Bury Your Gays

"It's not always the way it is in plays.Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story!"

—Michael, The Boys in the Band

Often, especially in older works (to the extent that they are found in older works, of course), gay characters just aren't allowed happy endings. Even if they do end up having some kind of relationship, at least one half of the couple, often the one who was more aggressive in pursuing a relationship, thus "perverting" the other one, has to die at the end. Of course, it can also happen to gay characters who aren't in relationships, particularly if they're psycho lesbians or depraved homosexuals.

Nowadays, when opinions on sexuality are different, this justification will often be tried to via Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Sometimes it's because the Magical Queer has died in a Heroic Sacrifice so that the straights may live. "See, we didn't kill them off as a punishment or to avoid having them together, it was to point out how mankind isn't worthy!" Naturally, this is subject to Alternate Character Interpretation.

Also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome. This trope can also be seen as a head-on collision between Sex Is Evil and All Gays Are Promiscuous.

See also Romantic Two-Girl Friendship and Bait and Switch Lesbians for the nicer way to let the ship down. If the characters' relationship is obscured, it drastically increases their chance of survival (note from the names of all three that they're most common for female couples. If you're a man, you're basically screwed).

Please note that sometimes gay characters die in fiction because in fiction sometimes people die (this is particularly true of soldiers at war, where Sitch Sexuality and Anyone Can Die are both common tropes); this isn't an if-then correlation, and it's not always meant to "teach us something" or indicative of some prejudice on the part of the creator - particularly if it was written after 1960. The problem isn't when gay characters are killed off: the problem is when gay characters are killed off far more often than straight characters, or when they're killed off because they are gay. This trope therefore won't apply to a series where Anyone Can Die (and does).

An approach in which every LGBT character ends up either in terminal misery or dead was common in the Hays Code era, where this was the only way to get the (already very rare) gay character past the censors. Not quite the same trope as Queerbaiting, a later pattern in which a same-sex romance would be briefly alluded to but then never developed further, to the frustration of LGBT viewers.

Can be seen as Truth in Television in some cases, as gay and lesbian people are at a substantially higher risk for suicide. And, well, dying violently at the hands of a stranger. And the fact that AIDS hit the gay male community most prominently provided potent fresh fuel for this long running trope (which, like many things about the eighties, still has an effect on more recent works). Not to mention that nothing communicates that "the wage of sin is death" quite like killing off your gay character.

Period fiction also needs to take into account the lack of understanding of gay characters, whereby depicting the death or murder of homosexuals may not reflect the views of the author but the social dynamics of the setting.

See also: Gayngst

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As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of Bury Your Gays include:

Anime and Manga

  • Hagino and Mari from Blue Drop are obviously not meant to be happy together, despite the whole series being about their growing relationship. When they finally confess their feelings for each other, Hagino dies in a Senseless Sacrifice.
    • And Hagino's race is a bunch of evil lesbians who invade Earth and prey on girls. The good one, though, died.
  • In Devilman Lady, when Jun's best friend/girlfriend Kazumi dies for no reason. This likely arose out of the changes from the Devilman Lady manga, where Asuka was Jun's lover. Also, Jun was older in the manga, being a schoolteacher instead of a model.
    • Compare the original Devilman, the ending of which had the hero die at the hands of Ryo Asuka as a direct result of Foe Yay.
  • Probably parodied in episode 16 ("Take Back Love!") of Excel Saga, where both Ropponmatsus fall in love with Hyatt and Excel, respectively, and are destroyed by the end of the episode. They get better, but they don't like them anymore because they're no longer programmed to love the first person they see.
  • Franz d'Epinay, who was secretly and tragically in love with Albert de Morcerf in Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, sacrifices his life to save Albert's.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has Tieria, whose "love" Lockon Stratos interest was killed before anything could develop... although whether or not Lockon would have generally reciprocated ANY feelings of a significantly deep nature is highly debatable. Tieria himself later dies... and then his mind not only survives, but it's uploaded into the super-computer VEDA.
    • Also, in Special Edition 1, a very lightly hinted gay relationship is made explicit between Alejandro and Ribbons, who turn out to be the Big Bad of season 1 and 2 respectively. More exactly, Ribbons was a male Honey Trap and pretended to care for Alejandro, who was rather smitten with him... and then he kills him and takes over.
  • Honey Crush had a different take on this: the lesbian main character is killed off in the first chapter but brought back as a ghost and not precluded from still getting a happy ending, though she does go to Heaven in the final chapter after confessing to Kyouko, so it's still a Bittersweet Ending.
  • All lesbian main characters in ICE--of which there are quite a few—meet their demise in one way or another.
  • In Kannazuki no Miko Himeko and Chikane confess their love to each other. Chikane dies and gets erased from existence. Then, come The Stinger epilogue, Chikane subverts this trope, having kept her promise of not letting even the gods stop her from returning to Himeko. Crowd goes wild. In the manga version, however, they get reincarnated—as sisters, in reference to the Japanese legend that says star-crossed lovers get reincarnated as twins.
  • The ultimate fate of Gilbert in Kaze to Ki no Uta.
  • Subverted in the Lupin III TV Special An Angel's Tactics. Bisexual Bifauxnen Lady Joe is the only one of the villainesses who survives.
  • In My-HiME, Shizuru and Natsuki die at the end of their fight with each other, as a result of Natsuki using an attack that destroys both their Childs, killing each other, as they are each other's Most Important People. Subverted in that not only are they the last Himes to die, but they and everyone else get resurrected in the next episode.
  • Maya in Maya's Funeral Procession is burned to death minutes after learning that her love interest is really her half-sister. Said love interest marries a man not long afterwards.
  • Mimi and Sheshe of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch are killed in the second arc by their own employer. It's much worse for them in the manga, where they're eaten alive without warning, than in the anime, where their life force is simply absorbed after they rebel.
  • Subverted in The Mikos Words and The Witches Incantations: after setting up the standard yuri Downer Ending, with Tsumugi having to die right after learning about love, the plot does a twist, wherein Letty goes and flips off the local god, risking her life to become a deity herself—all for Tsumugi's sake. The fans go "Awwww!"
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: Of course, all the relationships end badly, so Shinji and Kaworu's relationship is not unique here. It is unique in that Shinji has to kill him.
  • Rei Asaka/"Hana no Saint-Juste" in Oniisama e..., although in depends on which adaptation you are following: In the anime she dies suddenly in an accident just when it's beginning to look as though she and her love interest Nanako are getting a happy ending; in the manga, it's suicide after her other "love interest", her half-sister Fukiko, gives her a cruel "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  • Mr. 2 Bon Kurei from One Piece stayed behind in prison to allow for the other inmates to escape, and it was heavily implied he didn't make it out alive. Slightly mitigated in that many of those who escaped were Ivankov and his other New Kama allies, so it kind of balances out. Mr. 2 Bon Kurei's sacrifice was probably more indicative of the overall darker tone the series was beginning to take.
  • Happens twice to Sailors Uranus and Neptune in Sailor Moon, the first time when their heart crystals were extracted for the Talismans, and the second time after faking a Face Heel Turn just to try to remove Galaxia's star seed only to find out that Galaxia doesn't have one. Both times the trope then gets subverted because they got better. They survive the longest out of the main cast (aside from Sailor Moon) in the final arc. Sailors Mercury, Mars Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto are all killed off before them. Slightly mitigated in that in the final arc (when Uranus and Neptune are killed in the manga), we get the deaths and revivals of numerous unnamed civilians, Sailor Saturn, and Sailor Pluto, not to mention that the backstory has all of the Inner Senshi die and come back to life.
  • Simone in Shiroi Heya no Futari is stabbed by a jealousy-crazed male admirer.
  • Depraved Homosexual Lain Brody in the manga Under Grand Hotel is shot to death in the first volume. Also subverted: the main character and his male lover escape life imprisonment and end up living on a tropical paradise.
  • Clari from the Violinist of Hameln (while the infatuation is only implied), he harbored a crush on Lute for most of his life, ending in said Love Interest dying twice.
  • X 1999 has this at the core of the story. Kamui's mother Tohru and Fuuma and Kotori's mother Saya were lesbian lovers, but in order to save Tohru's life Saya agreed to marry her Romantic Runner-Up Kyougo Monou, in order to take Tohru's place and "give birth" to the holy sword (read: explode into a bunch of bloody pieces). Tohru survived, but later died by bursting into flames to protect her son.
  • If you notice all the Les Yay in Noir, then the ending can be seen as this. Especially in Chloe's case.
    • Also Lady Silvana.
  • Uzume from Sekirei. The only female Sekirei, to have a female partner, and is also in love with said partner. She's killed a few episode after we discover this.
  • Legend of the Blue Wolves: Poor Leonard. By Jonathan's hand, no less.
    • A less sympathetic version is implied to be Captain Continental who was supposedly killed by Leonard after he cut his penis off as revenge for him raping Jonathan.
  • The main character from Claudine is a Transgender man. He takes his own life when it's all but stated that the Love Triangle between himself, his girlfriend Sirene and his brother Andre is not tipping towards him.
  • A transgender variant pops up in one chapter of He Said "I'm A Girl". Yuki makes a comment on how one of her friends was killed by her boyfriend after learning she was trans.

Comic Books

  • Marvel's Freedom Ring defied nearly all the gay stereotypes... other than the one about being allowed to live happily. Killed off within a month of Marvel E.I.C Joe Quesada touting him as the company's top gay hero. Word of God is that "Freedom Ring "was always planned as an inexperienced hero who would get beaten up constantly and probably die. I wanted to comment on the fact that most superheroes get their powers and are okay at it... and that's not how life works. During working on the book, I was also noticing that most gay characters... are all about being gay. Straight characters are well-rounded characters who like chicks. So I wanted to do a well-rounded character who just happened to like dudes. Then I decided to combine the two ideas." Oops. Robert Kirkman did apologize when he realized he had effectively killed off 20% of Marvel's gay male characters.
  • Moondragon's death in Marvel's recent Annihilation: Conquest series. Considering how many characters died in the series, what makes Moondragon's treatment notable was the sheer brutality of it. In Annihilation, Thanos kidnaps her, uses her as a hostage, rips her ear off, and presents the ear to her lover Phyla. She survives that series, but in Conquest she finds herself permanently turned into a dragon before ultimately dying in a Heroic Sacrifice to protect Phyla.
    • She eventually got better, but then they went and killed Phyla off at the same time. And not only that but in the stupidest way possible. She dies not only off panel but her death gets one line from Gamora and no one other than Moondragon seems to care.
      • It Got Worse. In the character files book tying in with the series one of the main characters actually states he thinks that her girlfriend being brutally murdered will make Moondragon a BETTER PERSON.
  • The DCU's Monsieur Mallah and the Brain, a... talking gorilla with a gun and a French accent and an immobile brain in a little chamber thing that allows him to talk. Mallah got into a fight with Gorilla Grodd after the latter was offended at the suggestion that they're at all similar. Despite being armed, Mallah lost, and was beaten to death with The Brain, who likewise expired. And that was the second time they died: the first was being blown to smithereens the instant they confessed their love for each other.
  • Accusations of this were thrown about when Northstar, Marvel's first hero to come out of the closet, got killed by a brainwashed Wolverine. It didn't help that he died from an attack that he could've easily dodged. It also didn't help that, a few months later, he died in two separate Alternate Universe books that were released in the same week. Northstar was resurrected the next issue, though, although he ended up Brainwashed and Crazy and only recently returned to normal.
    • There's also the fact that Northstar was originally going to die from... from AIDS. You see, he was gay, so of course he would have AIDS. Executive Meddling finally did something right by putting that one down before it saw print... Except instead of AIDS, Northstar just had some vague life-threatening ailment.
      • Which was then changed *again* to reveal that Northstar actually had elven blood, and that living in the mortal world away from the Fair Folk lands had given him a "wasting sickness." Peter David's disbelieving commentary on this in his "BUT I DIGRESS..." column: "So, Northstar's not gay -- he's a FAIRY. Yeah, that's an improvement." This was retconned away rather quickly, as was the fatal illness.
    • For a few issues, it looked like this happened to Northstar again in Ultimate X-Men, after an overdose of a mutant drug apparently made his heart give out... but a few issues later, he turned up fully alive, just paralyzed from the waist down. In other words, he's alive, he just can't have sex. Oops.
  • In Marvel's Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways, out of the fourteen heroes we have, the transgender Xavin gets her neck broken and the gay Hulkling gets dissected, while the gay Wiccan and the lesbian Karolina get kidnapped. The straight characters? Perfectly fine. Fortunately, Xavin and Hulkling are shape shifters but still...
    • The most painful part of this twist is that it's only the gay characters who get kidnapped/tortured. The explanation in the book is that the kidnapper sees aliens as unprotected by human rights provisions, which would explain Karolina, Xavin, and Hulkling... but not Wiccan.
    • Not if you remember his original (rather unfortunate) superhero name of...Asgardian. As in from Asgard. So an "alien."
  • Likewise, Marvel's The Order axed some superfluous characters in the first issue, but one of the two main characters to die by the end of the series was the lesbian Mulholland Black. That said, she was also the youngest and the most innocent, her gang history aside.
  • Justice League: Cry for Justice seemed like one of the more queer-inclusive products DC was putting out in recent days—it has both Batwoman and Mikaal Tomas in the book's main superteam. Surprise! Mikaal's boyfriend is killed off for pathos' sake (offscreen), and obscure gay superhero the Tasmanian Devil is killed and skinned (again, offscreen) to set up the villain as a threat. Batwoman gets lucky by just disappearing from the series, and luckily had her own book planned that spared her from getting killed.
    • In a prime example of "Oops, we done fucked up," James Robinson has now resurrected Tasmanian Devil (via a Lazarus Pit), and it looks like he and Mikaal may get together at some point.
  • In Matt Wagner's Grendel series, bad-ass bodyguard and fighter Susan Veraghen is portrayed as a lesbian. Her first lover abandons her. Her next lover is brutally killed. Her next lover abandons her and THEN is brutally killed. Veraghan herself lives to a ripe old age, but only after she falls in Courtly Love with the (male) Grendel Prime.
  • Knockout, one of the bad-guys in DC's fantastic Secret Six died essentially offscreen between the first mini-series and the ongoing comic. Her lover Scandal Savage is left devastated although thankfully not insane or any more evil than before. Knockout was a "New God" and killed off with the rest in the Final Crisis arc, so it gets a pass as her death didn't come off like such an afterthought within the confines of someone else's comic book or because of her lesbian relationship, and the writer, Gail Simone, was not happy that the character had to die. It also helps that in the finale of Secret Six they go to Hell and get Knockout back.
  • Terry Moore's various series often deal with human sexuality in a mature and intelligent fashion, exploring what might force a person to reassess their self-identification and what impact societal pressures and expectations have on human desires, but when Echo needs to show its villain beginning to lose his grasp on his sanity and begin to break down he, of course, kills his boyfriend to keep him from leaving.
  • After writer Peter David brought Rictor and Shatterstar together, many people guessed that he'd kill one or both of them off, to which he responded that he was aware of this trope and would purposefully avoid it.
  • An unintentional example, one can't help but think this with Rotor's brutal torture (and his significant other Cobar's implied death) shortly after their Word of Gay reveal in the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog story "Mobius: 25 Years Later". The fact that writers Ian Flynn and Ken Penders (the one who wrote the torture and revealed the Word of Gay, respectively) are at odds about each other's writings, and the former's denouncement of the Word of Gay as "irrelevant" years earlier, didn't help matters any.
  • It's suggested that John Reddear from The Tamakis' Skim was in love with another boy from his Catholic school and is part of the reason he committed suicide at the start of the story. Unfortunately this sort of happens all too often in real life.
  • This is used in the original Watchmen comic to deconstruct ideas about homosexuality in golden age comics. A lesbian superhero is outed and thrown out of her team, then brutally murdered alongside her lover. The killer was punishing them for their sexual orientation, but it was more that, had she retained her identity and the support of her co-workers, she would have been safe. In an interview, another superhero comments that a number of the other superheroes were understood (within the ranks) to be homosexual and nobody cared so long as they stayed in the closet and weren't caught.
  • This is a plot point in Sandman Mystery Theatre. In The Phantom of the Fair, a a serial killer suffering from either schizophrenia or multiple personalities lures unsuspecting gay men, kidnaps them, then tortures them while dressed in a gimp suit. He then leaves the bodies in the Worlds Fair, in places where anyone and everyone can see them until the police get them removed.

