#BuryYourGays

Travis: Introduction

The media trope that has now been deemed as “Bury Your Gays” has lived a whole life of its own, even prior to its emergence as a hashtag on social media platforms like Twitter. Through its time in television shows and movies, the Bury Your Gays Trope has evolved in various ways; the main difference is the reason the trope is used throughout various periods of time. The title of “Bury Your Gays” expresses the trope it labels in a fairly self-explanatory way - media often kills Queer characters to the point that the narrative decision to do so has received “trope” status. However, how did this trope begin, how has it changed, and how can we grow to become more aware of its existence?

Context

Figure 1: Side-by-side of Ursula and Divine, the
drag queen that inspired Ursula's design.

To understand the ideology behind Bury Your Gays, we first have to look at the cultural climate surrounding the Queer community at the time. In the very early stages of this trope's appearance, gay representation often came in the form of villainy and moral corruptness. This makes sense when, culturally, being Queer was very taboo and even illegal in some areas of the United States. When the “Depraved Homosexual” character becomes the villain of a narrative, it follows suit that they must receive some sort of punishment - be that death or otherwise. We can see evidence of tropes like this in many Disney films, where the villainous characters are often coded as Queer (think Ursula as a drag queen, Scar as a gay man, etc.).

However, as the cultural climate warmed up to Queer people, the trope didn’t disappear - rather, it shifted the reason for killing Queer people. Rather than killing the villainous Queer character, the “Too Good for This Sinful Earth” narrative came into play. This was coupled with a response to the AIDS Crisis, which often featured media depictions of gay men succumbing to the disease. Rather than dying because they were bad, Queer characters began dying because they were good. Instead of villains, they became victims. Often, acts of homophobia would result in Queer death, either through murder or suicide.

Even today, it feels like Queer characters are killed at disproportionately high rates. Erin Waggoner points out that out of 35 WLW (Women Loving Women) characters on television in the 2015-2016 season, 10 of them died in the span of 5 months. Major mainstream news sources, such as NBC, have even published articles discussing the frequent death of lesbian characters in television. Coupling the killing of Queer characters with the popularity of social media, upset fans took to Twitter to express their frustration about the Bury Your Gays trope through #BuryYourGays.

Key Actors

Because of the broad topic that #BuryYourGays encompasses, it's difficult to establish specific key actors in the movement. Because of the ongoing use of the hashtag, it's also difficult to establish exactly what moment instigated the creation of the hashtag. However, upon reviewing a variety of tweets, it seems that the main people utilizing the hashtag are people within the Queer community and their allies. Their target audience varies depending on the goal of their tweet, which will be discussed more later. Some tweets aim to raise awareness of the harms of the trope; the audience here seems to be more general - anyone who will listen. Other tweets call for change within the entertainment industry by expressing discontent with the trope's occurrence. For these tweets, it seems like the target audience is those in the entertainment industry: writers, producers, directors, actors, etc.

Many of the tweets focused primarily on a handful of television shows: Orange is the New Black, Kingdom, The Walking Dead, and even WandaVision were at the focus of many tweets. Fans expressed their anger and frustration with these shows due to the various Queer deaths many of them depicted. Orange is the New Black features a long-time fan favorite, Poussey dies from suffocation after being restrained during a peaceful protest. Kingdom features a fight between a father and his gay son outside of a bar that ultimately ends in the bouncer shooting the son. The tweets about The Walking Dead focused primarily on the death of Tara, a lesbian character who was killed in a massacre of many of the survivors. Her death followed that of another Queer character, Jesus, earlier that season. And despite its recent release, WandaVision also received criticism for its treatment of Queer characters. This instance was a bit different though - Wanda Maximoff's children, Billy and Tommy are Queer in the comics, although it is never specified in the show (where they are shown in their pre-teen years). After Wanda comes to terms with the death of her husband, Vision, she releases a spell she has place the town of Westview under, thus getting rid of everything she has created while enacting this spell; this includes Billy and Tommy.

Despite these various examples of fan responses to the Bury Your Gays trope at play, we chose to focus on other examples in the Social Media Presence section.

Ang: An Exploration into the Trope: Hannibal and IT

We see the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope in many forms of media – television shows seem to wreak the most havoc, in regard to the trope, these days. However, I’m surprised at how little people are digging into the horror genre! This genre is riddled with homophobia and unnecessary endings for LGBTQ+ characters. It makes us wonder if these characters are introduced merely for the writers to claim representation, or if there is some type of underlying homophobia within these types of films. I understand that perhaps this genre hasn’t been heavily torn apart, merely because there are a large handful of people that can’t stomach blood and gore. Maybe this is a trigger, maybe they have too much anxiety over jump scares – I understand, these things happen. However, by not diving right into Horror looking at this trope in specific, we are missing a valuable argument, as well as a reason to be more disgusted by mindsets than dead bodies. 

