If you’ve ever watched a beloved queer couple on television only to see one of them killed off before the season finale, you’ve witnessed the bury your gays trope in action.
Across more than a decade of fandom conversations and academic study, this pattern has become impossible to ignore. From Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lexa on The 100, lesbian and bisexual women in particular seem to die far more often than their straight counterparts, and the deaths feel arbitrary.
Our team has spent months reviewing fan forums, academic papers, and creator interviews to answer a single question: why does the bury your gays trope still persist in modern TV and film, even as audiences loudly reject it? This guide breaks down the trope, traces its history, and offers practical guidance for creators who want to do better.
Table of Contents
What Is the Bury Your Gays Trope?
The bury your gays trope describes a recurring pattern in which LGBTQ+ characters, especially lesbian and bisexual women, are killed off in ways that feel punitive, premature, or narratively unjustified.
It is closely related to dead lesbian syndrome, a term fans use when these deaths pile up so frequently that the genre itself appears cursed.
The TV Tropes catalog defines it as the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts. In practice, this looks like a queer woman shot in a random attack, killed in a car crash, or dying in a character’s arms right after a love scene, while straight leads survive similar danger.
What separates the trope from a regular character death is three things: the death comes before the queer character has a full arc, the death often serves the development of a straight character, and the death rarely comes with consequences for the world of the story.
Where Did the Bury Your Gays Trope Come From?
The bury your gays trope did not start with cable dramas. Its roots go back to the Hays Code era of Hollywood and even earlier 19th century literature.
From 1934 to 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code banned any positive depiction of homosexuality on screen. Gay characters could appear, but only as cautionary figures. That meant queer characters had to be punished, usually through death, institutionalization, or suicide, or the film would not pass censorship.
The 1950s and 1960s saw lesbian and gay characters on screen almost exclusively as villains, predators, or victims. Films like The Children’s Hour (1961) ended with the suicide of a character accused of lesbianism, a textbook example of the era’s preferred resolution.
After the Hays Code collapsed, the pattern didn’t disappear. It migrated into television, where the rise of prestige drama in the 1990s and 2000s gave writers new room to depict queer lives, but old habits followed.
Academic work by scholars like Renée Hulan has documented how these early moralistic narratives shaped the templates screenwriters still draw on today. The Hays Code ended more than fifty years ago, but its shadow lingers in writers’ rooms everywhere.
Modern Examples of the Bury Your Gays Trope in TV and Film
Between 2016 and 2017, fans counted more than sixty queer women killed on television. That single statistic reshaped the conversation around queer representation.
The most cited example remains Lexa from The 100, who was shot moments after consummating her relationship with protagonist Clarke in 2016. The backlash was immediate. Fans launched a campaign that gathered more than a hundred thousand signatures and led to the formation of the Lexa Pledge, a commitment from creators not to kill queer characters solely for shock value.
Other high-profile examples include:
Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, killed by a stray bullet moments after reconciling with Willow in 2002.
Denise McCowen on The Walking Dead, bitten and killed in 2012 despite being the show’s first major queer character of color.
Poussey Washington on Orange Is the New Black, whose death in 2016 sparked the #PousseyMustang protest hashtag.
Emily Hart on The 100, killed in 2017 in the same season as Lexa.
Sophie in The Last of Us Part II, whose early death set up a revenge plot centered on her killer, not her own grief.
These deaths share a pattern. The character is often newly introduced, only partially developed, and killed in a way that primarily fuels someone else’s arc.
Why Does the Bury Your Gays Trope Still Happen Today?
If the trope is so widely criticized, why does the bury your gays trope still appear in modern TV and film? The answer is layered.
First, writers internalize what they watch. If you grew up watching queer tragedy on screen, your instinct for dramatic stakes defaults to death. Most screenwriting rooms rely on shared shorthand, and the shorthand for queerness has long been sorrow.
Second, queer characters are still treated as more expendable in ensemble casts. When networks green-light ten new series each pilot season, writers know that token or supporting characters are at risk. Killing them costs less than killing a lead.
Third, the shock value of queer death has not fully faded. For some straight writers and executives, the death of a lesbian character still feels “edgy” in a way that resonates with viewers who see queerness as novel or titillating rather than ordinary.
Fourth, the gap between intention and execution remains wide. Many creators now want to avoid the trope. But without clear internal guidelines, the same writers who promise representation end up repeating old patterns. The Lexa Pledge exists precisely because pledges had to be invented.