Fan Works

Film

  • 2001 Maniacs - The gay guy is sodomized to death.
  • Trailer Park Of Terror - A group of troubled teens on a Christian retreat get tormented according to their most offensive sin by a gang of supernatural trailer trash. The leader gets some head while cheating on his wife, the doper gets it after doing dope, the masturbator gets a not-so-happy ending, the hetero couple gets The Bible misquoted at them for their premarital sex before getting murdered. But the gay guy? Well, he gets hit by a car, nothing to do with his "sin" to avoid showing the sin, unlike the rest of the characters, because gay sex would be too terrible to show in a movie filled with endless, varied torture and murder in loving close-up. Breasts are also too terrible to show. The writer tried to make the gay guy's primary sin different halfway through by having the gay guy literally throw the goth girl at one of the monsters so that he could escape, which only made him a Depraved Homosexual. And we only know that he's gay because another character calls the gay guy various epithets.
  • 9 Dead Gay Guys: All there in the title. The two protagonists,one straight and one gay, live.
  • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in some way subverted this trope. Though the lesbian couple in the film were not the only ones to die in the show, their fate was specifically mentioned in the sarcastic voice-over ending as not being based around the fact that their relationship was in any way evil. Of course, they also weren't the only people to die, just the only ones for whom it wasn't supposed to be a consequence or punishment of their wrongdoing according to that monologue.
  • There's a montage in the documentary The Celluloid Closet (a history of homosexual depictions in film up through the early 1990s) of a litany of gay/lesbian characters either dying or being Depraved Homosexuals or (most often) both.
  • In The Fox lesbian Jill is killed and her girlfriend runs off with a man.
  • Jack from Four Brothers, maybe. In a deleted scene, his older brother Bobby joked about him being gay. Bobby went as low as making fun of his tongue ring.
  • In Prey for Rock & Roll, Faith, the one half of the prominent lesbian couple in that movie, is hit by a car and killed when two punks try to take her guitar.
  • Happened to Mrs. Danvers in the Hitchcock film Rebecca, though this wasn't the case in the original book.
  • An early example would be the 1924 film Michael.
  • Land of the Dead features an incredibly gratuitous scene, even considering some of what happens in the rest of the film, where two women are passionately making out until one of them is pulled through the wall by a bunch of zombies.
  • Subverted in the 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform ("Girls in uniform"), which ends with a lesbian teenager's class mates preventing her suicide. The original stage play, Gestern und heute by Christa Winsloe, ends less happily, thus fitting the trope.
  • The 1919 German film Anders als die Andern ("Different from the Others") used this trope to a much better effect than Brokeback Mountain, because it was genuinely trying to educate the public about the senseless persecution of gays and included real life sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld giving a lecture that homosexuality was completely natural. That said, the main character still gets thrown out of school, loses all of his clients, is blackmailed and eventually commits suicide.
  • A Single Man: George's partner of sixteen years dies in a car accident eight months before the start of the film. By the end of the story, George himself dies due to a heart-attack, right after an epiphany which stopped him from committing suicide out of unsustainable grief. He was so busy preparing for his death that day that he forgot to take the heart medicine keeping him alive. It's all pretty tragic, really.
  • Milk: Controversial, to say the least: Harvey Milk may not have been killed specifically because he was gay, and Mayor George Moscone, a staight man, was killed in the same incident. However, Dan White, the assassin, was a self-described "defender of the home, the family, and religious life against homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics." On the other hand, he got on well with homosexuals professionally and said at other times that he respected their rights. Possibly a case of politicians being politicians.
  • The lone gay man in Single White Female gets in the villain's way... but he gets better and comes back to help Bridget Fonda kick Jennifer Jason Leigh's ass. Although you could make the argument that Leigh's character herself is an example of this trope, as well as a Psycho Lesbian.
  • Many people remember the sixties hit song "Ode To Billy Joe," about a young man who kills himself by jumping off the Tallahatchee Bridge, for reasons unknown. What few people remember is that in 1976, Hollywood decided to make a movie of the song that would explain exactly why Billy Joe jumped. Turns out it was the Gayngst.
  • Braveheart has the prince's male lover being murdered by King Edward by throwing said lover out a tall window right in front of the prince.
  • Bride of Chucky. The sole gay character gets whacked on the highway.
  • In the fantasy-horror Warlock, the main character's gay roommate is killed off quite early and in brutal fashion by the Warlock.
  • Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Gay Perry is shot, and barfs blood and keels over dead. But then he miraculously comes back, and it's HEAVILY lampshaded.
  • 'Boy' Barrett's suicide in Victim (1961). As in Brokeback Mountain, it's the guy who's more open about his sexuality who has to die. In a common working of the trope, he dies to protect the man he loves: knowing he'll be questioned by police, he hangs himself in his prison cell to avoid revealing a distinguished lawyer's involvement with him.
  • In The Wild Geese the openly gay guy is given a heroic death (quipping about his sexuality all the way). As the film is one of those 'one last mission' ones you could possibly say the trope was averted or subverted, there was certainly no hint that it was because of his sexuality (i.e. it wasn't a 'punishment' death).
  • In Nous étions un seul homme (We Were One Man), a German soldier on the run in occupied France and a French peasant he meets fall in love. The soldier is caught. The peasant, who's a little crazy, shoots him and, carrying the body, gets into a hole in the ground where he puts dead things so they can grow again.
  • Le temps qui reste (Time to Leave) is about a promiscuous, selfish gay fashion photographer dying of cancer.
  • In Gerard Blain's <<Les Amis>>, about an intergenerational gay relationship, the older man is killed in a car crash. Blain, however, maintained that he dies not because of his homosexuality but because it's his destiny.
  • Right at the end of L.I.E., pederast Big John is shot dead by a jealous boyfriend who thinks he's been replaced by a younger model.
  • In Smukke Dreng (Pretty Boy), a 13-year-old boy has a relationship with an astronomy professor who kicks him out when the professor's girlfriend comes home. The boy ends up semi-accidentally killing the man by throwing a rock at his head, sending him on a long fall.
  • Subverted in Trevor. 13-year-old Trevor attempts suicide over his homosexuality but recovers in hospital, where he meets a cute, friendly candy-striper, Jack, who offers him tickets to a Diana Ross concert. Trevor decides to live—at least "until tomorrow"—and dances up the path to his house.
  • In Ma Vie en Rose, the protagonist, a gender-variant seven-year-old whose gender variance causes him/her a lot of trouble, attempts suicide by shutting himself up in the family's garage freezer, but is rescued by his mother.
  • In the documentary The Lavender Lens: 100 Years of Celluloid Queers, there's a very striking montage towards the end of gay accidental death, murder and suicide scenes from various films, set to 'Another One Bites the Dust'. The film ends with a Bugs Bunny clip in which Bugs is suspected dead but revives and runs off wearing a tutu.
  • Martineau in Another Country gets caught during some guy-on-guy action and a few minutes later (in the film) he offs himself. In a church, of all places.
  • In Bent, it is a movie about two gay men in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Use your imagination.
  • Lucy bites it at the end of High Art.
  • Cruising is also a serial killer stalking New York City's gay leather subculture, and Al Pacino going undercover to stop this. In contrast to the acres of dead sexually active perverts, Al's neighbor, Ted, is offered up as a contrast - he has a steady boyfriend and hates the idea of cruising. And he dies, too.
  • The 1987 thriller No Way Out features a Depraved Homosexual as the story's main antagonist. When his Unrequited Love for the man he's protecting from a murder accusation is outed, he shoots himself and is posthumously framed both for the murder and for being a Soviet mole.
  • The titular funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The eulogy delivered for Gareth got the main character thinking about love and marriage, setting up the climax.
  • Independence Day features a walking—nay, prancing—gay stereotype played by Harvey Fierstein. Naturally, the aliens get him.
  • Your Highness gets extra special mention for Boremont, who reveals his love for Fabious, as Fabious is stabbing him.


