Bury your gays

"Bury your gays" is a trope in the media portrayal of LGBTQ people in which "queer characters face tragic fates, including death, much more often" than straight characters; the pattern is also called dead lesbian syndrome. The article traces its origin to the late nineteenth century, the era of Oscar Wilde, when sodomy laws made any queer portrayal, even a tragic one, read as rebellion, and The Picture of Dorian Gray was later used against Wilde at his trial. The naming is fandom discourse of the 2010s: Autostraddle's 2016 inventory All 215 Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Characters on TV, and How They Died did the counting, and the 2016 death of Lexa on The 100 sparked viewer outrage, the #LGBTfansdeservebetter campaign and mainstream attention. The figures the article relays come from Autostraddle's review of 1,779 scripted US television series from 1976 to 2016: of the series with lesbian or bisexual female characters, 35 percent killed those characters and only 16 percent gave them happy endings.

For writers the term is a reader-trust contract: audiences now read any queer character's death against this pattern first, so it faces scrutiny that the same death on a straight character would not. The counterpoint is in the record too: Grey's Anatomy showrunner Krista Vernoff worried that the pressure could limit storytelling and stall progress in queer representation, and Star Trek: Discovery killed a queer character and then revived him, a reversal the article frames as consciously avoiding the cliché. Structurally it is kin to stuffed into the fridge: a death whose job is to serve another character's arc, spotted now in advance by the readers it was aimed at.