Harmful Tropes: Bury Your Gays
Harmful tropes are narrative shortcuts that reinforce negative stereotypes, justify toxic behavior, or demean marginalized groups. Here, we discuss them and give you tips for avoiding them in your work.
Trope: LGBTQIA+ characters are killed off disproportionately more often than their heterosexual counterparts or their death is somehow related to their sexuality.
Why is it harmful?: It links the idea of queer joy with cosmic justice—that if a character isn’t straight, they somehow deserve punishment. It also deepens real-world trauma, especially among queer youth, by purporting the idea that queer people are expendable.
Examples in media: Goldfinger by Ian Flemming (a woman falls in love with Pussy Galore and is then killed off); Beverly LaSalle from “All In the Family.”
How to avoid it?: Include several characters on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum! This way, even if a character needs to die for plot reasons, you’re not engaging in the harmful trope (but make sure every character is fully realized instead of a 2D group of stereotypes in a trench coat). Also, if you must kill off a queer character, their death should be the result of their own choices or a logical conclusion to their story arc. It should never happen only to shock your readers or serve as an easy way to motivate the main character, and should never happen right after they come out or consummate a relationship.
Reading that expertly challenges this trope: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle; This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; The Seven of Spades Series by Cordelia Kingsbridge; More than Happy by Adam Silvera