Literature

  • Older Than Feudalism: Although the story of Sodom was probably originally about the treatment of guests (read: don't gang rape them), Jewish authors were already reading it as against homosexuality around 100 BCE. When things started to get worse for homosexuals and bisexuals in Europe in the 13th and 14th century, Sodom narratives became more common. The first known in English is Cleanness by the Pearl-Poet (author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), which includes a full description of the destruction of Sodom for homosexuality, complete with fiery dogs, and a lifeless sea and ash-filled fruit to symbolize sterility.
  • James Baldwin's feel bad classic, Giovanni's Room is a stunning example. The novel is narrated by a sexually confused young man who is counting the hours before his lover is executed.
  • Les Misérables may feature this trope: there's references to possible historical and mythological homosexuals in the scenes featuring Enjolras and Grantaire, and they eventually die together, hand in hand, in "Orestes Sober and Pylades Drunk". However, there is no confirmation of either person's sexuality, and none of the heterosexual students survive either, except a protagonist, Marius.
  • In Voltaire's Candide, the Baron's son is heavily implied to be gay, and he's the only one of the recurring characters who at the end is shipped off to be a galley slave.
  • Partially subverted in China Mieville's Iron Council: Cutter, who is gay, is one of the few characters to survive but his on-off boyfriend Judah is shot in one of the final scenes.
  • Robin Hobb's latest trilogy averts this; Sedric and Carson seem to be on their way to a happy ending.
  • For all of the death and destruction that happens in Warhammer 40,000, this trope is oddly enough subverted during the Ciaphas Cain novels. Magot and Grifen, the lesbian couple, are pretty much hinted at being the only actual couple with names to survive long enough to see retirement aside from Cain and Amberley. Indeed, it is their relationship that's the main reason that they make it away from the Necrons without a major mental breakdown, which actually impresses Cain a bit, saying that he wishes there were more soldiers like them in the Imperial Guard.
    • Similar to the 40k example, Jame and her wife Cathie in the first Alien vs. Predator novel are among 4 characters to make it to the end and are actually among the nicest most sympathetic characters in it. Their relationship is a bit more subtle in the comics though.
  • C J L Almquist's The Queen's Tiara, which is set in Sweden in 1792, has Tintomara, who pretty much personifies Attractive Bent Gender. Two sisters and their respective suitors fall in love with her, the men thinking she's a woman, the girls convinced that she's male (at least initially). The men fight a Duel to the Death over her, the sisters go insane, and Tintomara herself is eventually killed for her refusal to pick a gender role and stick with it.
  • In Clive Barker's Imajica (by Clive Barker), a fantasy novel by British horror author Clive Barker (published in 1991), a subplot introduces an openly gay male couple who are friends of the Christ-like protagonist Gentle. One of the gay men, Taylor Briggs, dies of AIDS near the beginning of the story, while his partner Clem survives and goes on to help the protagonist. It is mentioned in passing that both men were in a lot of open relationships during the 1970s and "slept around" a lot, back before HIV became public knowledge; but only Taylor, the party animal, contracted HIV while his partner was plain lucky and never did, something for which Clem feels Survivor Guilt. Subverted Trope in that both men had been lovers for a long time and their love and relationship are depicted in a very positive light. Later on, Taylor returns as a ghost and reunites with Clem. At the end of the story, after the Reconciliation of all five realms, when all the souls of the dead of Earth and the other four Dominions are free to travel on to... somewhere else, before he departs Taylor asks his lover not to forget him but to go on with his life.
  • In The Golden Compass there is Balthamos's death, six other characters on the protagonists' side had died in the series, most of them fairly major characters.
    • Also, note that angels are made of Dust, the sentient particle; a common theme of the third book is that dead people's souls reunite with their loved ones, daemons or other people, once their Dust particles spread across the universes, after getting out of the underworld for humans of course. Having this in consideration, maybe Balthamos and Baruch had a happy ending after all...
  • Subverted in Mary Renault's The Charioteer - the main character believes Ralph is about to commit suicide, but manages to interfere in time, resulting in a relatively happy ending. Considering the book was published in 1953, when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK, this came as a genuine surprise.
  • The Front Runner, while being one of the first modern novels to treat gays as people, still follows this trope.
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the two main characters (Basil Hallward and Dorian Grey) are heavily implied to be gay or bisexual, ends up with two of them dead, one murdered by the other. The other later effectively committed suicide. This may be a reflection of the difficulties of being a gay man in Victorian England, though (Wilde himself eventually died in poverty after being imprisoned for "gross obscenity", i.e. having sex with men).
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman, in which the gay protagonist demonstrates his new-found bravery by accepting a suicide mission to pass a message to political revolutionaries.
  • The first—and so far only—plainly gay characters in R.A. Salvatore's The Dark Elf Trilogy were... pirates. The horrible joke is (thankfully?) ruined, as they're lesbian pirates (bisexual in the case of one). At least they're properly pirate-y, not just Fan Service, though that makes them bad guys. But guess what? All the gay ones die, Going Down with the Ship as it were (ugh). The bisexual one, who also happens to have maintained a male lover she coerced into working for the pirates, is a sorceress and manages to escape with him after he talks her into doing the right thing.
  • Margaret in Affinity intends to take her life at the end of the story. The TV adaptation explicitly shows her jumping into the Thames.
  • Played as a Gay Aesop in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Sam Clay's too-good-to-be-true boyfriend Tracy is killed in action in World War II. Soon after, Sam marries fellow comic book writer Rosa Saks. Sam and Tracy were arrested in a raid, where the arresting officer basically raped Sam before letting him and Tracy go. Tracy wanted to know what happened, but Sam breaks off the relationship and never tells Tracy why. Rosa becomes The Beard because she'd gotten pregnant before her fiancée Joe (also Sam's cousin and writing partner) ran off to join the Navy. After Joe comes back and is Easily Forgiven, Sam is pretty much outed for the multiple affairs he's had with other men and regrets having treated Tracy so poorly. Sam is forced to renounce his Jerkass Gayngst and move on with his own life. As for Tracy, being an able-bodied American male on the eve of World War II, he might have wanted to join the Air Force regardless of his relationship status. No news on if Tracy ever found love in the barraks.
  • The Book of Lost Things features the knight Roland, who is trying to find out what happened to his lost lover, Raphael. He is, of course, dead. Roland ends up dying as well, once he finds out what happened.
  • In Fritz Peters' Finistère Michel drowns at the end, probably intending to die though this is only hinted at. When the book was published—in the early '50s—the tragic-conclusion trope was still de rigueur.
  • Wicked. Word of Gay is that there was something going on between Glinda and Elphaba. Elphaba, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West, dies at the end. Not in the musical though.
  • Carol Plum-Ucci's What Happened to Lani Garver is built around this trope, although it's justified in that one of the major themes of the book is to bring attention to homophobic hate crimes. Also, it's strongly implied that Lani is actually an angel, which may change things a bit.
  • Perry Moore wrote his young adult novel Hero as a response to the use of this trope in superhero comics. There are several gay characters and several characters who die, but no overlap.
  • Presumably, Edward II in the eponymous play by Christopher Marlowe, and his lover Gaveston. Real Life didn't help, of course.
  • Subverted in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The gay character Carlo survives a horrific campaign in Albania while the heterosexual man whom Carlo secretly loves dies in his arms. Carlo is later killed in the Cephallonia massacre, but (as with the real-life historical event) every single one of the other Italian soldiers dies with him except the Captain.
  • A particularly grotesque version of this in Orson Scott Card's Song Master: the bisexual character gets married to one of the female characters and they have a happy marriage except he warns her that he's attracted to the inhumanly gorgeous main character. She tells him that that's fine, she doesn't mind if he sleeps with the main character but he still continues to worry about it. In the end the main character and this guy do end up getting together. Unfortunately, treatments he received as a child to delay puberty cause a weird chemical reaction, making sex intolerantly painful. The other character is hunted down and has his genitals removed as punishment for "raping" the main character. Said character then dies. His wife remarries the next day and in the epilogue is said to be much happier in this more peaceful relationship. Subtle Card, subtle.
  • Hal Duncan's The Book of All Hours duology has the gay character Thomas "Puck" Messenger get murdered early on in the first book, leaving behind his lover Jack... and dies again and again across the multiverse, to the point that one version of Puck and Jack find a tomb full of hundreds if not thousands of dead versions of Puck. Puck's treatment is a harsh criticism of this trope from Duncan (as well as upon real-world anti-gay violence, specifically the murder of Matthew Shepard), who is very outspoken about gay rights, and several versions of Jack manage to save their Pucks in the end.
  • A plot point in Darkship Thieves. Max kept his orientation a secret, so his identity thief doesn't realize he's given himself away by ignoring the lover, Nat. Still, the book ends with one gay man dead and the other consumed by his need for revenge.
  • Teenaged Harold's heroic death in The Garden God (1905). He dies saving his friend/lover's life; it's implied that this wipes out the 'sin' of his previous homosexual acts.
  • Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) (1912). Aschenbach expires on the beach, gazing at Tadzio.
  • Alexandre's suicide in Les amitiés particulières (Special Friendships) (1943) after being cruelly separated from his boyfriend by hypocritically-moralising priests. Alexandre is 12.
  • Ashley's suicide over his homosexuality in Lord Dismiss Us (1967).
  • Happens to Jack in Brokeback Mountain. Also in The Film of the Book.
  • Pippa (of Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle trilogy) dies at the end of the first book, leading to her gradually turning into a monster in the realms before she is Killed Off for Real in the third book. However, the trope is subverted, as the series does not shine a negative light on homosexual relationships, and the reader only finds out she and Felicity were in love after Pippa dies the first time.
  • Played with in the House of Night series, which portrays gay relationships positively (if unrealistically/stereotypically). Jack is killed by Neferet as a sacrifice to Darkness, since he is a "pure" soul. While this is completely against the homosexuality = sin mentality of many of the other examples of this trope, it still prevents Jack and his boyfriend Damien from getting a happy ending.
  • Rosemary Sutcliff wrote historical novels stuffed full of homeoeroticism but had only three explicitly gay characters. All three are minor. One, in Blood and Sand, is a villain who sleeps with young slave-boys and whom we never actually meet. The other two, in Sword at Sunset, are heroic warriors whose love inspires them to greater heroism. However, one of them dies nobly in battle, whereat the other feels suicidal and ends up dying too, saving everybody's life in the process. Mind you, this was published in 1963.
  • 10-year-old Serge's suicide in Quand mourut Jonathan (When Jonathan Died). Serge's mother decides to keep him away from his adult lover, Jonathan. Serge runs away to go to Jonathan, but on the way realises he'll never make it and jumps in front of a car.
  • 13-year-old Manuela's suicide in Das Kind Manuela after being punished for declaring her love for a female teacher and told she can't see the teacher again. In the film, Mädchen in Uniform, she's rescued while preparing to kill herself.
  • In Ursula Zilinsky's Middle Ground, Johannes von Svestrom's lover Gabriel is killed in a burning tank and Svestrom acquires a death wish, which only ends up winning him a lot of medals for bravery in combat. Svestrom intends shooting himself until he meets and loves Tyl von Pankow, Gabriel's nephew. The end of the book is ostensibly happy, with Tyl going to Svestrom, but we never see him arrive and he's been told that he has a 'short life-line' on his palm.
  • In David Blaize, the titular character very nearly suffers a death like that of Harold in The Garden God, jumping at a runaway horse in an act of self-sacrifice. However, he survives, and the accident is basically an excuse to bring his older boyfriend, who's gone away to university, back to his side.
  • In Tout contre Léo (Close to Leo), Leo is very young, gay and dying of AIDS. The book is told from the point of view of his little brother Marcel.
  • In the Left Behind book series, closet lesbian and Straw Feminist Verna Zee gets killed by the Wrath Of The Lamb earthquake in the book Nicolae. In the prequel novels, the Antichrist villain Nicolae Carpathia has his two biological fathers, who were both gay, killed off.
  • In Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series the lesbian Raina dies from a magical plague in Richard's arms while her lover is trying to find a way to save her. They have time to say they love each other before she dies.
  • Mass Effect: Deception kills off Hendel Mitra, established as Invisible to Gaydar in another book... after Deception makes an effort to make him un-gay by having him ogle asari strippers. Asari are monogendered aliens who all look like blue women.
  • Truth in Television with Someone Else's War. The LRA hates Muslims and homosexuals and will kill both indiscriminately.


