Chels

I’m continuing my explorations of queer tropes – this one is a bit more controversial; some people are quite avidly against it, others think it’s not that bad, and some think it doesn’t even exist. This week we’re exploring bury your gays.

There’s a broad definition of bury your gays, and a more specific one. Broadly, the term refers to the expendable nature of queer characters. Queer characters are more likely to be killed off as part of their story. Of course it’s hard to properly quantify, because there are far fewer queer characters than straight ones, so one death makes up a higher proportion of the characters than for straight characters. It’s a trope that’s stuck around for a while though, for various reasons, which is what validates the trope regardless of sample size.

The trope as we know it originated as a result of the Hay’s Code, when queer characters could only be portrayed on screen if they  a) were explicitly portrayed as villains or degenerates, or b) died by the end of their time on screen. Usually the death was expected to be tied to their queerness in some way – perhaps they died as a punishment for queerness, or they died soon after revealing queerness. It was rare for a queer character to have an ending that wasn’t death, even if they were villains.

Later, portrayals of queer characters became more sympathetic, but that didn’t mean they were spared from death. In fact, queer death became even more of a trope – it became an easy shorthand for tragedy. The HIV/AIDs crisis was a big inspiration for queer media, and media about queer people. From Philadelphia to RENT, the queer experience on screen was defined by illness and death. Yes, it reflected a large part of the queer experience of the time, but queerness was so strongly linked to tragic early deaths, and while many people did lose their lives, many others survived, and queer joy still existed. It almost became a kind of trauma porn, to watch vibrant queer characters become weak with illness, and eventually die prematurely.

These days, the traumatic deaths continue. Coronation Street celebrated the show’s first ever successful lesbian wedding this year – a feat that was almost achieved seven years ago, however the wedding could not officially go ahead, as Rana Habeeb, who had overcome homophobia from her family, died in a tragic accident on the day of her wedding to Kate Connor. The couple exchanged vows together, and Rana died shortly after. Of course, wedding day disasters are not uncommon in soap operas, but it felt particularly significant that Rana died at the same time she would be making her same-sex relationship official. Of course, it didn’t help that Coronation Street previously killed off Maddie Heath, another lesbian character, in a similar tragic accident.

The bury your gays trope was less criticised until recently, primarily because there was so little queer representation in media that any representation was celebrated, even if that meant a background character who wouldn’t survive the media. These days, though, representation is much less sparse, which means audiences can now afford to be a bit more selective with our tastes. Now, it’s not enough to simply have a queer character, who may or may not survive the series, or who is merely a side character. Now, queer stories have to be worthwhile.

Some of the worst offenders of the bury your gays trope have come in recent years, and i think it’s partly to do with how egregious the particular scenes are, and partly because audiences aren’t starved for queer stories. Spoilers ahead.

The first is Killing Eve. For four seasons, Eve and Villanelle had a will-they-won’t-they relationship that audiences feared would be queerbait at first. Their relationship remained complex, sometimes positive, and sometimes negative, with the two rarely feeling the same way about one another. In the final episode, Eve and Villanelle seem to finally accept their love for one another, only for Villanelle to be killed in the final moments of the show. Killing Eve was never marketed as a romance or a happy story, and shock endings are common in thrillers, but something about killing off Villanelle immediately after she found happiness felt quite cruel to the audience who had spent years wondering how the characters’ relationship would culminate.

Possibly more egregious is Supernatural. The show featured two male leads who were very popular with their fanbase; Dean and Castiel. While fans wished they’d end up together, it was largely accepted that the show would turn out to be queerbait. There were plenty of references to queerness by both characters, and in fact by the actors themselves, but the audience assumed it would never come to fruition. They were wrong, but also, they were right. With two episodes to go until the show’s 15 season run ended, Castiel confessed his love to Dean. What happened next is hard to explain, but essentially, Castiel (an angel) made a deal with a cosmic entity that once he achieved true happiness, they would take him to a place called ‘the empty’. So, shortly after confessing his love to Dean (and without receiving a reply), Castiel was taken away to a place referred to by fans as Turbo Hell. Two episodes later, Dean would die anticlimactically. Supernatural is one of the worst offenders when it comes to the bury your gays trope – the ‘death’ was explicitly tied to Castiel’s queerness, and it came immediately following the confirmation that the character was queer.

It can be hard to convince some people that the bury your gays trope exists. People die in media all the time, so why is it so significant when a gay person dies? Do we expect every gay character to live? Are we looking for special treatment for queer characters? Well, no. It’s just that there’s a very specific pattern to a lot of queer deaths – so many happen just as a character is about to achieve deep happiness, or just as the character is revealed to be queer. There’s almost an inability by some creators to portray queer characters as ‘normal’. They are often troubled, traumatised, or treated as expendable. Perhaps you agree that the trope is exaggerated, or that we shouldn’t care so much, but I think that aside from wanting to see more queer representation (and better queer representation), it’s a really fascinating topic to look into – it’s survived for nearly a hundred years, from a code of conduct invented to ‘preserve morality’ in Hollywood, to exploiting the HIV/AIDs epidemic for tragic stories, to becoming an expected phenomenon.