Is it okay to kill off a main LGBT love interest?

Question

I'm a young writer and have only recently figured out about the "bury your gays trope". I'm writing a book and the main character is a lesbian and gets a girlfriend. Shortly there after the girlfriend gets killed for some plot important reasons. The story follows the main character trying to avenge and bring back her girlfriend and in the end she does. Is it okay for me to kill of the main love interest, especially a gay one? There are many other LGBT characters, in fact most are. I'm just confused and don't want to offend anyone.

Thank you for all the answers, I am choosing to go through and kill her off, I am thankfull for all the advice and will keep all in mind in my future endeavors.

Answer 1

As you describe it I don't see the problem, and you aren't buying into the trope.

The trope is that LGBTQ characters are expendable; you are writing the opposite of that: Your killed lesbian is so not expendable, the hero (LGBTQ lover) is going to move heaven and Earth to both avenge her and bring her back from the dead, and succeeds.

That is how powerful LGBTQ love is, it defies death.

You are not minimizing the value of their lives, You've got Superman (as a woman) flying faster than light, a blur around the Earth, to reverse time and save Lois Lane from being killed.

The trope is offensive because it treats LGBTQ characters as inherently flawed and therefore less valuable and more expendable than Hetero characters.

According to your story description, you are not doing that.

Answer 2

Yes, in the context you have given, it sounds reasonable. The "Bury Your Gays" trope is around the token gay character being killed off. As TV Tropes points out:

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. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances... 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.

...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.

If you have plenty of LGBTQIAA+ characters who don't die, then one of them dying ceases to be remarkable (at least in terms of gender/sexuality), especially if you do your best to make the character a three-dimensional human being and not merely a plot device.

Answer 3

If the love interest was heteronormative would it be okay to kill them off?

The answer is the same if they're LGBT.

Their sexuality has nothing to do with whether or not they're killable

Answer 4

TL;DR: It depends whether you're killing a character or perpetuating a stereotype.

What's the trope?

What defines the "bury your gays" trope is first and foremost a character whose defining characteristic is "gay". They're token characters, thrown by the wayside with little fore- or afterthought.

At the heart of the issue is that it's a way to tick boxes and give the illusion of inclusiveness, without having to bother with actual representation. And then it also has the unfortunate implication that these lives have little to no value.

How do avoid playing straight into the trope?

You can start by making the character an actual character, not defined by their gayness but by their wants, needs, hopes, dreams, experiences, and so forth.

Having other well-rounded characters from the whole LGBT rainbow would also be helpful to mark the difference between killing the gay character and killing a character (who happens to be gay).

Is it okay to kill of a gay love interest?

It's about as okay as killing any other love interest.

As far as the myth of Orpheus, Eurydice just exists to give some motivation to the hero. Killing the wife to send the hero on a righteous rampage is a story that's been done. The thing you have to acknowledge here is whether it's a dead wife, a taken daughter or dead puppy dog, none of these are characters, they're plot devices.

The way I see it, you're more likely to run into women in refrigerators (see also Stuffed into the Fridge) and damsels-in-distress territory. The revenge action genre has long faced criticism for using women to give the man a motivation for cheap, and that never stopped any of them from being commercial and critical successes.

You could leave it at that if you're only interested in the revenge part of the story, and having a lesbian hero avenge and save her lesbian lover would probably do more to subvert these tropes than most others.

If you're not satisfied with your love interest being a mere plot device, it's worth considering two ways to explore that character's hopes and dreams and wants and needs, and such.

First, whatever relationship exists between the hero and their loved one, it has to be shown, not told. Don't just label them as girlfriends, show us that they care about each other, or at least why the hero cares.

Second, make the character live beyond the grave. By that I mean have their presence felt throughout the story, e.g. through memories, objects they left in the hero's home, other people that knew and cared about them, etc. People don't just disappear from Earth when they die, what they leave behind is a great way to explore who they were.

The resurrection angle also opens the door to have them observe the quest of the hero from the great beyond, or even narrate the whole story from their ghostly point of view.

Answer 5

Short Answer: Yes

Long Answer Yes, because consider this:

A: It is YOUR story, so yes it is ALWAYS okay to kill of any character you want (with the exception of historical accurate writing of course but that isn't the case here).

