Bury Your Gays

This short film, directed and written by Charlotte Serena Cooper, is not only an enjoyable story but also an encapsulation of an important queer struggle conveyed masterfully. 

Following queer actress Grace, Bury Your Gays is a terrific satire narrating her inability to survive in her queer roles. Time after time, characters she plays are killed off. In a constant battle against her directors and producers, she has become increasingly frustrated. Why do her queer roles never get happy endings? In fact, why don’t any queer stories seem to end with a fulfilling romantic outcome? Grace questions the harshness of the Bury Your Gays trope, just as many viewers, authors and critics of film and TV have, as it has been increasingly investigated in recent years.

The film grounds itself within queer culture, depicting a clear awareness of the evolution of queer cinema, from the New Queer Cinema wave of the 1990s to the later queer classics. The film presents its cultural awareness through humorous, ironic references, such as a direct callback to Brokeback Mountain, to intensify the film’s point that queer characters are doomed to have tragic endings (we all know how that one ends). 

The opening to Bury Your Gays is skilfully gripping. After suffering one of her on-screen deaths, which is convincing as a story within a story, Grace enters a peculiar void inhabited by a captivating agent played by T’Nia Miller. Miller’s character is a personification of the way viewers perceive the Bury Your Gays trope. The Agent offers hope to queer actors, just as audiences have hope in the queer characters they see on screen, only to hit them with an ‘Oh well, try again next time!’ when the characters reach their eventual demise. This brings to life the constant struggle of queer viewership, as audiences fall in love with characters and ships, only to have their happy ending taken away from them, yet they continuously view queer stories in the hope that this will change.

Grace is given nine lives and is told by the agent she must find a role in which she does not die. She travels to each role through a fantastical portal within the void. Each storyline is brief and vague; however, they are full of contextual cues that viewers can easily immerse themselves in each world that is created, and the punchline at the end of them never loses its impact.

As Bury Your Gays highlights, the film industry for years has excluded queer stories due to the Hayes Code, and as representation has increased, queer characters continuously end up dying off. This short film, by enacting this trope, actually manages to subvert it by taking the tragedy out of the deaths. By using comedy, Bury Your Gays invents a new mechanism of killing queer characters, highlighting the injustice this poses. Whilst being very on the nose, Bury Your Gays still works due to its reliance on satire and breaking of the fourth wall. It is a film about infuriating queer tropes in films, with these exact tropes involved in the story, whilst also offering its own story of progression and abandonment of stereotypes.

Bury Your Gays marks the start of a new era. Recently, queer films such as Bottoms and Red, White and Royal Blue have struck the film industry with a new kind of queer storytelling, depicting queer joy rather than, as has been continuously done so beforehand, queer suffering. Although these happier, optimistic films are unfathomably outnumbered by their tragic predecessors, Bury Your Gays presents an outlook which provides queer characters the option of being happy, whilst acknowledging and honouring the past. All the while, the film never misses a beat. Bury Your Gays is full of comedic twists, well-rounded characters and an engaging script. As well as this, the film’s use of several different settings and costumes brings an exciting, satisfying look to the film, one which encapsulates viewers as they follow along a touching, uplifting, and critical story.