#queer death

Is it gay?: Yes Warnings/Notes: 🏳️‍🌈 ☠ 😢

Is it gay?: Yes

Warnings: ☠ 👊🏼  🚫  😢

Is it gay?: Yes

Warnings: ☠ 👊🏼  🚫  😢

The title of this article is not vague. It does not include a spoiler warning. If you hadn’t heard yet that this happens, I want you to be pissed too. I want you to be angry, like I am, that yet another queer female character was killed for shock value. This was not an act of “relevant social commentary.” This is nothing more than part of an ongoing social narrative that tells queer and trans people, especially women, especially women of color, especially black women, that no matter what, they will be punished.

It is not just “real life” that women like Poussey Washington have to fear. In the past six months, EIGHTEEN queer female characters have been killed on TV. For a group already vastly underrepresented, to have 18 killed just so far this year is outrageous. Back in March, Autostraddle published an article called “All 65 Dead Lesbian and Bisexaul Characters on TV, and How They Died,” which has since been updated to a more comprehensive list of 158 names. They also put together a detailed info-graphic on fictional queer death that further puts the problem into perspective. Salon summarized their findings:

...queer women [are] the most likely characters to die on TV: Since 1976, 11% of television shows have featured a lesbian or bisexual character, and of these programs, 65% have a deceased queer female character. If lesbian characters no longer on television, 31% have bitten the dust. Just 11% have been allowed to have a happy ending that doesn’t [end] in tragedy or death.

Imagine if one third of all straight female characters were killed off. Imagine how ludicrous it would be if one in every three straight male characters on television ended up dead. It’s not a coincidence that this happens so often to queer women. It’s not an accident. Now I don’t believe that TV writers are killing these women out of explicit homophobia, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of looking at the implicit homophobia that leads these writers, over and over and over again, to make the same explicit choice to kill queer female characters. 

At this point, now that the “Bury Your Gays” trope has been taken so far, I think it’s more than fair to say that killing queer female characters is always, always, always, always, always the wrong choice. It’s not about being creative or edgy or “true to life;” it’s not a commentary on violence or racism or homophobia. It is part of the violence and racism and homophobia. It does not allude to; it contributes to. 

Queer people watch shows with queer characters, in part, so that they can see people like them represented on screen. What are they supposed to think when two-thirds of these shows have killed characters they identify with? A show like Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” which originally was praised for it’s largely diverse cast, is still mainly a show about a privileged white woman surrounded by women of color, including queer women and transgender women. 

And yes, it’s based on the memoir of a privileged white woman, but we can’t pretend that including other stories means they’re being told well and with respect, when even the main character’s bisexuality is erased. Having a black lesbian be suffocated to death by a guard- and being told to sympathize with that guard- is not telling black lesbian stories well. It’s one indication, among several, that a show which markets itself to viewers as being queer-friendly, cares more about queer subscription money than queer representation. 

And that is not acceptable. That pisses me off. You can’t make money with the promise of diverse representation, and then kill off the characters that make your show diverse (and worth watching) and then just expect all these viewers to keep watching your show anyway.