This week I'm looking at some problematic techniques that TV shows will sometimes use to deal with story issues. In some ways today's is a subset of yesterday's concept of fridging, or killing a female or minority character in order to advance the story of the protagonist (who is almost always white, male and straight).
But "burying the gays" is slightly broader, in the sense that it's not just about motivating other characters, but who a show chooses to have die or be killed. If a show needs to lose a character and there is a queer character on the show, they are much more likely to be the one to go, and they are going to get killed.
You might think that's an old trope. The Joss Whedon reference goes back to 2002 and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. The show had one of its leads slowly come to realize she's a lesbian, gave her a relationship with a great queer woman--and then randomly killed that queer woman (in this case to move the story along).
(It also goes back to this recent Vulture profile/interview with him, which offers by his very sad and at times shocking example a lot of insight into how not to treat your fellow writers, cast, crew or family. Wow is it not good.)
But even as society seems to have advanced in its understanding of respect for homosexuality, writers have kept burying the gays. The technique was used 5 times in 2020 according to this study of the phenomenon, 11 times in 2019 and at least 215 times in TV shows overall.
I'm willing to accept that on some shows, like THE WALKING DEAD or GREY'S ANATOMY, the issue is not so cut and dry. They're just shows where a lot of people die, and so yeah, gays gonna die too.
But when we get to BUFFY, where Tara was randomly shot, or ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, which killed three queer characters in three years, there's an issue. Intriguingly, both those shows were generally praised for their depiction of queer characters. ORANGE actually won GLAAD awards for best comedy three years in a row. (Then they started burying the gays.)
I think it's important to note that seeming contradiction. It shows just how rooted the trope is in modern storytelling, and how deeply buried the internalized homophobia goes.
That's the issue here, and really it's much the same as experienced by people of color in horror films, who are once again always the victims and never the Final Girls. Queer characters are viewed as disposable, eventually treated as such. And that's just plain messed up.
Characters die onscreen, just like they do in real life. But keep track of which characters you choose. Sometimes the patterns by which we make choices these kinds of choices are hidden away.
