Bury Your Gays

by Chuck Tingle

“In film, in TV, in books … the queer characters never get a happy ending,” I press. “Sometimes they’re the first to go, other times they make some brave sacrifice in the finale, but it always ends in tragedy and death. That’s why it’s called bury your gays.”

Some events are timeless, I guess, stuck between past, present, and future. They’re a different color than the rest. A different scale. A different tense. When you turn them into a screenplay or a song or a novel or even a piece of erotic fanfiction, these are the moments that will outlive your body.)

Queer horror isn’t exactly the arena of someone looking to go unnoticed by hordes of bigoted, rage-filled right-wingers out for blood.

Sometimes kindness is a duty, a job that one sets out to accomplish with time and patience and effort. People who feel this way, myself included, fight against some other gnawing instinct within; we bloom like a flower from the dirt. It’s an honorable thing to strive for, and there’s nothing bad I can say about that kind of growth. Other folks, however, don’t even think about it. There’s some uncanny spark that always pushes them to make the right choice, because they’re not even aware a choice exists. It’s just what they do.

Night of the Living Dead isn’t really about zombies, it’s about racism. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is littered with pro-vegetarian subtext, and They Live is more about rampant consumerism than aliens.” “But ghosts aren’t real,” Seth argues. “He wasn’t actually in danger.” “Zombies, Leatherface, and space invaders aren’t real, either,” I counter. “But racism, factory farming, and unchecked corporate greed are.”

“This is how scary stories work, how horror works. We’re all still here, safe and alive. We’ve had that primal rush and exercised those muscles to remind us death is eventually coming for everyone, but not today.”

The will to survive is innate in all of us, but profit is an equally potent motivation for self-replication.

Nobody has to be a hero for anyone else, that’s kinda the whole point.”

“You know who the real villain is?” I continue, strolling through the lobby and joining a line of other writers, directors, cinematographers, and actors as they filter inside to find their seats. “Unchecked capitalism and the desire for capitalist systems to monetize other people’s trauma.”

“I call on all of you to usher in a new era of stories where the gay, or bi, or lesbian, or asexual, or pansexual, or trans character lives happily ever after. Buy those stories. Make those stories profitable.”

People love to gawk at a downfall, but they also love a redemption arc.

On a long enough timeline, endings are inevitable. Tragedy is inevitable. Fortunately, so is joy.