Every trope has an origin story.
Welcome to The Queue — your every day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the net. Today, we’re watching a video essay that explores the origins of the “bury your gays” cinematic trope.
Unfortunately, very similar to real life, sure demographics in movie have traditionally been thought of “more expendable” than others. For a very long time, this included queer characters.
The nuances of this expendability have shifted over time, reacting to all the things from human rights victories to the AIDS epidemic, to modifications in public opinion. From “deviant” queer-coded characters whose deaths are performed for laughs to melodramatic “gayngst-induced suicides,” for a great deal of cinema’s historical past, being queer on-screen was a demise sentence.
It should be mentioned: issues have modified. To the purpose the place there’s even a “preserve your gays” trope, which as its title suggests, goes out of its method to make sure that queer characters survive.
But the place did the “bury your gays” cinematic trope start? What half did the Hayes Code play in its proliferation? And what can the trope’s origins inform us about how we inform queer tales in the present day? Here’s a super-sized video essay that digs into it:
Watch “Where the ‘Bury Your Gays’ Trope Came From?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRyi-e_HTc
Who made this?
This video essay concerning the origins of the “bury your gays” trope in movie is by James Somerton, a Toronto-based video essayist who makes movies about “mostly queer stuff” (hell yeah). You can subscribe to Somerton on YouTube here. And you’ll be able to observe them on Twitter (I’m not going to name it “X”), here.
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Related Topics: LGBTQ, The Queue
Meg has been writing professionally about all issues film-related since 2016. She is a Senior Contributor at Film School Rejects in addition to a Curator for One Perfect Shot. She has attended worldwide movie festivals comparable to TIFF, Hot Docs, and the Nitrate Picture Show as a member of the press. In her day job as an archivist and information supervisor, she usually works with bodily media and is dedicated to making sure ongoing bodily media accessibility within the digital age. You can discover extra of Meg’s work at Cinema Scope, Dead Central, and Nonfics. She has additionally appeared on various film-related podcasts, together with All the President’s Minutes, Zodiac: Chronicle, Cannes I Kick It?, and Junk Filter. Her work has been shared on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, Business Insider, and CherryPicks. Meg has a B.A. from the University of King’s College and a Master of Information diploma from the University of Toronto.
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