Spoilers for Weapons (2025), Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle, Spread Me by Sarah Gailey, Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White, and Freaky (2020)
Every queer horror connoisseur has likely had a similar moment. You’re watching a movie and are excited to see a queer person pop up. It’s so rare to see queer characters in this type of movie that you’re excited for the representation of a queer couple in domestic bliss or a trans kid learning to be himself. That excitement soon turns to disappointment as the queer couple has their heads bashed in within five minutes of each other or the trans kid is stabbed and then thrown into a woodchipper. It’s brutal and pointless, and it might leave you with a pit in your stomach. The indiscriminate and brutal killing of gay characters is a trope in media so prolific that it has a name: “Bury Your Gays.” Even in 2025, horror directors and authors are using the death and dismemberment of queer characters for shock value, as a punishment for existence, or to provide character development to the cisgender straight characters. 
Horror as a genre has long exploited queer characters, but queer authors and filmmakers are creating a space for themselves in the horror genre, telling authentic and terrifying queer horror stories. So that begs the question: how can queer horror authors and film-makers balance queer horror stories that include death and dismemberment without falling into the trap of burying their gays? This article gives three suggestions for telling queer horror stories that subvert the bury your gays trope while still allowing these queer horror stories to be sufficiently gruesome.
What is Burying your Gays?
If you’re not familiar with the term “burying your gays,” you may be confused by this article and its premise, so a brief description is in order. In 1934, Hollywood studios implemented the Hays Code, strict censorship regulations meant to ensure that movies were suitable for a general audience. Portrayals of homosexuality, among various other “vices,” was forbidden, unless those portrayals made it clear to the audience that those “sins” were condemned. If a queer character was to exist in a movie, they needed to die by the end of that movie in order to “punish” them for being gay. Thus, the “bury your gays” trope was born. Despite the end of the Hays Code in 1968, the trope has continued into the modern day, with brutal, pointless depictions of queer death to serve the other characters or for shock value.
Punish Your Characters for Being Assholes, not for Being Gay
The Hays Code demanded that gay characters be punished for the “crime” of being gay, and the first way that this trope can be subverted is through punishing queer characters, not for being queer, but for being assholes. If a queer character is going to die, they should die because they earned it. Other characters in horror movies earn their deaths. The straight couple sneaks out in the middle of the night to have sex, breaking curfew. The jock bullies the weaker kid. The prom queen excludes the frumpy protagonist from fun activities. When a straight character dies in a horror movie, they almost always deserve it.
One example of queer characters whose death is not earned is in 2025’s Weapons. (spoilers for Weapons ahead). Only five characters die in the movie, and three of them are terrible people. The villain deserves to die, no doubt about it. The corrupt cop cheating on his wife gets his comeuppance, and the thief and addict who only cares about himself is carelessly dispatched without a word. The only two characters who don’t “earn” their death are the principal and his husband. The principal’s greatest sin is naiveté, and his husband has no faults at all, and yet their deaths are two of the most brutal in the film, the camera lingering on their shattered skulls and spilled brains. Their deaths were not earned, and so it feels like a rehashing of this decades-old trope.
Two horror stories of recent years do well in punishing their queer characters for being assholes instead of for being gay. Freaky (2020), directed by out gay filmmaker Christopher Landon, includes a queer death that is fully deserved. The only queer character who dies in the movie is killed immediately after he assaults and then threatens another character. The comeuppance is swift, as he’s pierced through the eyeball by the killer’s hook. He was not punished for being queer; he was punished for being unable to keep his hands to himself, and that’s a message we can all get behind.
Similarly, Chuck Tingle’s most recent queer horror novel, Lucky Day includes queer characters that run the gamut of good to evil to everything in between. If queer characters die, they do not die because they are queer, they die because they are evil, and this is made increasingly clear as the novel progresses, and when gay guy finally does have his head bashed in (in a shockingly similar way to one of the queer characters in Weapons), we all breathe a sigh of relief that he’s gone.
If Queer Characters are Going to Die, Others Should Survive
A second way that the bury your gays trope can be subverted is by ensuring that, if queer characters die, other queer characters survive. If a movie or book ends, and all the queer characters are six feet under, and the straight characters are moving on with their lives in a world free of any homosexuality, then the message has been sent that the world is a better place without those pesky gays. If queer characters dying is a necessity, then the audience should be shown that queer characters living is also a necessity.
While the aforementioned closeted jock in Freaky gets his brains skewered by the movie’s killer, another queer character ends the movie alive and well and happily reunited with his friends. It’s almost refreshing if you’re used to gay characters dying unceremoniously for the sake of the straight lead. A gay teenager gets to live his life, traumatized by the slaughterhouse that was his high school, sure, but ultimately happy.
Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White also subverts the bury your gays trope by allowing many queer characters to survive. Some queer characters die, which seems like a necessity in a world where a LGBTQ+ youth group becomes a paramilitary monster hunting squad, but by the end, White leaves us with a world where queer people exist and get to live happily ever after (or at least as happily ever after as one can live in an apocalypse as a half-angel trans kid).
If queer characters are going to die, the world left over should not be one with only straight cisgender people. Queer characters should be shown to the audience alive, happy (or at least as happy as everyone else), and surviving.
Queer Characters should be Fully Realized and Necessary
Finally, if queer characters are going to die, they should die as fully realized people. Too often, queer characters only exist in media for representations’ sake. They serve no purpose other than to signal to the audience “we have gays here.” In Halloween Kills, a gay couple are introduced (according to Bloody Disgusting, the franchise’s first queer characters). However, they serve little purpose other than to show that gay people exist in this universe, and they die as side characters who may as well have been a straight couple. Similarly, in Weapons, the inclusion of the gay couple serves very little purpose. We know nothing about the principal’s husband other than the fact that he is a happy gay man who eats too many hot dogs. This lack of development makes his death a few minutes later feel unearned, and he may as well have been the principal’s doting wife.
Spread Me by Sarah Gailey and Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle are strong examples of horror stories in which queer characters exist but do not exist merely for representation’s sake. The queer characters in both novels are fully realized, 3-dimensional, and real, and, when some of them die, they die to serve a purpose in the story. The characters are queer, but they’re also aloof, secretive, slutty, murderous, nonchalant, and annoying. They exist as characters as developed as any of the unending number of straight characters that horror movies and books love.
These characters are also queer for a reason. In Spread Me, once the scientist main characters begin to turn on each other, their queerness adds to the chaos, as almost all of them had slept with each other at some point. Without that key plot point, the novella’s plot would not be the same. Similarly, the queerness of Lucky Day’s characters is integral to the plot, and the story would not remain the same were everyone to be straight. These characters do not just exist as queer to add representation in an otherwise straight world. They exist as part of the fabric to the story as fully realized characters.
Conclusion
So whether you’re an author and ally looking to add some queerness to your gorefest, a queer storyteller looking to tell authentic queer stories of dismemberment and death, or simply a connoisseur of horror looking to think critically about representation, be on the lookout for the bury your gays trope and how that trope can and should be subverted in media. It is possible to tell queer stories that are authentic, fully realized, and fulfilling, even if someone occasionally loses a head or two.
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Dr. Maxwell Folkman (they/he) is an author, educator, and researcher from Milwaukee, WI. Their fiction work appears in Smitten Land, Nonbinary Review, and Flash Phantoms. In their free time, they enjoy going for walks, reading comic books, and writing.