May 06, 2016 3:28pm PT by Jonathan Handel
'Bury Your Gays' Trope Stumps Panelists at Writers Guild Event

The trope — in which gay characters are routinely killed off — came to a boil after a massive fan backlash following the death of leading lady Lexa on The CW's The 100.

Multiple TV producers were left at a loss for words about how to reconcile the "Bury Your Gays" trope during a Thursday night panel discussion at the Writers Guild.

The topic was top of mind during the wide-ranging panel, which included How to Get Away With Murder showrunner Pete Nowalk, Faking It boss Carter Covington, American Crime Story writer Sonay Hoffman and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writer-star Rachel Bloom.

The trope — in which gay characters are routinely killed off — came to a boil after a massive fan backlash following the death of leading lady Lexa on The CW's The 100. Other shows this season followed suit, including The Walking Dead and The Magicians, among others, resulting in a seven-part pledge from numerous writers to "refuse to kill a queer character solely to further the plot of a straight one," avoid "story choices that perpetuate the toxic [Bury Your Gays] trope" and make other improvements to counter the long history of killing off gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters, often as punishment for their sexuality.

Read More Bury Your Gays: Why 'The 100,' 'Walking Dead' Deaths Are Problematic (Guest Column)

But balancing those goals with creative freedom can lead to hard questions, panelists said Thursday.

"If a character dies and it had a bad message, I support [the Lexa pledge]," Covington said. But otherwise, "It's dangerous to tell the showrunner how to tell a story."

"You have to serve the story [and] serve the character," Hoffman said. "It's so tricky."

"For [characters that are] gay, lesbian, people of color, there's probably a feeling that they're more expendable," she added. "It would be very hard for me to do that, to kill them off, because I'm aware of how much that character means to people."

But emotional arcs often mandate storm clouds, including for LGBT characters.

"Once you've achieved happiness [in a story], you want to bring conflict back," Bloom said. "That's a general storytelling thing: 'Where do we go with this character?' But gay characters are more than their sexuality. We should move past that trope."

That's not to say that sexuality wasn't on topic at the evening event, especially as panelists discussed millennial actors' willingness to play explicit or highly suggestive scenes. "I think that's their job," Nowalk said. "The younger actors just want to make it look real," he said, pointing to a sex act not necessarily for the squeamish that would confound a network's standards and practices censors.

Introducing our Queer Representation on TV Series

Identification is a powerful tool. When it comes to representation on television, the connection between character and viewer is what makes the medium so unique. Television does what film cannot: It allows us to get immersed in a story week after week without losing you by breaking for years at a time. We come to love the characters we see on screen. Something about them keeps us returning week after week. We develop relationships with these people and when we lose those characters, we are losing people that we truly care about. Identification is a strong weapon.

Despite significant strides being made in our society, there’s still a huge issue with proper representation of LGBTQ people on television. Not only is there a lack of LGBTQ stories and main characters, seemingly positive examples of representation have fallen victim to exhausted and familiar tropes. According that very helpful Autostraddle article, there are over 18,000+ straight characters in the television universe, but only 383 lesbian and bisexual characters–95 of which have died and only 30 received happy endings. Are we as viewers expected to just to go on as normal? When there are only 30 lesbian and bisexual characters granted happy endings, what are we telling the world? How can we expand our stories into compelling television, free from tropes, when we still have the majority of our queer characters dying on screen?

Something has to give.
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A Letter to the TV Industry: Keep Fighting the Good Fight

Ein Ausschnitt:
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Slowly, TV has begun offering a more varied array of protagonists and more ensembles featuring a diverse set of cultures, backgrounds, and classes. Black men and women, Hispanics, Asians, and LGBTQ folks are getting to star in their own stories, and more of them (not nearly enough, but more) are creating shows, and even commissioning them at some networks.

If you study representation statistics in almost any field — including TV — you notice right away that progress on the diversity front is incremental and fragile (when it exists at all). Progress is slow — it’s always way too slow — and Hollywood is quick to congratulate itself on the most glacial and minuscule markers of progress. But TV has been trying to change. And it’s working.

My son is 14, and his favorite shows are “The Flash,” “Black-ish,” “Supergirl,” “The Good Place,” “Fresh Off the Boat,” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” Those shows, as the saying goes, look like America — the America I believe in, not the one sketched out by Trump in his divisive stump speeches.

You don’t need me to tell you that Trump’s election is partly a reaction to the long-overdue progress of men and women of color in America. It’s frightening that small improvements in a limited number of areas are so hated and feared, and that justifiable demands for dignity and respect have produced such a terrifying backlash. Even modest signs of progress have been greeted with ferocious pushback.

Those of you making, buying, and distributing TV need to push back too — with everything you have.
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