Live Action TV

  • Surprisingly, this is played straight more often than not in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; specifically, Larry, the only (confirmed) gay man to ever appear on the show was killed off in the battle against The Mayor, and Tara, Willow's long term girlfriend was shot by Warren Mears. In addition to Tara, Willow's next girlfriend, Kennedy, was killed between Seasons 7 and 8, but then revived by Willow.
    • Though this being a Joss Whedon series, straight people get bumped off just as often. And the deaths are never played as a punishment for being gay. Lets just say no one, gay or straight, is safe when Joss is writing.
  • For a series that has been praised for it's portrayal and inclusion of gay characters and themes, True Blood does often fall victim to this trope. While the majority of the series' vampires are Ambiguously Gay or flamingly bisexual, the only strictly gay vampire, Eddie Fournier, was kidnapped and staked to death by Jason's psycho girlfriend.
    • And then there was Lafayette's boyfriend Jesus. Their romance was surprisingly genuine, but apart from a few kisses and laying in bed together they weren't shown "in action" like most in-series couples. And then Lafayette was possessed by a psycho witch and was forced to stab Jesus to death.
      • To the series' credit, it averted this trope by keeping Lafayette alive at the start of the second season. The book actually killed him.
  • Averted in the series Will and Grace. All of the characters, including the flamboyantly gay Jack and title character Will (also homosexual), go on to live long, comfortable lives (as shown in the final episode).
  • The Lexx episode "Nook" had Brother Trager admit that he was in love with Stanley. This is on a planet populated by all men, but he's the only one who specifically states an attraction. He is later killed in an attempt to frame the crew for murder. Even on a Sadist Show known for a dark tone, this was a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming because he was genuinely a good guy and moved Stan to show genuine regret that he couldn't return Trager's affections.
  • Ally McBeal had a Very Special Episode guest-starring Wilson Cruz from My So-Called Life as an Attractive Bent Gender Magical Prostitute, who of course died at the end of the episode.
  • In the original book and movie of The Andromeda Strain, Dr. Hall is straight and lives. In the 2008 miniseries adaptation, he is replaced by Major Keane, who is gay and dies. Draw your own conclusions.
  • On the soon to be gone As the World Turns, Reid (one half of the show's gay couple) died after his car was hit by a train and his heart is going to be used to save a straight character.
  • Babylon 5, which rather unsubtly implies a certain sapphic essence to the relationship between Talia and Susan, doesn't really go all the way to acknowledging that they sleep together until the episode in which Talia's personality is wiped, which is called "death". But had the actress playing Talia not left the show, Kosh had plans to make it better.
  • Battlestar Galactica Reimagined Gaeta was revealed as bisexual, and he had a very unfortunate experience with a Cylon that ended up pushing him over the edge into a full-blown insurrection against Adama and his proposed Alliance with elements of the Cylons. For his part in the attempted coup, he was executed. All in the span of four episodes. Although in this case the Cylon relationship was heterosexual and his homosexual relationship was the nice one.
    • Hoshi, on the other hand, not only survived but was made Admiral during Adama's suicide mission of rescuing Hera.
    • Not to mention Admiral Cain.
      • According to the DVD Commentary for "Pegasus" this was not intentional. When Michelle Forbes read the line "She ate at our table..." she gave it an extra personal touch that the producers decided to build on in "Razor".
  • The Bill. Lance Powell, murdered. Juliet Becker, murdered. Luke Ashton, large scale-heartbreak. Gemma Osbourne, suffers GBH. Thankfully, Paul Marquess has gone...
  • Bramwell: Frederick, who was initially the Wholesome Crossdresser, gets hit by a carriage, gets his throat torn open with a smashed bottle by a drunken Thrift patient, gets sent away to a religious institution and then dies of infection. The religious institution seems to subvert its own trope somewhat with the master being portrayed, if not truly sympathetically, then certainly as permitting a last reconciliation between Frederick and Charles Sheldon without intruding on their private grief. The master delivers a powerful sermon on forgiveness, which is a powerful bit of writing in its own right and averts the straw fundamentalist stereotype quite significantly.
  • Larry, the first openly and proudly homosexual person to be on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was the only named student who got killed (well, permanently anyway) in season 3's finale. Then, several seasons later, there was Tara.
    • There is debate about whether Tara dies because of Bury Your Gays or if she dies because people in Buffy frequently die. It is significant that she is one of the few (if not the only) title characters who dies without being resurrected (in contrast to Buffy, or to Oz who simply leaves town), and dies in the same episode as her very sexual reunion with Willow.
    • Joss Whedon claimed that Tara died not because she was gay, but because she was with Willow. Had Oz still been around, he would have died.
    • Averted with Willow and Kennedy, the only couple to survive the finale.
  • In the Cold Case episode "Forever Blue", the cop who calls him and his partner 'the lucky ones', tells his father that he is a man, and all but admits that he's in love with said partner is the one who's killed. Meanwhile, his partner, who in present day, still insists until near the end of the episode that he isn't gay (and to add insult to death, claims his partner also wasn't 'like that') is the one who lives. He lived because he broke things off the night they were supposed to go patrolling together.
    • Also, in the Cold Case episode "Best Friends", a butch lesbian dies and her girlfriend lives after they try to commit suicide by driving off a bridge, while being chased by her homophobic brother.
    • Another Cold Case episode featured elements of this trope being applied, not to gays, but to the deaf. A student at a deaf school has a massive falling-out with his parents and friends over his attraction to a non-deaf teaching assistant, and is murdered by his roommate when he acquires a cochlear implant, making the proudly-deaf roommate feel abandoned and betrayed.
  • The worst thing about the first season of Damages was Ray's plot, which looked horribly reminiscent of one of those would-be sympathetic 1950s/60s films confronting the Homosexual Problem, in which gay people are tragic victims of a terrible burden but still suffer perpetual torment and death. It would have been less unfortunate if he hadn't been the only identified gay character in the show ever (as of the end of S3).
  • Dark Angel. Original Cindy's one serious girlfriend onscreen, Diamond, dies of being used as a disease lab rat. At least she took her murderer with her. Original Cindy herself survived, however.
  • Dirty Sexy Money killed off its transgender character Carmelita, who was played by real life transwoman Candis Cayne. Making it even worse was that the show had just been canceled, giving the impression that they just had to get that death in before it was over. Viewers had had their eyes on the show right from the start as well, as in the pilot episode Cayne's voice was digitally lowered an octave. Word of God explained that Cayne passes so well as a woman that they were afraid the audience wouldn't get that the character was assigned male at birth.
  • Nicely subverted in Flash Forward. The episode in which Janis is confirmed to be a lesbian ends with her lying alone in the street, bleeding out from a bullet to the stomach. In the next episode, she gets to a hospital and is saved.
  • In an episode of Foyle's War, Foyle lets the handsome young gay pilot in love with Foyle's son, Andrew, atone for his crime (his "girlfriend"'s death) by dying heroically in battle.
  • Grey's Anatomy is not immune. Hey, look, the Patient of the Week's a gay Marine! Guess we better- oops... But hey, this other one called Benjamin probably has a chan—damn.
