Xena Co-Creator Reveals Why The Warrior Princess & Gabrielle Never Became A Couple

Ever since it started on TV, Xena: Warrior Princess has been an LGBT favourite, with many feeling that the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle was a lesbian one, although the show never actually came out and explicitly said that. However, it was definitely there, with the show increasingly adding hints, jokes and innuendo, even including a ‘kiss’ between the characters towards the end, which saved Gabrielle’s life.

But why didn’t they ever actually become a couple on-screen (although by the end even the two actresses involved thought the two were almost definitely intimate)? Co-creator Robert Tapert has been talking about that, although his reasoning seems a little bit like an excuse. He told EW, “The name Xena means ‘stranger’. She felt she was irredeemable. That friendship between Xena and Gabrielle transmitted some message of self-worth, deservedness, and honor to people who felt very marginalized, so it had a lot of resonance in the gay community… We didn’t really ever want to get them 100 percent together for a very strange reason. There was Ares [Kevin Smith], God of War, who we loved. We did not want to give up the hold that character had over Xena and the enjoyment we had with telling stories of Xena and Ares. So as much as we liked that Xena and Gabrielle were two people who were the best of friends, and perhaps intimate friends, we never wanted to give up Ares.”

The real reason however is more likely the TV landscape in the 1990s, when LGBT characters were rarer and almost never the main characters. Tapert admits that, “Before we started shooting Xena, we shot the material that we were going to use to create the opening title sequences with. The studio was so concerned that it would be perceived as a lesbian show that they would not allow us to have Xena and Gabrielle in the same frame of the opening titles.”

Xena actress Lucy Lawless also thinks things may have been different if the show was made today, saying, “For the LGBT community to see themselves on TV was certainly new in the ’90s. My goodness, how things have changed from Xena subtext to I Am Cait. That’s an incredible evolution in 20 years, and I think it’s a really healthy one.”

There is currently a reboot of Xena in development at NBC, with suggestions already that it’s likely to include openly LGBT characters. However, whether that includes Xena herself remains to be seen.