Finally, queer men and trans characters are less often the targets than lesbian and bisexual women. The trope disproportionately affects WLW characters, which suggests a particular discomfort with women who love women existing on screen without punishment.
The Impact on LGBTQ+ Audiences and Communities
Watching queer characters die repeatedly has measurable emotional effects on LGBTQ+ viewers.
Studies and surveys by organizations like GLAAD have found that fans report fatigue, grief, and disengagement when their favorite shows kill off queer women for narrative convenience. Many viewers describe feeling used, as though their identities exist in media only to be sacrificed for straight character development.
The Lexa Pledge and similar fan-led initiatives are direct responses to this harm. The pledge now has more than a hundred signatories, including major showrunners, and it asks creators to commit to specific guidelines: never kill queer characters solely for shock value, never kill queer characters who are the only representation in a show, and consider alternatives to tragedy when planning a queer arc.
Social media has accelerated the conversation. When Lexa died in 2016, the outrage was immediate and global. By the time The Last of Us Part II launched, players were already debating whether a particular death would constitute the trope before they had finished the opening chapter.
The bury your gays trope is not just a storytelling problem. It shapes how queer viewers see themselves in fiction, and it sends a clear signal about whose stories are allowed to continue.
How Writers and Showrunners Can Avoid the Bury Your Gays Trope
Plenty of recent television has done better, and the patterns in those shows are worth copying.
ANNE+, a Dutch-Canadian web series, centers queer women whose storylines are about life, work, and love rather than tragedy. Killing Eve gave Villanelle and Eve a charged, complicated relationship across multiple seasons. The Haunting of Bly Manor and Sense8 both featured queer characters whose deaths, when they happened, carried narrative weight rather than feeling punitive.
Practical guidance for writers who want to avoid the bury your gays trope:
Make queer characters leads, not tokens. Supporting characters die more cheaply because the audience has less invested in them.
If a queer character must die, give them a full arc first. Let them have goals, relationships, and growth outside of their death.
Never use queer death as motivation for a straight character’s arc. If the only purpose of the death is what it does to someone else, the trope is operating.
Read the Lexa Pledge out loud in the writers’ room. If a planned death would violate it, the room should pause.
Hire queer writers in the room. Internalized tropes are easier to catch when the people most affected by them have decision-making power.
These steps are simple, but they require a willingness to treat queer characters as full human beings rather than narrative shortcuts.
FAQs
Why does the bury your gays trope exist?
The bury your gays trope exists because writers inherit storytelling templates from earlier media, especially the Hays Code era, where queer characters had to be punished for existing. When those templates go unexamined, they carry forward into modern scripts and reinforce the idea that queer lives end in tragedy.
What is the tragic queer trope?
The tragic queer trope is a broader category that includes the bury your gays trope but also covers queer characters who live in permanent misery, sacrifice themselves, or exist only as a source of suffering. The bury your gays trope is the most extreme version: queer characters are not just sad, they are killed off.
What is dead lesbian syndrome?
Dead lesbian syndrome is a fan-coined term that describes how often lesbian and bisexual women die on television, often shortly after a relationship begins or right after an on-screen intimacy scene. The phrase is sometimes used interchangeably with the bury your gays trope, though it specifically highlights the WLW focus of the pattern.
What is the Lexa Pledge?
The Lexa Pledge is a commitment created by fans after the death of Lexa on The 100 in 2016. It asks creators to avoid killing queer characters solely for shock value, to avoid killing the only queer character in a show, and to consider alternatives to tragedy when planning a queer arc. More than a hundred showrunners have signed it.
Is the bury your gays trope still a problem today?
Yes. Although creators are more aware of the trope than they were a decade ago, queer character deaths continue to appear in major films, streaming series, and prestige dramas. The pattern has shifted but not disappeared, which is why the bury your gays trope remains an active discussion in 2026.
The Future of the Bury Your Gays Trope in 2026
The bury your gays trope persists in modern TV and film because it sits at the intersection of old habits, industry economics, and unresolved cultural discomfort with queer women on screen.
Audiences have already done the work of naming the pattern, tracking the deaths, and pushing back through campaigns like the Lexa Pledge. Now the work shifts to writers’ rooms, where the choices get made.
Our team believes the next chapter for queer representation is simple: write queer characters who get to live. Give them full arcs, complicated relationships, and futures that stretch past a single finale. When the bury your gays trope finally stops appearing in modern TV and film, it will not be because audiences stopped noticing. It will be because storytellers stopped reaching for it.
Until then, fans, scholars, and creators will keep doing exactly what they have always done: watching closely, naming what they see, and asking for better.