when is it considered wrong to have a queer person die in the story? most of my characters are a part of the lgbt community, I'm still deciding what's going to happen to them in the story but a lot of people online say that you shouldn't kill off your gay characters. I was wondering if there any exceptions to this though?
We have a tag with a bit of Bury Your Gays stuff here, but honestly, this is a question we get a lot, and--
The problem with killing your characters isn't killing them, per se. It's refrigerating them.
An unfortunately nonzero percentage of stories with gay characters tend to follow a specific trend:
Gay character is introduced.
Protagonists reap the benefits of gay character. (Media creator reaps the benefits of gay character.)
Gay character no longer serves their aesthetic purpose.
Gay character is killed off.
Death of gay character traumatizes main character and pushes them toward an action.
Gay people are more than just plot devices to be introduced and later discarded when no longer useful, and the fact that is happens most often in the form of killing them also just...isn't great. We already face a disproportionate amount of harm in reality--why would any LGBT person who's reading a new character they relate to want to see that person suddenly murdered for seemingly no reason?
This trope is extremely similar to the "Women in Refrigerators" trope, coined by Gail Simone in 1999, a comics author who realized that a lot of the female characters in comics tended to end up dead.
...Violently. Raped, murdered, cut into pieces, sliced and diced and shoved into a refrigerator, these women served as mere plot devices to motivate a (male) protagonist.
Bury Your Gays is very, very similar, in that it treats gay people just as disposably. Worse, it often happens just after the character in question has had their first kiss/come out/other important moments in exploring their own identity, which undermines that development and, frankly, just doesn't fucking feel good to any gay reader.
But none of this is to say that you shouldn't kill your characters, even if they're gay. I've killed off a lot of queer characters in my time. The difference is that those deaths were actually well-written, significant and properly explored, part of the story in a way that a lot of "disposable" gay characters weren't.
My protagonists felt long-term, agonizing grief at losing their friend/girlfriend/etc. It affected the way they thought and acted about relationships for the rest of their lives. More, the death of that character was natural, part of the story in a way that felt reasonable and realistic. It wasn't unnecessary violence for the sake of shock value, or disposing of a no-longer-useful character; these were people who lived lives for as long as they could and affected the world around them.
All of this is basically to say: Kill any character you want. But think about why you're doing it. What narrative purpose does it serve? If they left another way, would it achieve the same effect? Is it a real, true tragedy, or just death for the sake of drama?
(Although death for the sake of drama isn't necessarily a bad thing either, plenty of stories and genres exist that way (COUGH COUGH: SHAKESPEARE) but when it's only the gay characters experiencing that particular phenomenon--well. That's not so fun, is it?)