    • But when it comes to the lesbian main characters, the show hasn't killed any of them. They put two of them on a bus, they got the third one in an almost fatal accident, but nobody has died yet.
  • Hex managed to subvert this somewhat. The first episode introduced Thelma, the main character's lesbian best friend. Then it had a demon murder her. Cut to her funeral, at which the priest is talking about how Thelma was very much her own individual and saying it was this individuality which left her isolated and led to her tragic death... at which point Thelma's ghost walks up beside the main character and says: "God, they're loving this. Don't be a dyke or you'll end up topping yourself." Thelma then goes on to be one of only two of the original cast to be left after the show's Kill'Em All ending.
    • Two more lesbian ghost characters turn up. Peggy, who has been long dead, and Maya, who was killed by the villain to provide Thelma with a girlfriend, thus giving him a hold on her. Admittedly, when you already have one lesbian ghost, who else is she going to get physical with? But then Maya proceeds to get even deader at the hands of the heroine.
    • Male gay character Tom ends up dying. At the hands of the man he fancies. Ouch.
  • The British soap opera Hollyoaks recently had a one-week series of Hollyoaks later, which is the same but Darker and Edgier. It concluded with the death of Sarah Barnes after her psychotic girlfriend mistakenly slashed her parachute instead of Zoe's.
    • Hollyoaks also featured the death of Kieran, the gay priest, but averted this trope nicely when John-Paul and Craig went off into the sunset together, both fully comfortable with their sexuality and their relationship. It should also be noted that Hollyoaks features character deaths quite frequently, and that the majority of the gay or bisexual characters on the show remain alive and well.
  • Another British soap, Emmerdale had Aaron and Jackson. Aaron was a violent thug, who got worse when he realised, and hated the fact that, he was gay. Eventually, he settled down with Jackson, who could tame him. They were happy, accepted. Then Jackson became paraplegic and begged Aaron to help him die until he agreed.
  • The fourth episode of House has two main couples whose babies are given different treatments to solve the case. The innocent lesbians lose their child, the (granted, unknowingly) infection-spreading straight couple keeps their child.
  • The Spanish soap opera Los Hombres de Paco recently wed one of its most popular pairs, lesbian couple Pepa and Silvia, in one the biggest and most hyped weddings of the year. All went well and the wedding was lovely—and then Silvia was shot when gangsters beseiged the reception. Unable to get medical help for hours (and still in her Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress) she slowly and painfully bled to death on the floor as Pepa held her and told her she loved her. The episode is almost Whedon-esque in its ability to cause maximum trauma to shippers.
  • General Arcadius dies saving the life of the title character in the first episode of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire after finding the love of his life and his true nature in prison. However his lover has become a series regular.
  • Lost was said to be adding a gay character. In season 4, this was revealed to be Tom, who by that time was already dead.
  • Steve from Reaper. Somewhat subverted by the fact that his boyfriend, Tony, is the only survivor after the Devil killed all the other demons. Steve is also redeemed and goes to Heaven as an angel. And provides an example for more demons who want to (attempt to) be good.
  • Vito Spatafore in The Sopranos is beaten to death for being gay. Justified in that the Mob is hardly a bastion of cultural liberalism, especially not on the subject of homosexuality.
    • The show also portrays Tony (Who is portrayed as a sympathetic character) as being accepting of homosexuality, at least compared to his friends, while the two most homophobic are either very unsympathetic (Paulie) or Complete Monster's (Phil Leotardo).
  • Captain Alicia Vega was supposed to be the first canonically gay character in the Stargate universe, which had a respectable reputation in real life for the diversity of its cast and characters, but had yet to feature an out character. She was introduced in the first episode of season five of Stargate Atlantis and was heralded as a new recurring character, but almost all her scenes from her introductory episode were deleted for pacing reasons, including the scene where her sexuality was hinted. The producers then decided her character did not fit the series as well as they liked, and she was killed in her second appearance.
  • In a complete (deliberate?) inversion of the trope, Strip Mall's series finale "Tammi Takes a Dive" features every main character bumped off except the lesbian couple.
  • Supernatural had a third-season episode called "Ghostfacers" in which a gay character is introduced and immediately killed, only to come back as a ghost for a bit... and then perform a Heroic Sacrifice to become Deader Than Dead. Everyone else survives.
    • There is also Lily in the finale for the second season, and while this is likely overlooked as just about everyone else in that episode dies (even if they get better), she is the first to go. Notably, after mentioning that she "touched her girlfriend and her heart stopped."
  • There was an episode of This Is Wonderland with an elderly gay couple, and at the end, it was revealed that one of them was dying of colon cancer. In a twist on the trope, however, he was the less aggressive of the two, and had been in the closet his whole life before meeting the other guy. Although the show was known for Tear Jerker moments, this subplot was one of the saddest.
  • Todd and the Book of Pure Evil kills off a gay character in the fourth episode (though he had used the Book of Pure Evil, which doesn't end well for anyone).
  • A major occurrence in Brazilian soap opera Torre de Babel was a shopping mall explosion. Said explosion was also used for the author to kill characters the audience wasn't liking, including a lesbian couple.
  • Veronica Mars does this in the second season as it is revealed that Beaver engineered the bus crash because two characters established to be gay were going to reveal that Woody had molested them when they were in a little league baseball team, and that he had done the same thing to Beaver, and Beaver didn't want people to think he was gay.
  • There has been only one confirmed lesbian couple in Charmed. In a show set in San Francisco, no less. Not only are they very minor characters, one of them naturally gets killed.
  • By the seventh episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, all three gay characters have either been killed or have killed themselves. A fourth gay character was introduced the very next episode, although he wasn't revealed to be gay until season two.
  • Although True Blood initially subverted this trope with Lafayette, the fourth season finale kills off both Lafayette's boyfriend, Jesus, AND Tara. Unless she gets better.
  • In the Warehouse 13 season 3 finale, they seem to have done this with BOTH of their queer characters—H.G. Wells and Steve Jinks. Fortunately, there's a hint that the deaths may not be permanent.
  • In Boardwalk Empire, the only queer regular character is Angela, Jimmy's bisexual - though lesbian-leaning - wife. She and her lover are killed by Manny Horovitz as retaliation for the hit Jimmy put out on him. Bury Your Gays AND Stuffed Into the Fridge! Thanks, Winter!
  • A possible subversion in The Tudors with George Boleyn and Mark Smeaton..only one other person even knows that they are gay, and they are actually executed for an(alleged)heterosexual sex act.
    • Played straight with William Compton and Thomas Tallis, however. Tallis originally rejected Compton's advances but eventually gave in. Compton then died of "sweating sickness" in the episode after they had consummated the relationship.
  • A potentially justified example in RTE's restaurant drama Raw and gay character Pavel. Krystof Hádek declined to return for the fifth series partway through filming for the fourth leaving writers with little time to find a resolution for the show's sole gay couple while still retaining the other half as a character. Having only just found stability in their relationship, it would have seemed odd for the pair to suddenly implode with no real build-up, so killing Pavel was the only viable solution.


