The history of lesbian representation on television is rocky — in the beginning, we seemed exclusively relegated to roles that saw us getting killed/attacked or doing the killing/attacking. And until the last five or so years, lesbian and bisexual characters seemed entirely unable to date an actual woman or stay alive for more than three episodes, let alone an entire run, of a show. Gay and lesbian characters are so often murdered on television that we have our very own trope: Bury Your Gays. We comprise such a teeny-tiny fraction of characters on television to begin with that killing us off so haphazardly feels especially cruel.
When I first saw this headline it was 65. The number keeps climbing. That’s fucked up.
Now it’s up to 108 (the headline says 103 but I counted them). Like any good psychologist, I had to graph the data. I coded them (very roughly as I haven’t seen the majority of the shows) based on the method used to kill off the character, and whether the death was murder, suicide, accidental, or illness related. I don’t have non-lesbian/bi characters to compare these numbers to, but here is what the raw data looks like:
Gunshots, whether accidental or on purpose, are the leading cause of death for lesbian and bisexual characters.
Roughly 64% of the characters were murdered.
I also noticed a disturbing trend of deaths that were due to their orientation, such as characters dying because they came out to someone who reacted badly and it caused an accident, or due to jealous exes (or exes of their same-gender lovers) murdering them/causing accidents. Together these made up 16% of all deaths. Two other themes I noticed were pregnancy-related deaths and death just after a major happy moment for the character.
