Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Why the (literal meaning of) 'Bury' isn't the important part of 'Bury your Gays'

For me, bury your gays is indicative of a much more pervasive issue which is essentially tokenism. Those guilty of bury your gays are in essence saying 'this character isn't important enough for me to be interested in finding out how their story turns out, so instead I will milk their existence for some cheap drama.'

The people writing these storylines are often trying to be progressive by including the characters at all and feel strongly about how the character is Sympathetic, so killing them will be Moving and Effective. The truth is, they aren't wrong. They just don't understand that to the audience most greatly pissed off by this, these characters aren't just sympathetic minor characters, they're Main Characters, and killing them abruptly is not just insensitive, but violates narrative expectations, and, in fact, ruins the plot. It is like reading Harry Potter and getting to book 2 and at a key moment Harry is killed by the basilisk and then that annoying minor character you tried not to pay too much attention to must save the day.

What I find terrifying about the anti-bury your gays movement is that it is filled with people who don't take a nuanced approach and immediately assume gay+dead=bad and gay+alive=good regardless of the real issue which is that the queer characters are being sidelined. Being casually written out of a show when the writers couldn't think of how to work this character into a plot is the same problem as the stray bullet,just less violent. And because of this, instead of doing what we actually want, which is Give Your Gays a Storyline That Isn't Tokenist, people just get scared of writing queer characters.

Where the question gets sticky is when we discuss the genre of Tragedy. The fact that most of queer lit is both #ownvoices and Tragedy is a weird fact that both complements the bury your gays discussion and adds a complication to it. People have argued that queer lit is tragic because everyone used to believe that there was no way to happily live in the world as queer, that it was more palatable to straight gatekeepers as a morality play, etc.. A lot of tragedies are morality plays. The main character is in some way Wrong and therefore must suffer. In queer lit, either the maintext or the subtext is that the Wrongness is the queerness. Many of these books are #ownvoices, which to me means that that particular issue isn't really relevant. Whoever you are, if you are writing about how being queer Must Lead to Suffering, we are tired and we know that because we also read the news. But, if you're writing about how something else that is both _specific_ and potentially universal leads to suffering, there is something interesting there, and I would like to see that explored with queer characters.

If you are writing a Tragedy and your main character is queer, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. That is a good thing! It says queer characters deserve to be centered in a narrative and have interesting stories! But readers will come at expecting queerness to be the culprit. Bi and poly? If there is any way that indecisiveness could be an issue (hi, Hamlet's monologues), it's easy to read that as inditing the queerness. If there is too much depression because of not fitting in, then it's the old story of how it's impossible to live a happy life and be queer. And if you don't signal that it's a tragedy early on, and readers are unsatisfied by the ending, then it feels like piling on.

Execution is important. And it's also important to be aware that there will be like 6 reviews debating whether or not it counts as bury your gays, and already hurt people feeling more hurt, and the problem of 'When there's only one Xs, this X = All Xs.' But until there are more than one X, this will always be a problem. So I say write the X--and then, yes, get some sensitivity readers on it, but ones who believe that that Tragedy is a valid genre and also that queer tragedy lit is a tired genre. Circling all instances of a dead queer character and hitting delete is like circling every passive voice construction and hitting delete. It might liven up the piece, but it doesn't always make it better.

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