Out of the Closet, Into the Fire: After a character comes out they are quickly killed, harmed, or cosmically punished.Homophobic Hate Crime: When a character is attacked and often murdered by homophobic characters.Gayngst-Induced Suicide: When an LGBT+ character commits, or attempts to commit, suicide because of reasons connected to or caused by being LGBT.Gay Guy Dies First: When the often only queer character dies early on, before straight characters.The exact opposite is found in Preserve Your Gays, which is often a reaction to this. Additionally, given the ratio of mainstream queer narratives that end in tragedy, compared to ones with a genuinely happy ending, any addition to the list of the dead is often greeted with dismay, no matter how technically well executed. Even when there is a perfectly valid narrative reason for the writers to chose to kill off the character, or it serves the story perfectly, it's often the case that killing one queer character is removing the only positive representation within the narrative. It's also, however, a question of a sheer numbers game.
The occasional death of one in a Cast Full of Gay is unlikely to be notable, either. There are many Anyone Can Die stories: barring explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight deaths in these, it's not necessarily odd that the gay characters are dying. However, sometimes gay characters die in fiction because, well, sometimes people die. Another issue, however is that the stories where gay people quietly lived out their lives in peace are often less documented, and considered less dramatically compelling for straight audiences, leading to what can still be a skewed picture of the past. There may also be a higher prevalence of this trope in Period Fiction because of its supposed realism since historically there was lots of homophobic persecution though undoubtedly plenty of acceptance, too. 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). 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.Ĭan be seen as Truth in Television in some cases, as gay and lesbian people are at a substantially higher risk for suicide and assault see the tropes Gayngst-Induced Suicide and Homophobic Hate Crime. And then there are the cases of But Not Too Gay or the Bait-and-Switch Lesbians, where creators manage to get the romance going but quickly avoid showing it in detail by killing off one of the relevant characters.Īlso 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. The AIDS crisis also contributed to this narrative, as the Tragic AIDS Story became its own archetype, popularized by films like Philadelphia. However, as sensitivity to gay people became more mainstream, this then transitioned into the Too Good for This Sinful Earth narrative, where stories would tackle the subject of homophobia and then depict LGBT characters as suffering victims who die tragic deaths from an uncaring world.
Even somewhat sympathetic characters would usually receive punishment, as their sexuality was perceived as a negative trait (similar to how one would write a sympathetic drug addict). This, conversely, meant that most of them would either die or be punished by the end.
For a good while, it was because the Depraved Homosexual trope and its ilk pretty much limited portrayals of explicitly gay characters to villainous characters, or at least characters who weren't given much respect by the narrative. The reasons for this trope have evolved somewhat over the years. Indeed, it may be because they seem to have less purpose compared to straight characters, or that the supposed natural conclusion of their story is an early death. In aggregate, queer characters are more likely to die than straight characters. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances. This trope is the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts.