When Jay Hulme came out as trans in early 2015 at age 18, he was struggling. The poet had grown up loving Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and had met Anthony Stewart Head, who played the beloved Watcher Giles, at fan conventions. But those cherished photos felt painful now: they showed him with his deadname, long hair, and before he'd come out. He was, by his own account, having a hard time.
Then something unexpected happened. Stewart Head and his wife Sarah Fisher somehow learned that Hulme was struggling, and they reached out with an invitation.
A Day That Changed Everything
Hulme later recalled the visit in a Twitter thread, describing how the actor and his wife spent the entire day with him at their farm. They took him to an upscale restaurant he'd never experienced before, introduced him to their horses, and had new photos taken and signed. They also offered thoughtful feedback on an essay he was writing about Shakespeare for school. But the material kindness mattered less than the emotional one. "Most importantly," Hulme wrote, "they gave me what I had been lacking in my life up until that point: affirmation, compassion, and belief in my abilities."
A Legacy of Support
The friendship lasted. Years later, when Hulme published his first poetry collection, Stewart Head wrote the foreword. In his own tribute after the actor's death on June 1 at age 72 from pneumonia complications, Hulme revealed that he had named himself Anthony as a middle name in honor of Stewart Head, choosing it "as a reminder to be for others what he, and Sarah, were to me. A light of hope."
The story, which Hulme first shared publicly in 2019, resurged in early 2026 after Stewart Head's passing and amid broader conversation about allyship in fandom. For many in the LGBTQ+ community, it stands as a quiet example of what genuine support looks like: not performative, but concrete, generous, and given without fanfare to someone who needed it.
Source: PinkNews
Cover photo: Raven Underwood, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