 

As a kid I watched Hannibal; later in life I read all the novels by Thomas Harris. When we think of Hannibal Lecter, gay doesn’t come to mind. When we think of these novels and the films that have been produced in their image, we don’t outwardly see ‘Bury your gays.’ As a queer person, however, I do. Take, for instance, Hannibal’s fascination and mutilation of Mason Verger. Within the film, Mason (Gary Oldman) is not only a homosexual but a sex offender – it’s as if being gay wasn’t wild enough for the author, but to link the character’s homosexuality to the sexual abuse of young children makes this a whole other offense entirely. Not only is the audience/reader being introduced to a gay character, but they are also then being told that he is a pedophile – instant hate, instant stigma, instant outcast of those that are not straight. This also can persuade a public argument that all gay men want to violate young boys – yes, this has already been brought to light many times. Thus, this type of characterization and portrayal can be damaging to the LGBTQ+ community. I digress…

When Verger retells his story to Agent Starling (Julianne Moore) about how he came to be severely disfigured and paralyzed, he mentions that Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) was invited over for dinner. While at the dinner, Lecter makes advances on Verger to gain his trust – they then drink, take ‘poppers’ (a hallucinogen drug), kiss and then BOOM Mason is under Hannibal’s spell. Mason winds up hanging from the ceiling, a request from Hannibal, playing into Mason’s desire of autoerotic asphyxiation. He begins swinging on the rope tied to his neck, kicking out and shattering a glass mirror behind him. Lecter comes forward and hands Verger a glass shard, saying, “try this…try peeling off your face” (Hannibal, 2001). Needless to say, he does, and in doing so the swinging from the rope continues until Verger’s back is broken. Right here, we see a mutilation of a queer character, and yet no one seems to bat an eye – why? Is Mason just a reminder of Hannibal’s damages? Or is it to punish this character for being anything but straight?

Later on, in the film (and in the novel), Lecter is captured and taken to Verger’s estate. On the estate, there is a barn, where Verger’s henchmen bring Lecter, strapped to a dolly and fully masked (as to keep him from biting the staff). Wild boar are released while Verger watches from above, his desire is to have Lecter dismembered and disfigured by the animals, in the same way that he was essentially ‘torn apart.’ This of course, doesn’t actually occur. What does occur, however, is our villain becoming a hero, as he rescues Agent Starling who has unconsciously fallen into the pit of pigs. Verger watches this, encouraging his main caretaker, Cordell, to do something. Lecter quips to Cordell, “Hey Cordell, why don’t you push him in? You could always say it was me,” (Hannibal, 2001). With that, Verger is being pushed into the pit of Wild Boar, hungry for blood, as Cordell runs off to of course blame Hannibal when asked what happened to his boss. Mason is torn limb from limb in a graphic display for the audience, and most probably think, ‘he deserved it.’ 

I’m not going to disagree with the idea that Mason Verger is a villain, or that he is a disgusting pedophile. That being said, I am going to disagree with the way queer characters were represented here, showcasing homosexuals as the ‘worst of the worst.’ Not only was Mason Verger buried (quite literally) with the Boar that he had intended to use as Lecter’s demise, but he was buried from the start by the way he was characterized and shown to the reader/viewer. It might seem like justice, but Verger is a victim of the ‘bury your gays’ trope within the Horror Genre. 

 

Another situation where a mainstream novel and film holds tight to our offensive trope is that of Stephen King’s IT. Although the references within the novel are subtle – Richie Tozier constantly referring to Eddie Kaspbrak as cute, or the kissing of his cheek at the time of his death – they are there. Want something even more in your face? Is this subtly not enough for an argument? 

Let’s take characters Patrick Hockstetter and Henry Bowers – friends, bullies….lovers? The duo spends most of their time harassing ‘The Loser’s Club,’ the main characters of the novel. These characters are younger than Hockstetter and Bowers, and therefore this all plays into the stereotypical older bullies vs. younger kids. However, there is another stereotype at play when it comes to these two bullies and their agendas – once again, Horror decides to make the queer character the villain. In King’s novel, Hockstetter and Bowers have a ‘different’ type of friendship, not only do they harass one another for fun, but they also like to perform sex acts with each other when no one is around. Take, for instance, Hockstetter giving Bowers a hand job, which quickly escalates into the offering of a blow job, (King, pg. 805). For some reason, this maddens Bowers, and he storms off. What maddens me is the fact that once again, we take a gay character and show them as a bad person. As a reader, what we also see is a seemingly straight character (Bowers) feeling pressed by his homosexual friend (Hockstetter) into allowing oral sex to be performed upon an ‘unwilling’ party. If this isn’t enough to summon a homophobic backlash, let’s take into consideration that immediately after this happens, Hockstetter is attacked and killed by the monster/clown entity, Pennywise. Bury Your Gays is ever-present. 

 

To make a return back to main character territory, we look at our boys (and Beverly) of The Loser’s Club – namely, Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie Tozier. As mentioned before, there are a lot of subtleties that hint at a relationship between the two, especially a love that Richie has been harboring for Eddie. However, as readers we never get that far, King quite literally ‘buries’ the idea, leaving room for argument from the ‘straight camp’ that the queer community is reaching in regard to Richie being gay. 

Let’s take a look at the film – where Richie Tozier is very gay and even more so, very closeted. Of course, we understand Richie’s pain, he lives in a small town where hate crimes have already been committed on gay men. Not to mention, as a child he was bullied by Bowers (Go figure!) for having a crush on Bowers’ cousin. Within the film, we see this scene played out in an arcade when Richie offers the other young boy there a token so they can continue to play Street Fighter. 

Fast forward to later on in the film where we see many moments of Richie trying to make a more significant connection with Eddie. It’s all there in black and white, but once again, nothing comes to actually happen. What does happen though, is Eddie’s death when the group is trying to finally defeat Pennywise once and for all. This, of course, breaks Richie’s heart and he refuses to leave Eddie’s dead body, screaming over and over, “We can’t leave him,” (It, 2019). 

 

Not only is Eddie killed off at the end of the film, but we once again see Richie remaining closeted. He never admits to his feelings out loud, never tells his friends that he is gay, and he loses what we can presume was the love of his life. Eddie is a tragic death for the queer community, not just because he himself could have been gay, but because our one gay character (Richie) was never truly able to express his love. In a way, the ‘bury your gays’ trope cries out the loudest with Stephen King’s IT. Not only was there a death of an assumed gay character, but there was a forcing further back into the closet of our homosexual hero. In summation, the LGBTQ+ community isn’t allowed to win when it comes to the Horror genre, and good luck surviving until the end of the film.

Travis: Social Media Presence

Twitter users approached #BuryYourGays in many different ways. Primarily, tweets that were located using a Twitter search either a) worked to raise awareness of the harms of the trope and the trope itself or b) expressed discontent with the use of the trope in television. Specifically, tweets I found focused on The 100, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Supernatural. The following tweet from @Lez_Dish calls attention to the frequency of the Bury Your Gays trope by presenting a startling fact - "Only about 5% of lesbian TV characters get happy endings." She couples this statement, along with examples of WLW couple names, with an embedding link that allows viewers to learn more information about the Bury Your Gays trope, focusing specifically on lesbian characterization.

Figure 2: Tweet from @Lez_Dish calling for
further awareness of the Bury Your Gays Trope

Other tweets, such as the following from @aneffcientmess work to primarily show distaste in the use of the trope. @anefficeintmess called out Supernatural after long-time character Castiel confesses his love for protagonist Dean Winchester, only to immediately sacrifice himself for Dean.

Figure 3: @anefficientmess vocalizes disdain for the use of
the Bury Your Gays trope in Supernatural

The act of queerbaiting is specifically called out in the case of Supernatural, as it was in The 100. This suggests a pattern that queerbaiting acts as a means to hook audiences in, only to be let down by a "bait-and-switch" tactic that has gained the title of "trope" in its own right. The sarcastic final phrase of "Lol & g'nite" seems to indicate a level of unsurprised reaction from the user, or at the very least frustration in the repetition of this trope.

In the following thread of tweets by @thequeernomad, The Haunting of Bly Manor is called out for its "representation of a tragic romance" between two female characters, stating that two heterosexual couples with no romantic involvement had a better tragic romance than the WLW couple. Thus, with this first tweet, @thequeernomad vocalizes their negative emotions about the Bury Your Gays trope, which results in the death of the lead protagonist of the series.

Figure 4: @thequeernomad tweets to both vocalize discontent and call for change

The second tweet shown operates in a more complex way. It seems to be both noting the harms of the trope and vocalizing dissatisfaction. @thequeernomad calls out "sapphics" to demand better representation of WLW characters, arguing that the existence of lesbians within media is enough for said "sapphics" to feel content.

Impact of Movement

Though it is difficult to discern what exactly the impact of #BuryYourGays has been, it is possible to draw a few conclusions about the events surrounding the movement. Although #BuryYourGays began in roughly 2015/2016, people are still utilizing the hashtag in 2020, as demonstrated in the above images. Thus, we can conclude two things: the issues that are being addressed by the #BuryYourGays movement are still occurring and the longevity of the hashtag itself is substantial enough to allow continued use of it.

Two of the examples previously mentioned, The Haunting of Hill House and the finale of Supernatural both premiered in 2020, indicating that the media is still following the Bury Your Gays trope despite the movement the hashtag has created. That being said, there have been real-world impacts as a result of the digital movement - fans of The 100 performed a mass unfollowing of the show's producer, forcing him into a position where he had to think about the use of the trope. He stated that "knowing what [he] know[s] now, he would have done some things differently," although he wouldn't have changed the story, and thus Lexa's death. Following this statement, he refused to speak more on the matter when asked about Lexa's death at a panel a few days later.

Figure 5: idashboads.com visualization of
Queer television deaths

While the use of the Bury Your Gays trope still persists, it may not be used as frequently as in the past. Figure 5 shows that Queer deaths in television shows decreased by over half during 2017 as compared to the year prior. While 2016 featured 26 Queer characters dying on-screen, 2017 only featured 11. This may be due in part to the presence of #BuryYourGays and the awareness and pushback of the harmful trope. Regardless of the reason, this feels like a step in the right direction for those trying to end a trope such as Bury Your Gays, that has permeated so much of the media we consume and held a presence in popular culture for so long.

Additionally, it is not necessarily common to see hashtags in the realm of social activism survive in the way #BuryYourGays has. The continued use of the hashtag indicates that the unjustified killings of Queer characters are still occurring, and we can see evidence of this in the television shows mentioned above.

Weaknesses of the Movement

One weakness of #BuryYourGays is that it is difficult to discern what effects have come about the movement. While the hashtag raised awareness about the use of the trope and its effects on the Queer community, it feels like nothing else was accomplished. Producers of media that featured the trope were able to dismiss fan claims and complaints (as demonstrated by the producer of The 100), and the trope is still occurring today. We experienced some difficulty finding anything regarding an offline presence, which is perhaps one of the pitfalls this movement falls into.

Without an offline element of #BuryYourGays, the hashtag fails to give those perpetrating the actions the movement is fighting against any "real-world" actions. Some people have decided to boycott certain media, thus decreasing viewership, but that was essentially all of the evidence we could find. And the impact of that decrease in viewership clearly was not enough to encourage producers to avoid the trope in their writing.

Conclusion

Overall, we were surprised at the longevity of the hashtag itself, though not surprised at the lack of response for ending the trope. The idea of "burying your gays" has a long history that predates the invention of the hashtag, but the creation of the hashtag works to raise awareness of the harmful nature of this portrayal of Queer characters. Though Queer people and their allies have long been expressing their discontent at the continuation of this trope, it still persists in the media, failing to positively represent Queer characters. #BuryYourGays's use shows the community is paying attention to how Queer characters are treated, but without an offline presence, seems to lack a solution to this problem.

 

Works Cited

@anefficientmess. "@ all the articles about canon #deestiel framing it as a positive, please believe the hype is people laughing at how egregiously homophobic the writers and that scene are. Like, it's hysterical how they thought a 10 year #queerbait should end in a #BuryYourGays trope. Lol & g'nite" Twitter, 6 November 2020.

@Lez_Dish. "#BuryYourGays is just one part of a larger #LGBT representation problem: the unhappy ending problem. Only about 5% of lesbian TV characters get happy endings. #Clexa, #Crisabel, #Chelly, #Naomily, etc. This is why we need hope for pairings like #Maitino." Twitter, 15 April 2020.

@thequeernomad. "Side unpopular opinion: Hannah and Own had a better representation of a tragic romance" Twitter, 28 October 2020

@thequeernomad. "Also I just really want sapphics to stop losing their shit over toxic tropes like #BuryYourGays simply because ~lesbians~. We have received better representation than that before and we should be demanding it moving forward" Twitter, 28 October 2020.

“Bury Your Gays.” TV Tropes, tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays.

Hannibal. Directed by Ridley Scott, performances by Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, and Ray Liotta, MGM Films, 2001.

Harris, Thomas. Hannibal. New York, Bantam Dell, 1999.

Horne, Jennifer. “5 Must See TV Data Visualizations.” IDashboards, www.idashboards.com/blog/2018/03/07/5-must-see-tv-data-visualizations/.

IT Chapter 2. Directed by Andres Muschietti, performances by Bill Skarsgard, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, James Ransone, and Jessica Chastain, Warner Brothers, 2019.

King, Stephen. It. New York, Scribner, 1986.