⚰️ Is 'Bury Your Gays' Making a Comeback? ⚰️

QUEER WORD
BURY YOUR GAYS

What It Means:

a storytelling trope where queer characters are killed off (or given unnecessarily tragic endings) far, far more often than straight characters. Most often it is used to refer to storytelling in TV and film, but it also shows up across books, video games, and other media.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

Jenny quietly realised the reason she kept expecting Mayim to vanish or get hit by a bus was because every queer woman she’d ever seen on TV had been sacrificed to a tragic bury your gays storyline.

A little bit of history:

The only time I remember seeing cisgender queer men on TV when I was growing up was in storylines about HIV.

Precisely zero of those stories were about men successfully living their chaotic, delicious lives with the virus.

No, they were all about those men dying. Every one of them facing a tragic, depressing demise.

Trans men? They simply didn't exist, as far as my TV was concerned.

And trans women were only there to be mocked or humiliated.

Queer cis women had it slightly better. Sure, they were only ever wheeled out for the lesbian kiss episode, a ratings stunt that saw them snog a female lead for shock value, before promptly being written out of the show when said character realised that she was just ‘confused’.

Which, you know, is not exactly a very satisfying story, but at least these characters got to live!

For over half a century, this has been the pattern. Queer characters show up periodically as walking plot devices whose main job is to suffer, die, or provide a teachable moment. They were only ever:

• the moody best friend who dies by suicide

• the once vivacious man stricken with AIDS

• the tragic side character brutally beaten by a mob of angry men

Actually seeing queer joy - you know, queer people living, being imperfect, funny, annoying, and (dare I say) boring - was practically unheard of.

So, although the bury your gays trope wasn't officially named until the 2010s, it resonated almost immediately for the generations who had experiences similar to my own.

Why Were Queer People So Often Depicted In This Way?

Well, the most straightforward answer is: queerphobia.

But it’s how the queerphobia was deployed that’s interesting here.

When looking specifically at the film industry, a lot of what we saw (and still see) can be traced back to the Hays Code, which was a set of ‘morality’ rules that Hollywood studios were compelled to comply with from the 1930s to the late 1960s.

Homosexuality sat in a category charmingly called ‘sex perversion’.

Because the Code existed to prevent ‘untoward influence’ on audiences, if a film wanted to include an openly queer character, there had to be consequences for their ‘perversion’. Their queerness couldn't simply exist, it had to be the problem that needed solving (usually through tragedy).

The Hays Code finally died in 1968, just a year before Stonewall and the birth of the modern gay rights movement. And for a while there, things started to look like they were on the up. In the '70s, queer characters started appearing more often on TV and in film. For example:

• The first ever major American motion picture to revolve around gay characters, ‘The Boys in the Band’, was released in 1970, and though it did receive backlash for depicting the character’s lives in a tragic way, you can’t deny that they weren’t fully rounded, fleshed-out, wonderfully flawed humans (Fun fact: this film is thought to be the first mainstream American film to use the C-word!)

• In US sitcom ‘Soap’, Billy Crystal played Jodie Dallas. Jodie was one of the first recurring gay characters on American network TV, and was pretty much the ‘normal’, level-headed one in his family (that is, if you ignore the deeply problematic trans storyline that happened in the show’s first few episodes).

• In Australia, ‘Number 96’ featured Carlotta as Robyn Ross in 1973, the first time a trans character was played by a trans actor on television anywhere in the world. Her storyline was kind of flimsy (it is a soap, after all), but she was also allowed to be a glamorous, desired, bombshell.

These characters broke new ground. Sure, their queerness was often used as a bit of a storytelling gimmick, but they still provided more rounded characters than we had seen up until that point (and, most importantly, they hadn’t died by the time the credits rolled).

Then came the ‘80s. A general hardening of attitudes and the AIDS crisis. Yet again, queer characters became tragic cautionary tales - nothing but fodder for ‘Very Special Episodes’ seemingly created to scare children into heterosexuality.

The Coining of A Term

In the 2010s someone finally gave the pattern a name. Bury your gays first appeared after the good people of the internet took particular umbrage with the death of the character Lexa on the TV show ‘The 100’.

And like the ‘Bechdel Test’ did for women in film (that simple checklist about whether two named women talk to each other about something other than a man) naming it held a mirror up to what had been happening all this time.

Once you see it you can’t unsee it. After fans had a phrase for it, writers and showrunners couldn't pretend it was all just coincidence anymore. People started paying close attention and keeping track of patterns, like:

• How many queer characters are there?

• How many survive to the end of the season?

• Why do so many of them die right after they finally get their happy ending?

And slowly, things started to get better.

We got whole series built around queer characters who were allowed to be happy, scrappy, complicated, and fully human.

Shows where the drama didn't automatically end with the gay one dying in a car crash, a hate crime, or some tragic misunderstanding.

Pose. Heartstopper. Feel Good. Gentleman Jack. Our Flag Means Death. Stories where queer people got to be messy and boring and alive (and also pirates).

Until... Maybe Now?

OK, that's a bit of a dramatic headline, but we seem to have stumbled into a time where bury your gays has taken on a completely different meaning. After a period of meaningful growth in queer representation, things seem to be slipping somewhat backwards.

Recent data from GLAAD's Where We Are on TV report shows that of 489 LGBTQ characters counted across broadcast, cable and streaming, 201 of them (that’s a whopping 41%) won't be returning next season. Their shows have either been cancelled, wrapped up as limited series, or they've been written out altogether.

So, just as we finally started getting more queer characters who don't die for drama, a huge chunk of them are about to disappear anyway.

And with public attitudes hardening once again and studios getting skittish about ‘diversity’ becoming a political football, it's looking doubtful whether the shows we lose will be replaced with new queer stories.

So yes, bury your gays still exists as the classic trope - the death, the tragedy, the shocking twist for ratings.

But we're also watching a quieter, industry-wide version play out right now, with whole shows full of queer characters being buried under cancellations, budget cuts, and culture-war panic.

The question has stopped being ‘by which episode do you think the gay one will be killed off?’, and is now ‘do you think we’ll keep seeing ourselves on screen at all?’.