B: Sadly when it comes to writing LGBT content, you can never do it right. Currently it's a bit of a polarizing subject, majority of the people won't care but you will have extremists on both sides. Some will be angry that the main chars are LGBT to begin with, others will be angry that one dies... a lot of people just want their world view imposed on anything they see, hear or read and even the slightest deviation will make them angry.

C: IT seems that the characters death is the catalyst for the entire plot... if you want to re-write it the only options would be to make them same sex or instead of death making it a kidnapping... but you should only re-write it YOU want to, not because somebody else because like i said in A: it is your story and in B, there will always be people who don't agree.

Answer 6

Spoiler alert: I'm spoiling "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", season 6 below... if you haven't watched it (where have you been all this time?!) you may want to do that before reading further...

You're right to ask this question, and even though your main character finally brings this character back from the dead, your reader won't know that when she dies, so how she dies is important.

It's good that there are other queer characters in the story. (You may want to add another lesbian couple to be on the safe side).

Your character dies from a plot-important reason.

This can be good or bad, depending on how she dies.

Tara's death in Buffy the Vampire slayer has been quoted as the ultimate version of "bury your gays". Her death is plot-important, for Willow. But that's about all that went right with that scene.

To avoid a repeat of Tara's death, you could give your character agency in her death. Make her choose to walk into danger and risk her life, perhaps to save someone or destroy some evil artifact or similar. Make it a heroic death, rather than some random, happenstance slaying put there to get your main character and the story going...

Maybe your character saves the life of her lover/your main character and dies in the process? That might add nice resonance to the story as well...

Answer 7

This is nothing like "burying your gays" which appears to entail killing off gay (and other LGBT) characters with no purpose. The description you've given really doesn't fit this trope.

The death of your MC's girlfriend is a major driver for both character development and plot in the story. It seems to me, from your brief description, that it is in fact the single most important motivation for your MC to take the actions that she does. Sadly for your MC, her girlfriend's death is necessary to your story.

Beyond that though, I happen to hold a (strangely) controversial opinion: people are people. If you never allow your LGBT characters to be hurt, to fail, to be petty or petulant or outright evil; if you only write them as perfect, saintly people then you are not writing real people. It's like when Christian writers make all of their antagonists non-Christian and all of the Christian characters are angelic... which we all know isn't the way it works in real life.

The same goes for harm: everyone bleeds. Everyone hurts. Anyone can die no matter how virtuous they are, no matter what their gender or sexual orientation or race. What matters is how you depict that pain, how people in the story respond to those deaths, and whether or not the violence you're writing is important... which it certainly seems to be in this case.

So yes, go ahead and write it. If you're squeemish about writing about violence against a lesbian character than write about the MC's emotional reactions. Show the readers why she embarked on this quest rather than letting it destroy her. Write about the hole it left in her life, the madness she had to overcome. Make her human, not just another cardboard cut-out masquerading as a main character.

Answer 8

The original knock on it was that it was a cliché. A little worse than most clichés, because the reason for it was that all gay characters used to have to die as punishment for their sins, or the story would be deemed “immoral” back in the bad old days. Times changed, and gay characters became sympathetic and started to die so the reader would feel sorry for them instead, but they’d still always die and readers were tired of it. Especially lesbians who said they wanted some happy endings too! There was a backlash, and it worked: that’s a lot less ubiquitous and predictable than it used to be.

Then it went through a few rounds of the social-media outrage cycle, and all nuance got beaten out. You might just have to accept that anything you write these days might come under hyperbolic attack, more or less at random, even if you don’t deserve it. The most common way to ward this one off these days is to write in another couple of the same gender who get a happy ending.

Answer 9

As a writer, you should largely ignore audience reaction. It’s not relevant. Writing either to rile up or to not rile up your audience is the domain of hacks, not artists.

(If you want to be a hack, go ahead — but don’t bother writing fiction. Probably 500 people in the whole country make a living authoring fiction. If you are going to sell out, look for a more profitable industry to sell out to.)

In general, do not worry too much about “offending” people. Offense is taken, not given. If someone is determined to be offended, nothing that you do or omit doing will stop them.

Also read this.