: Re: Is killing off one of my queer characters homophobic? (For reference, I am queer.) In my post-apocalyptic novel and in the short story from the novel's antagonist's perspective, my MC, Eris'

@Cugini967

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I’m going to challenge the framing of this question a bit. The way you’ve asked it, only a troll could answer yes. Of course it’s absurd to give writers a list of predictable dos and donts to check off—especially since the original justification for a lot of them was, “Write something different for a change.” If you want validation on that, you’re right: it’s dumb. But I think there’s a more serious point here, which we should understand and acknowledge. It’s not homophobic, but is it cliché? In 2016, Caroline Franke complained that of the 242 recurring characters who died in the past season of television, about ten percent were queer women.

You don’t give an example of someone who says that killing off a gay lover is “homophobic,” and I can’t think of anyone influential who says it always is. So I’m not sure whether the people I’ve run into are the same people you’re worried about. Still, let’s look at where they’re coming from. Sorry for going over stuff you already know.

Up until around the 1960s, books that dealt with homosexuality would be deemed “obscene” unless they killed off the gay characters in the end as punishment. In the US, the Post Office would refuse to ship them, so they couldn’t be sold. When the times and the mores changed, the cliché stuck but its meaning reversed: now the gay characters always died so we could feel sorry for them. Up through the ’90s, it was still controversial to depict gay characters on television or YA fiction at all. Even series that patted themselves on the back for how visionary and liberal they were, like Star Trek: TNG, completely flinched. As social conservatives shifted to saying they only objected to “the homosexual lifestyle” and began to see gay people as pitiably deluded, a large part of the public were more willing to accept a single, miserable gay character in fiction—especially one whose partner had already died so they never had to see them together—than one in a happy, fulfilling relationship. Today, none of that applies, and there’s no reason you couldn’t write as many lesbian couples living happily ever after as you want. But it’s still a lot more common to kill them off.

So on one level, it’s sort of like a dog dying in a children’s book, or writing in a cop who says he’s one day away from retirement and shows a picture of his wife and cute daughter. (There was an episode of ER in the ’90s that played off that expectation even back then: “You told me his partner died of AIDS!” “Oh, I meant his lab partner. I’m sorry you misunderstood.”) The reason there’s a stronger reaction than eye-rolling is that a lot of lesbians are sick of seeing the characters they identify with always tragically dying or tragically losing their true love. Straight romance sometimes has a sad ending, but that’s all lesbians ever got. If they were born before 1990 or so, they also remember that it was because homophobes didn’t want there to be any stories where lesbians ever got to have a happy ending.

So one way to mollify those readers (I’d encourage you not to think of it as “defending” yourself) might be to give some other lesbians a happy ending. Before too long, people will probably look back from a different perspective and think, “Oh, this is a YA book from the late twenty-teens, so of course it won’t kill any lesbians. That taboo was enforced on social media back then just like the opposite taboo used to be enforced by old ladies writing letters.” It makes sense today for people to be sick and tired of dead lesbians, but in the longer view, both taboos are equally limiting. You can’t please everyone. But regardless, “the hero learns that the bad guy killed the parent he never knew,” was one even George Lucas thought was too boring to play straight.

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