a sacred calling, waging war against the forces of darkness, sometimes triumphant, sometimes bruised and bloodied by a battle with no end in sight, but one which they cannot give up on, no matter the cost!”

Kristin, not well versed in genre television and always instinctively opposed to a dramatic sales pitch, rolled her eyes. This was not Jenny’s first “watch Buffy with me” blitz. If anything, she’d lost ground.

“Okay, okay, okay, consider this: it’s gayer than you are.”

Only then did Kristin take Jenny’s DVD boxed set of all seven seasons of Buffy off the bookshelf and pick up the remote control.

“Nothing,” Kristin said, “is gayer than I am.” 

And so, we watched.

We’d watched television together before, of course, but watching Buffy in this enchanted, cemetery-adjacent, first-home-together space—Kristin sprawled across our IKEA couch with Trey perched on the cushions behind her, Jenny in her favorite spot on the living room floor with a pillow tucked under her head—this was different. If it wasn’t already apparent from her displayed boxed set of the series, this was Jenny’s show. It was a show she’d watched over and over again, anytime she needed comfort, a cozy vampire blanket that had been with her for over a decade. So sharing it with Kristin was no small thing.

Jenny, to her delight, was correct: once Kristin’s initial skepticism began to fade, she fell in love with the characters and the story. She laughed when Buffy’s mom lovingly made a cup of hot cocoa for the evil vampire Spike, and she cried when Buffy sacrificed her first love in order to save the world. For what it’s worth, Kristin maintains that she was also right about at least one thing: nothing is gayer than she is.

Once it became clear that we could share not only a love for each other but also a love for the Slayer, we made plans to marry the following year. As you do.

Our wedding was held at The Bell House in Brooklyn on August 25, 2013. Only two months earlier, we’d held our breath as the Supreme Court decided whether our marriage would be worthy of recognition and protection across the country. It was equal parts powerful and overwhelming when nine appointed justices decided that yes, it was.

The Bell House was a music venue where Jenny had played on many occasions, and it felt like an extension of home. Huge exposed beams crossed the vaulted ceilings in a warehouse space that was built in 1931 and had spent most of its life as a printing press. Our friends and family danced together, ate barbecue fresh from a smoker set up on the sidewalk, and took turns in the venue’s vintage photo booth. It was an absolutely beautiful day.

We remained in the brownstone with the wide floorboards for two more years before Jenny’s music career took us west.

After years of making albums of her own and touring on repeat, she had the opportunity to explore the world of cowriting in collaboration with other artists and songwriters, and much of that world is headquartered in Los Angeles. If our Brooklyn floorboards could talk, they’d tell tales of Trey’s ongoing rivalry with the fire escape raccoons, his holiday tradition of shitting under the Christmas tree (just once per calendar year), and his love of meticulously licking the condensation off of each and every window during the winter months. They would also have to tell you about Trey’s declining kidneys, about the months we spent administering fluids from an IV bag to help keep him hydrated and spry, and the day that two loving nurses came to our home from the veterinarian’s office to ease Trey’s transition into the great beyond.

We left the day after Christmas, without sweet Trey, to drive to California. We’d emptied the entire apartment of all of our belongings (Buffy DVDs thrice Bubble-Wrapped) except for the Christmas tree itself, which Kristin refused to take down until the moment we walked out the door for the last time.

Los Angeles felt like a photo negative of what we’d left behind. Where there once were vivid greens, there were now desert browns; instead of a snowy season, we experienced our first fire season; in place of our fire escape raccoons, we now had nightly visits from backyard coyotes. We missed home. Perhaps to distract us from the things we were missing, or maybe even as a way to reach back toward our old neighborhood cemetery, Jenny brought up an idea she’d once proposed in our Brooklyn apartment: Wouldn’t it be fun to start a podcast about Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Kristin, anxious for any distraction from the black widow spider we’d found in the kitchen earlier in the week, agreed.

Jenny had already put together a home recording studio in our spare bedroom, and she came equipped with a knowledge of both vampires and microphones, so our technical foundation was solid. Kristin, despite her status as a Buffy novice, had clocked quite a few hours during her teen years reading Anne Rice and wearing custom-molded vampire fangs to school. Both of us had grown up just a few hours outside NYC in the 1990s, wearing JNCO jeans, smoking clove cigarettes, and listening to Nirvana on our Discmans, so we were also tapped into the nostalgia factor.

We released our first episode of Buffering the Vampire Slayer on September 14, 2016. We couldn’t have imagined that only a few weeks later, we’d have thousands of new listeners.

We also could not have imagined that a presidential candidate would erupt from a real-life Hellmouth just two months later, win control of the country, and steel us and our expanding community for a fight.

That we’d get pregnant after months of trying, only to experience a miscarriage just hours before going onstage for a live podcast recording in Madison, Wisconsin.

That we’d announce a Buffy Prom in Los Angeles and then watch in awe as it sold out in less than three minutes. Or that, just a week before that first Buffy Prom, Jenny would tell Kristin she was leaving our marriage.

That in the wake of our divorce, we’d somehow manage to continue podcasting together, bracing through some of our darkest times while simultaneously witnessing some of the podcast’s highest highs.

That seven years later we’d still be here, each remarried, one of us with a toddler, still talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer from our separate houses (Jenny in Maine and Kristin in upstate New York) with lives both separate and intertwined.

We didn’t know any of this when we sat down to record our first episode, Jenny in her office chair monitoring the audio, Kristin in the cozy green armchair just a few feet away.

All we knew then was that we loved Buffy.

That she and her friends would be riding sidecar to our lives for many years to follow, crisis managing by example, would reveal itself over time.

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Excerpted from Slayers, Every One of Us: How One Girl In All The World Showed Us How To Hold On by Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs. Copyright © 2025 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, a division of Macmillan.