The meaning behind Bury Your Gays' title becomes clear as soon as oily Harold Bros. executive Jack Hays orders protagonist Misha to do the bidding of the algorithm for the sake of his streaming TV show and kill off two lesbian characters. Author Chuck Tingle is commenting on the cynical use of queer representation in entertainment, especially on streaming television: characters are flaunted for brownie points, then casually discarded when they've served their purpose. But the "bury your gays" trope, in which queer characters are more likely to die than their straight counterparts, has been around for much longer than the likes of Netflix, and these character deaths have been motivated by many different factors.

For a long time, if gay characters were shown at all in film or television, it was as a villain, monster, or general person of ill-repute. The Hays Code, which censored Hollywood from the early 1930s to the mid-'60s, forbid the portrayal of homosexuality as anything other ...