The ‘bury your gays’ trope: why it is time for the industry to let it go 

Villanelle from Killing Eve, Lexa from The 100, Rose from Jane the Virgin, Martha from Children’s Hour, Andrew Beckett from Philadelphia, Tara Maclay from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Denise Cloyd from Walking Dead, Oberyn Martell from The Game of Thrones, and Edward Meechum from House of Cards have two things in common— they were queer and now are dead.

It is easy to spot the similarities these characters share because on-screen the conventional interaction with questions of death, grief and mourning takes a backseat when the character is queer.

Their death is either incorporated to serve as a cautionary tale or to generate a shock value for audiences. Their demise is treated like a direct consequence of their sexuality.

In 2016 after Lexa, a lesbian character from the post-apocalyptic science fiction series The 100 was killed, fans rose up in arms and alleged that the creators of the show invoked the regressive ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope. The backlash prompted Jason Rothenberg, the executive producer and showrunner of the series The 100, to issue an apology for his oversight in an open letter.

This is one among the spate of queer character deaths that plagued the TV screen with the most recent being that of Villanelle’s from Killing Eve.

The origins of the trope

Hollywood became synonymous with scandals in the Roaring Twenties — from the murder of William Desmond Taylor to the alleged rape of Virginia Rappe by popular actor Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. 

These events made headlines and attracted the scorn of religious and political organisations alike. Subsequently, legislators in over 37 states introduced censorship laws.

Frightened at the thought of having to comply with multiple inconsistent laws, producers chose to censor themselves using the ‘Hays Code’—a set of guidelines in line with the social and cultural vein of conservative America. The Code prohibited profanity, nudity, violence, sexual persuasions and rape. It also governed the use of crime, costume, dance, religious and national sentiments, and morality. Filmmakers who tried to defy the code were forced out of the business.

To ensure the presence of queer characters under the self-imposed sanctions, filmmakers had to resort to portraying homosexuality as perverse. A notable example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s characterisation of Norman Bates in Psycho. While queer villains enjoyed screen time they were also destined for suffering and death. This exercise, however, was not limited to just cinema.

The tropes and the killings

Marijane Meaker, the pioneer of lesbian pulp fiction novels was explicitly instructed by her publishers that queer characters had to die by the end of the book — an instruction that many filmmakers abide by to this day. Among the queer characters martyred at the guillotine of creativity in cinema, a disproportionately high number of them are bisexual and lesbian women.

In fact, the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope was previously known as the ‘Dead Lesbian Syndrome’, which was representative of the misogyny and queerphobia female characters had to face on screen.

Most of these killings were often tied to the character’s romantic arc — in the 1931 and 1958 films Girls in Uniform, Manuela, the lesbian protagonist dies by suicide when she is separated from the teacher she loves.

In the 1961 drama Children’s Hour, two former college classmates Martha (Shirley MacLaine) and Karen (Audrey Hepburn) run a boarding school for girls. When a mischievous girl spreads a rumour about their relationship, they are disowned by the community. This incident forces Martha to reckon with her sexuality and she comes out to Karen before dying by suicide. Even though the film addressed the issue of social ostracisation of queer people eloquently, it chose to fall back on the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope to advance the story.

Effects of the trope

Employing suicide as a plot point to bring a queer relationship to an end has a significant impact on queer teenagers who are still inside the closet. Their only source of respite from heteronormativity might be a fictional television character who thinks like them and resembles their desires. To kill such characters with repeated impunity will push an already vulnerable section of the audience into further isolation and hopelessness.

“Depictions of romantic suicides are insidious because populations confronted with suicide — whether illusory or real — are more prone to it themselves,” Samuel Clowes Huneke, a historian at Stanford noted. With LGBT youth twice and four times as likely as their straight peers to attempt suicide, filmmakers must opt to cremate this trope. While the community started making strides in achieving acceptance in mainstream society after Stonewall, the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the U.S. in the 90s re-centred death in queer stories of love and friendship as seen in the 1993 Tom Hanks feature Philadelphia.

Employing the trope liberally forces the audiences to identify queer people only through negative emotions like grief, while reinforcing the notion that queer relationships are inherently doomed or tragic. The trope suggests that queer lives are expendable and that their deaths can be fashioned as plot points to reinforce heteronormativity. On occasion, they are turned into a spectacle to enhance the shock value of the production like in the case of Oberyn Martell in the second season of Game of Thrones.

Turning tides

With more queer people helming projects, the possibility of happy queer relationships making it to our screens is on the horizon. Queer writers and producers like Dan Levy and Mae Martin are actively pushing for change from within the industry by creating joyful and meaningful romantic relationships for queer characters that underline their humanity. Though Schitt’s Creek featured a majority of straight couples, the anchor of the show’s romantic arc was David (Levy) and Patrick’s (Noah Reid) relationship for a majority of its runtime.

While audiences do not have the authority to dissuade filmmakers from exploring the death of a queer character in their creation, it is imperative that they do it while being conscious of the history.