Music

  • Spoon's "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine":

I wanna play the part of Eddie in "The Stranger Dance"
 He makes love to the duke
 He swordfights the queen
 He steals the whole show in his last dying scene

  • Elton John's "All the Girls Love Alice," about a lesbian who dies:

Gettin' your kicks in another girl's bed
 And it was only last Tuesday
 They found you in the subway dead!


Theatre

Michael: It's not always the way it is in plays. Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the story!

  • Beautifully subverted in Angels in America. Although deaths of Prior and Belize's friends are mentioned, the only one of the gay characters to die is Roy Cohn, the malicious, heartless bastard of a closet queen who refuses to think of himself as gay.
  • Subverted in Spring Awakening. Hänschen and Ernst don't appear again after their kiss, which is a pretty good fate, since saying the lives of the heterosexual characters (well, those who are left alive) suck would be an understatement.
  • Dog Sees God.
  • Jason McConnell in bare: a pop opera, although Peter survives.
  • In Rent, the only character who dies is Angel, a gay male drag queen. Mimi, the straight female drug addict, comes close, and likely dies soon after the play ends, but still makes it to the final curtain. The message implied was that Angel was Too Good for This Sinful Earth. A subversion is that the lesbian couple pretty much gets a happier ending than anyone else.
  • The Laramie Project is based off of the real life murder of Matthew Shepard, and the town's reaction to the news. Shepard was beaten brutally and tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming, by two men who suspected he was gay (which he was).
  • Parodied to the hilt by Lashings of Ginger Beer in their version of Buffy: The Musical: It's true and also sad / that dykes in mainstream film, we end up either dead or mad...
  • In The Children's Hour, two schoolteachers, Martha and Karen, have their lives and reputations irrevocably shattered after one of their beastly students spreads a rumor that they are lesbian lovers. After a bitter confrontation with the student's grandmother, and even after the women lose their court case for slander, the big twist is that Martha really did have those feelings for Karen, but never knew how to articulate them until they were spoken by someone else. Karen is accepting of her friend, and suggests they move away and start a new life together. In both the film and theatre version of the story, Martha kills herself before the night is through.
  • Marlowe's Edward II (1592). The explicitly gay title character and his boyfriend both meet a nasty end. Mind you, so do lots of other people.
  • Painfully and sadly played straight in A Chorus Line. Paul, after suffering a horrible childhood being rejected for being gay, falls on his leg that was operated on some time ago during a tap routine. While he doesn't die per se, his career ends and the other characters mourn how any of them could have a suffered a similar fate.


