Bury your gays and characters of color

These deaths often come shortly after the queer character. This era truly gave birth to the concept of queercoding, where certain characteristics and subtle symbolism are used to impart the queerness of a character or story into the audience's subconscious.

The main difference between LGBTQIA+ characters dying versus fulfilling the Bury Your Gays trope is what it says about LGBTQIA+ characters. Because the film did not positively promote Martha's queerness, the movie was allowed to be released as it was.

Queer characters in modern film are frequently the target of homophobia-driven abuse, murder, and ridicule. Sign in now.

The History of the

In early film and 19th-century literature, the bury your gays trope was actually a refuge for queer authors. But when their character is reduced solely to this suffering in order to make them a martyr or a moral scapegoat, that piece of media is no longer doing justice to the LGBTQ character or their narrative; they've been stripped of their identity in order to be used as a tool.

"Bury your gays" or "dead lesbian syndrome" is a trope in the media portrayal of LGBTQ people in which queer characters face tragic fates, including death, much more often than straight characters. When one of the teachers — Martha Shirley MacLaine — finally confesses to feeling romantic love for her coworker, Karen Audrey Hepburnshe laments her guilt and disgust at herself before taking her own life.

The Bury your Gays

The 'Bury Your Gays' trope is found throughout cinema history. These deaths often come shortly after the queer character is finally able to confess or act upon their sexuality, giving them a brief moment of happiness before they are extinguished.

In recent years, audiences have heard more about the "bury your gays" trope, leading to questions about its history in Hollywood and why it's so controversial. Bury Your Gays often targets the only — or one of the only two — queer characters in a story.

This is repeated across many genres, including romance, historical fiction, and even horror — IT Chapter 2 ends both queer relationships in the film with graphic deaths. However, similar to the trope of female characters being "fridged," their deaths and suffering are frequently used not to develop their own narrative, but those of the characters — especially the straight, cisgender characters — around them.

As Hollywood pushed the boundaries with salacious films in order to draw in meager crowds during the Great Depression, conservative forces began to push back. If LGBTQ+ characters in movies aren't being literally buried, they are being forced through suffering, queer-coded villainization, or buried beneath queer subtext.

As more and more queer characters are having their stories told, creators are beginning to move away from the idea of inherent struggles to tell stories of love, friendship, and acceptance. Following the Hays Code was technically voluntary, but those who did not comply — especially openly queer creators, like filmmaker Dorothy Arzner — were simply erased from history.

Films like Wings and Morocco both featured same-sex kisses, but would walk the thin line between romance, friendship, and performance in order to get away with their use of queer characters. Implemented from tothe Hays Code was a set of self-imposed industry guidelines, consisting of 36 rules that prohibited things like profanity, graphic violence, and "sexual perversion.

Movies like Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon may not always be happy, but they explore deep, enriching stories that don't reduce their queer characters to being martyrs and victims. One of the greatest examples of the bury your gays trope under the Hays Code is The Children's Hourwhich tells the story of two boarding school teachers who are accused of having a lesbian affair.

The films of the s and early s were far racier than those of the decades to come, openly featuring sexually-liberated women, violent activities, and queer characters, though, creators frequently had to toe the line in order to escape criticism.

Here's a closer look at this trope and some examples from film and TV. Abstract “Bury Your Gays” is the popular name used to describe the common television trope in which characters who are ostensibly gender- or sexually-diverse are denied happy endings or “killed off”.

The "bury your gays" trope has been so named because LGBTQ+ characters are far more likely to die in film and television than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts.