Needs Help: Bury Your Gays

It is more or less accepted at large that Jack gets beat up for being gay; not to mention that after the event the book focuses on how miserable it leaves Ennis. I'd say it counts, in my opinion.

There's not much comparison between his life and others though, so we can't really say his life is much more miserable.

Still gonna add it anyway. Can anyone check if it's good enough as an example?

• Ennis from Brokeback Mountain assumes that Jack's death was caused by a hate-crime rather than an accident like her wife informed him. He was then confident the trope was in effect after Jack's father told Ennis that Jack dreamt of divorcing his wife, building a log cabin in his family's ranch for him and Ennis to live and help "licking the ranch up to shape," implying that Jack was ready to be open about his relationship with Ennis. The event also leaves Ennis miserable, sometimes leaving him in tears after Jack appears in his dream.

good write-up. At least in the short story it's pretty much outright said that the car accident is a cover, but the police don't give a crap, that might be worth mentioning.

Was the part about the car accident coverup really mentioned in the short story? I don't remember reading about that.

I guess, the short story says that nobody believes the story and that his injuries weren't consistent with an accident.

I guess it was in expanded version then, since the only chance I can get to read the story was from Newyorker site.

One thing I've been thinking about is if there should be some kind of numerical requirement for examples to be put on the main page. Basically, in order to be an example, gay characters need to be killed off disproportionately. That way we can avoid examples for works where Anyone Can Die or works with a large gay cast. Does anyone else agree or do you guys think you it makes things too complicated?

That doesn't really work because all facts considered unless you're dealing with a case of Everyone Is Gay, very often there's only one or two gay characters in a series (if any).

To some of the above comments: new drafts for the BYG page and subtropes make clear what isn’t really a case just because a gay character has died, and are trying not to be overly complex. We’d love your input on these :)

thread update - the Torturous Gay Afterlife TLP was nuked for... being largely not understood.

current active related TLP's: Out of the Closet and Into the Line of Fire.

TLP I will be making next: Homophobic Hate Crime (here).

Should we suggest replacing the current BYG text with a sandbox draft (like the one I made on the last page, please add comments/suggestions) before or after we've effectively purged the page of subtrope examples and the wiki of non-examples?

edited 27th Apr '18 11:05:36 PM by lakingsif

Homophobic Hate Crime has been made.

That now gives Tragic AIDS Story, Gayngst-Induced Suicide and Homophobic Hate Crime for Bury Your Gays subtropes (and for appropriate wicks), and Preserve Your Gays for the large scale subversions.

Currently in TLP: Out of the Closet and Into the Line of Fire; nuked from TLP is Torturous Gay Afterlife.

To-be-made: Gay Guy Dies First, Kick The Gay (possibly, it may seem to already be covered by Heteronormative Crusader, as well as Homophobic Hate Crime and Stuffed in the Fridge more generally).

Wick clean-up post: The following pages have a wick to Bury Your Gays. This is because they either contain a legitimate use of Bury Your Gays, had it commented out awaiting context expansion, or had a note added explaining it belongs at a yet-unlaunched trope.

(Whenever a folder is added it is all the wicks in that range, any wicks in the range not on the list will have been added later)

edited 8th Jun '18 5:31:06 AM by lakingsif

Now that Homophobic Hate Crime is up, I'm going to move the current image for Bury Your Gays there since it's done out of in universe homophobia as opposed to as opposed to just narrative expectation. Any objection?

edited 2nd Jun '18 1:03:04 PM by Ferot_Dreadnaught

You should make an IP thread, as the image is on the page by IP decision

IP thread

edited 7th Jun '18 6:40:46 PM by lakingsif

As I make my way through the wicks, should we come back to the replacement text for the Bury Your Gays page? I have a draft below, but we could also mention how examples can qualify as BYG if they don't fit a sub trope if it's still obvious that the queer characters are expendable even if they are not directly killed because they are queer, from a queer-coded cause, first, or soon after coming out. So, if their death seems like it's a character death as ratings stunt and they are the only gay character, it would count, for example?

This draft is a slightly expanded version of the one we had before.

"[Television] has yet to recover from the [2015/16 and 16/17] seasons, which included the deaths of an overwhelming number of lesbian and bisexual women characters. These deaths were often in service of another straight, cisgender character's plotline, and sent a toxic message to audiences. This decades-long trend — referred to in popular culture as "Bury Your Gays" — has made countless headlines in the past year, educating both viewers and creators alike on just how ubiquitous this trope has been."

— Opening statement to the 2017/18 GLAAD Where We Are on TV Report

The Bury Your Gays trope in media, including all its variants, is a homophobic cliché. It is the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heteronormative counterparts. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances.

Often, especially in older works (to the extent that they are found in older works, of course), gay characters just aren't allowed happy endings. Even if they do end up having some kind of relationship, at least one half of the couple, often the one who was more aggressive in pursuing a relationship, thus "perverting" the other one, has to die at the end. Of course, it can also happen to gay characters who aren't in relationships, particularly if they're Psycho Lesbians or Depraved Homosexuals.

Nowadays, when opinions on sexuality have shifted somewhat, justification may be attempted via Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Sometimes it's because the Magical Queer has died in a Heroic Sacrifice so that the straights may live. Naturally, this is subject to Alternative Character Interpretation.

Also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome, though that name has largely fallen out of use post-2015 and the media riots about overuse of the trope. And, as this public outcry restated, the problem isn't merely that gay characters are killed off: the problem is the tendency that gay characters are killed off in a story full of mostly straight characters, or when the characters are killed off because they are gay.

If the characters' relationship is obscured, or plain baiting, it drastically increases their chance of survival.

As stated above, sometimes gay characters die in fiction because, well, sometimes people die; this isn't correlation, and it's not always meant to "teach us something", nor is it necessarily indicative of some prejudice on the part of the creator. There are many Anyone Can Die stories: barring explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight deaths, it's not odd that the gay characters are dying. The occasional death of one in a Cast Full of Gay is unlikely to be notable, either.

Can be seen as Truth in Television in some cases, as gay and lesbian people are at a substantially higher risk for suicide and assault. The fact that AIDS hit the gay male community most prominently provided potent fresh fuel for this long running trope (which, like many things about the eighties, still has an effect on more recent works).

Period fiction also needs to take into account the lack of understanding of gay characters, whereby depicting the death or murder of gay people may not reflect the views of the author but the social dynamics of the setting. However, again, there were gay people throughout history who survived and lived full lives, and it is possible to tell those stories rather than working on the assumption that tragedy is the only narrative option. Defaulting to the reasoning of Truth in Television provides some justification, but does not necessarily negate this trope.

The revival of this trope in 2015/16 (especially with regards to things that happened in reality), particularly for female LGBT characters, sparked a lot of outrage and a pledge to encourage show-runners' reconsideration if planning to implement the trope. Read a thesis written about the trope and its consequences here. It's possibly also for this reason that a small British future dystopia series was brought into the spotlight, and won two Emmys in 2017: it deconstructs the hell out of the trope.

The exact opposite is found in Preserve Your Gays, often a reaction to this.

Specific variants:

• Gayngst-Induced Suicide: When an LGBT+ characters commits, or attempts to commit, suicide because of reasons connected to or caused by being LGBT.
• Homophobic Hate Crime: When a character is attacked and often murdered by homophobic characters.
• Tragic AIDS Story: When the character is gay, usually a gay man, and their doom is presented as "destined to be" because they are gay.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

edited 7th Jun '18 8:35:47 PM by lakingsif

A few comments:

• I think the first paragraph beats around the bush a little bit. It should be more explicit about what the trope is. Which, if I understand correctly, is: In aggregate, Gay characters are more likely to die, and die sooner in their character arc, than straight characters.
• Might make more sense to fold in the subtropes in with the Truth In Television paragraph, as all the ones we have right now are somewhat realistic.
• I'm a little confused by the 2nd-to-last paragraph.
• Not a huge fan of the last paragraph. Is it kosher to have so many web links in a trope description? It would be good to have some more context about what happened in 2015/16 rather than just links if you're going to discuss it to this extent. But since the media outcry is already discussed in another paragraph and the page quote already, this seems like a little much.
• Tokenization (the writers want to have a gay character, but don't know how to write one so the character is killed off) is another relevant concept here.
• Compare Black Dude Dies First.

^ Thank you. Some of the paragraphs are wholesale from the current page. I'll try incorporate some of the suggestions. Could we also make mention of times when a character is introduced in a story arc where it's obvious they're going to be killed off, and their brief characterisation is being gay? I feel like that counts.

Other things the draft could mention, referencing this article:

1. Can overlap with Queer Show Ghetto, in that where Executive Meddling needs to make cuts it will be the gay characters and shows
2. In 2016/17 10% of all character deaths were lesbian and female bi characters, compared to these characters making up less than 2% of all characters.
3. That gay characters are usually briefly introduced for drama or comedy and then the typically straight white male show runners don't know what to do with them or how to write them out quickly without it seeming deliberately rushed so kill them instead
4. The above is exacerbated by writers thinking they have to give their gay characters exclusively gay-related stories, and then recycling such stories from other shows, one of these being killing the character

A troper recently added the following to the description, do you feel that it should be incorporated into the draft?

I would remove the weasel words. "Probably one of the most prominent and widespread cases" is really vague and doesn't say anything about how widespread it actually is.

I do agree that Bury Your Gays can be considered a Pet-Peeve Trope, though.

draft at Sandbox.Bury Your Gays. Changes made include:

• removed image as per IP thread
• expanded opening paragraph to explicitly outline trope
• incorporated a recent edit (mentioned above) into the fourth paragraph with a pot hole — with discussion, we may keep the line in whole where it was originally added
• added significantly to the fifth paragraph, mentioning Tokenism, other writing issues, and the excuse of "cuts"
• altered some wording the the sixth paragraph
• "Truth in Television" paragraph: added the relevant subtropes, and incorporated the main point of the penultimate paragraph to the end of this (then removed the penultimate paragraph)
• In the last paragraph, expanded on the vague events of 2015/16 both in TV and real life and removed the sequential weblinks, replacing those with a pot hole to Internet Backdraft
• will hold off on Black Dude Dies First, to add it as a comparison on the page for Gay Guy Dies First when we get that launched; after all, that trope is a specific circumstance and the equivalent would be something more like All The Minority Ethnic Characters Die (of course, willing to discuss this point)

Suggestion for image (and please help with the caption) from Odyssey:

Or from the Internet (specifically, a podcast discussing the trope on Friday Night Lip Service):

edited 17th Jun '18 4:10:54 AM by lakingsif

Is there really a need for an image?

No, but if one is good enough then it's generally wanted.

Never a need, almost always a want. "Does this page need an image?" is never an argument.