Video Games

  • Abu'l Nuquod in Assassin's Creed is very, very strongly implied to be gay due to his speech about being taunted by his neighbors for being "different" and refusing to serve a god who considers him an abomination. Unfortunately, he's also a bad guy, so Altair chases him down and stabs him in the throat. It doesn't help that while Altair mentions Abu'l's greed, decadence, and theft from his people as reasons that he needs to die, nobody ever said that. Going purely by what you hear around the city he's not such a bad guy. Granted, he does poison his party guests, but Altair didn't know that was going to happen.
  • In the Japanese My-HiME computer game, if you as the main character choose to date Natsuki Kuga, her best friend Shizuru Fujino is so hurt that she kills herself.
  • Sorta subverted but not really in Phantasmagoria 2. Trevor is the last out of four characters to be murdered, and specifically because Curtis loved him the most. However, he also dies right after admitting that he loves Curtis and right before they can kiss. The female love interest survives, apparently remembering that she was, in fact, a character in the game after disappearing from the last half of it or so.
  • Subverted in the Shadow Hearts series, where straight couples kick the bucket with astonishing regularity while gay characters fulfill their romantic relationships.
  • In Star Control 2, practically the only named character to die is Depraved Omnisexual Admiral ZEX.
    • Also applies to the Androsynth race from the original Star Control. Yes, the entire species.
  • Viranus Donton in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The only one character to be strongly hinted to be gay, and guess what happens to both him and his apparent romantic interest? The short version: mistaken for cavern trolls by a bunch of heavily armed mercenaries on acid.
  • Inverted in Tales of the Abyss. Camp Gay Dist is the only one of the villains who survives.
  • The Metal Gear Solid series on top of Ho Yay has four obviously non-hetero men. Scott Dolph, bisexual (and black), dies after the prologue in MGS2. Volgin the Big Bad of MGS3, Depraved Bisexual, dies at the end. Raikov, Volgin's lover and Depraved Homosexual (there's nothing in game that shows this but a radio conversation with EVA reveals he likes to punch his subordinates in the face for no reason), can be killed off with no consequences to the story. He was mostly a gag/minor plot device as it was. By the way, the way you dispatch of him is stuffing him into a closet. Then finally there's Vamp who is also a Depraved Bisexual and survives 2, dies in 4.
    • Portable Ops confirms Raikov's survival... well, as long as you rescue him, that is. If you don't, it's fair to assume this happens. Either way, just as in MGS3, it's up to the player to decide his fate.
    • Ocelot is a borderline example: his insane devotion to Big Boss is what gets him killed in the end.
    • Strangelove in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is loudly lesbian and survives until the end!!... but only after hooking up with a man and implicitly becoming the mother of his child. At one point, she even states that she was planning to make herself into this trope by killing herself after completing Peace Walker, but changed her mind upon interpreting Peace Walker's message as The Boss (her female lover) telling her to move on.
  • In Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, Mara and Elsa are revealed to be a lesbian couple, and are subsequently killed.
  • Dragon Age averts this with allowing players of either gender to have healthy relationships with the bisexual characters Leliana and Zevran, and possibly even to survive the story with them. Notably Herren and Wade are one of the only happy, stable couples in the entire game.
    • The same applies to Dragon Age II, where there are four bisexual options, and the player can be in a loving relationship with any of them.
  • In Deadly Premonition, Thomas suffers a rather gruesome death after flipping out and going all Depraved Homosexual (thereby forcing the player to fight him).
  • In The Orion Conspiracy, Devlin discovers that his dead son Danny was gay. Devlin was surprised, because he and Danny had been so distant from each other that Devlin simply did not have a clue. He also finds out that Kaufmann is gay and that he was Danny's boyfriend. Kaufmann and Devlin get into a shouting match, because Kaufmann thinks Devlin disapproves of the relationship. Devlin, on his part, feels that he would not have held that against Danny. Sadly, Kaufmann is found dead and disemboweled shortly afterwards. Devlin finds out later that Captain Shannon killed Danny and Kaufmann. Why? Because Shannon blames Devlin for the death of Shannon's wife, and so he murdered Danny for revenge. Shannon killed Kaufmann to frame Devlin. Naturally, Shannon is planning to kill Devlin. Despite this reasoning, Danny and Kaufmann are the first characters confirmed dead, and they were both gay, so the trope still stands.
  • Played with in Rift: In the Defiant start zone, you're informed that the rebellious bahmi princess Uriel Chuluun was killed in the razing of Meridian. However, it's not until you go back in time to when she's still alive (and thus, actually avert the Bad Future in which she dies) that she's able to meet (and, it would seem, fall for) Kira. Later, you have to save her from herself when she almost goes over to a death cult and almost gets herself killed in the process.


Webcomics

  • Chess Piece deconstructs this: Danny's gay lover commits suicide and comes back as a ghost. It's implied as to why, but still.
  • Cuanta Vida has BLU Sniper Liam and RED Spy Gabry. Gabry is killed taking a bullet for Liam. Liam commits assisted suicide later, after losing his eyes.
  • Mecha Maid in Spinnerette is terminally ill and apparently a lesbian.
  • Homestuck briefly attracted a fair bit of controversy when it killed off the only gay character in the comic. While some of this was (arguably justified) outrage over having a fan-favourite character killed off unceremoniously in a completely unforshadowed plot twist, some of it came from the fact that one of the first victims of the killing spree just so happened to be the lesbian. Fortunately, she gets better.
    • Of course, due to the fact that the main characters are 13, it's currently impossible to say which characters have what sexual orientations. The trolls do not regard gender as having any bearing on sex and Kanaya is considered gay because all her love interests have been women and Hussie said she was through it would be more like a fetish to troll culture, and as a troll she has likely never heard of the concept of sexual orientation.
  • Goodbye Chains has a rare inversion, wherein Banquo, the very straight, very promiscuous gunslinger gets killed off , leaving behind Colin, his gay and lovestruck partner in crime.


Web Original


Western Animation


Real Life

  • Has been known to happen in Real Life, and all too often because someone is Driven to Suicide or the victim of a hate crime, resulting in a disproportionately high mortality rate in the gay community.
  • Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who was brutally beaten and killed because of his sexual orientation. The two men accused of torturing Shepard, resulting in his death—Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson—are serving life sentences in connection with the crimes. The beating of Shepard (and resulting funeral demonstrations by the Rev. Fred Phelps and followers at the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas) brought worldwide attention to hate crimes and eventually resulted in passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, which provides more specific definitions of what constitutes a hate crime and severe penalties for those who engage in hate acts against people who are (or perceived to be) homosexual, along with race, creed, gender or disability.
  • After taking power in 1933, the Nazis persecuted homosexuals as part of their so-called moral crusade to racially and culturally purify Germany. This persecution ranged from dissolution of homosexual organizations to internment of thousands of individuals in concentration camps. Gay men, in particular, were subject to harassment, arrest, incarceration, castration and murder. In Nazi eyes, gay men were weak and unfit to be soldiers, as well as unlikely to have children and thereby contribute to the racial struggle for Aryan dominance. They also persecuted lesbians, but less severely.
    • Even tody, in many Islamic and African countries, homosexuality is a crime, sometimes even punishable by death.
  • In Soviet Russia, homosexuality was deemed "antisocial behavior" and outlawed. Those who were found guilty of it were often sent to forced labor camps as punishment.
  • The Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, forbade movies from showing or referencing "sexual perversion" unless the people involved ended up dead, villainous, or converted by the end of the work.
  • The story of Emperor Ai of Han and his romantic affair with Dong Xian ... is quite the Downer Ending.
  • Older Than Feudalism: The Tyrannicides: Short version, Greek noble Aristogeiton is upset that the tyrant's brother Hipparchus keeps putting the moves on his boy toy (Harmodius), so the couple decide it's time for the tyrant (Hippias) and his brother to go. An elaborate assassination is plotted, but botched, killing Hipparchus but not Hippias, as well as Harmodius. Aristogeiton is of course captured, but manages to trick Hippias into killing him during the interrogation.
  • After a typical yet fateful taping of the Jenny Jones episode "Same-Sex Secret Crushes", Scott Amedure was killed sometime later by Jonathan Schmitz, the very person he had a crush on.
  • Trevorspace is a web community devoted to averting this trope in Real Life. Closely tied to the The "It Gets Better" Project, with the same goal.
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