15 Recent, Especially Brutal, Examples of the Bury Your Gays Trope – Out Magazine
Back in 2016, the death of The 100 character Lexa inspired queer women’s site Autostraddle to make a list of every lesbian or bisexual woman on TV who had died in their shows. At present, the list now stands at over 225 characters.
That’s just TV. And that’s just queer women. The trope also extends to films, and gay and bi men. No queer people are immune. Before Pose, basically every example of trans representation ended with a trans woman dying.
This goes all the way back to the Hays Code, a rule in early Hollywood that said sexual acts considered “perverted,” including suggestions of same-sex relationships were banned, and that any sex outside of straight sex between a husband and a wife had to always be shown in a negative light and with negative consequences – usually meaning death.
Now, there are not rules, not even unspoken ones, that say queer characters have to be killed off, but the trope keeps coming back. Shows like Killing Eve, and most recently, House of the Dragon, are still brutally and needlessly killing off their queer characters instead of letting them be happy.
Here are 15 of the most egregious — and brutal — recent examples of the Bury Your Gays trope.