Bury Your Tropes: ATX Festival Panel

Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The 100), Carina MacKenzie (The Originals), Krista Vernoff (Shameless), Carter Covington (Faking It), and Megan Townsend (GLAAD), gathered at the ATX Festival on Saturday morning to address the Bury Your Gays trope, at a panel moderated by Lesley Goldberg (The Hollywood Reporter‎).

The one hour panel was called “Bury Your Tropes” and consisted mainly of the involved speakers defending their right to use the trope.

As fans and consumers of media, we are naturally dismayed at the lack of understanding, or even attempt at understanding, the issues surrounding the Bury Your Gays trope as discussed by the panelists. In a time of so much outcry over the disproportionate death of LGBT+ characters on television, it is uniquely frustrating to be misunderstood and maligned time and time again. As always, this is a conversation; an opportunity towards improvement for all involved.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the “Bury Your Gays” trope really means. Carter Covington defends the controversial death of Lexa on The 100 as “storytelling, very different than people getting killed off because they’re gay.” For that, he believes Jason Rothenberg and the crew involved are being unfairly assaulted. “In the end [The 100] is giving fans this amazing chance to meet each other online. There’s so much good The 100 is doing for the community”

“Bury Your Gays” is not a violent display of homophobia where one character kills an LGBT+ character out of hate or fear of their sexuality, or because a writer is trying to demonstrate the societal ills of identifying as LGBT+. The Bury Your Gays trope occurs simply when gay characters are killed, no matter the reason, because LGBT+ characters are killed off at alarming rates compared to their straight counterparts. In the 2015-2016 season, lesbian and bisexual women represented approximately 1% of all characters and 10% of all dead characters. No matter the reason, that is a trope. And it’s poor storytelling.

Covington’s statement regarding The 100 reflects, once again, a misunderstanding of the current situation. When minorities come together due to being misrepresented and hurt by damaging tropes, it seems inappropriate to praise the source of the misrepresentation and hurtful tropes.

Covington goes on to say “It’s always a challenge to create a show where LGBT themes are front and center,” because he says LGBT fans aren’t the majority, especially when it comes to advertising. “Networks are terrified, they’re completely scared right now. They don’t know where the industry is headed… I would hate for us to lose opportunities because of fear. What [the fans] are doing is ensuring that fewer LGBT characters are gonna be in the landscape because people are not going to take the risk to tell a story if they’re gonna get this kind of blowback”

Positive, complex representation where characters don’t die isn’t proposed as an option. Choices for the LGBT community seem to be: be grateful for the few characters we are getting, even though they end up dead and contribute to negative tropes that have existed since the 30s; or don’t have any representation at all. The logical explanation if networks are so afraid of backlash would be to solve the problem and avoid alienating and exploiting swaths of their audience. And as has been pointed out, the problems lie in the low number of LGBT characters with quality storylines and the high proportion of those characters who end up dead.

Examining the definition of Carter’s use of “backlash” and “blowback” also paints a useful picture. Krista Vernoff states “When we break the hearts of the fans of [LGBTQ] relationships, we are assaulted with a venom that I don’t receive from anyone else.” Many creators, including Covington and Vernoff, misunderstand the premise of fan backlash when LGBT+ characters are killed off. When a straight character is killed off, fans may be angry about losing a source of enjoyment or entertainment. When an LGBT+ character is killed off, LGBT+ fans lose a source of normalization. They lose representation. For many LGBT+ individuals with unsafe day-to-day lives, media is a form of escape and safety and inclusion from a life that is not safe or inclusive. When that is taken away in the form of rare LGBT+ characters being killed, the backlash is strong and vitriolic because it affects an already affected community. This is why Javi Grillo-Marxuach states that it is important to understand the cultural impact of the work; media does not exist in a vacuum. Understand why LGBT fans are upset when LGBT characters are killed off, and we can start taking the simple steps to solving that problem.

The Panel defends the current storylines: “What’s interesting to me is that these are characters that we see today: the fact that they’re gay is the least interesting thing about them and that’s progress.” “That’s groundbreaking” — Covington.

It’s no longer progress if those characters still continue to end up dead. Part of the problem is that showrunners and writers fail to listen to the communities they claim they want to represent. They are happy for praise when their shows are called groundbreaking for including fully defined LGBT characters, and yet when those same characters fall into the same damaging tropes, they not only ignore the community, but also dismiss the criticism and suggestions for improvements (i.e.The Lexa Pledge) because it would limit creativity.

When discussing The Lexa Pledge, Vernoff explained why she opted not to sign it: “It is to sign a pledge that I will limit my storytelling, I promise I won’t kill an LGBT character is going to limit my ability. There’s been huge progress and if we say, in the name of progress, we’re going to sign a pledge and limit our storytelling, we’re going to limit our progress.”

The low rate of representation for LGBT characters, the high number of them that end up dead, and the lack of happy endings when compared to those deaths is limiting progress and creativity. The pledge does not require them to never kill off an LGBT character again, nor does it require them to give all LGBT characters a happy ending. The pledge argues in favor of normalizing the way LGBT characters are treated: as fully formed, regular cast members and not sideline disposable guest stars with (if lucky) 1-2 minutes of storyline. TV needs to be more inclusive of regular/lead LGBT characters with meaningful storylines so that when one is killed off, our whole representation isn’t killed off with them.

Watch the full panel below (via The Hollywood Reporter)