Dead Gays Dying

[erastes]

Whilst I don't like the automatic "I already know the ending before I start out" habit that is the HEA (as hypocritical as that sounds, seeing as how I write romance) I also baulk at the Dead Gay Syndrome which flowers here and there.

Here's a great list "Bring out your Gay Dead" which lists a hell of a lot of them, modern and otherwise from many different media. It has kindly used white text to avoid too many spoilers, so you have to highlight the text to read them.

I could add to this list pretty easily:

The protagonist in A Single Man - once he decides he's going to move on and find love again, he dies of a heart attack.
Richard and Alec in Swordspoint. Although it's pretty clear that they lived and loved to a ripe old age - Kushner has to kill them both off in the short story Death of the Duke.
Trueblood the TV Series: one dead gay vampire (although I guess all vampires are dead), one dead gay cook (although that's not established completely as yet and I'm hoping not) one dead gay boys toy killed by vampires for being treacherous.
Brideshead Revisited - Sebastian is destroyed, if not actually killed off.
Death in Venice. No spoilers there, at least.
Sirius Black.  Yeah yeah.. I know... Leave me some fanfic illusions will you?

I could go on...  How about you? Any more to add?

Other links
http://eddieonfilm.blogspot.com/2006/11/oscars-rules-for-gay-characters.html
http://www.afterelton.com/archive/elton/movies/2006/10/horror2.html

Ps Don't forget The Advent Calendar. There's a competition today!

Comments

[busaikko]

Television miniseries Family Album: shunned gay son and his boyfriend are finally accepted by the family -- only to have tragic car crash on the way home. Boyfriend dies.

Er. And we're not talking about Dumbledore, right?

[erastes.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

DUMBLEDORE!! Yes!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

AND Grindelwald--imprisoned in solitary from 1945 till 1998, when Voldemort tortured and killed him. For all intents and purposes, Grindelwald was buried alive for fifty-three years.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Bad gays! Bad!

[the-sea-to.livejournal.com]

Sweetie - cannot see the Advent calendar for today yet!
xxx

[erastes.livejournal.com]

WHOOPS.

It would help if i uploaded it, wouldn't it....

[the-sea-to.livejournal.com]

also... dead gays: DUMBLEDORE!!!!

xxxx

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

Strange Meeting, Susan Hill. Several characters in the Pat Barker Trilogy. (Although as these are set in WWI that tends to rack up the body count.)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, a war doesn't help!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Don't forget A Song of Ice and Fire. Loras Tyrell and Renly Baratheon were lovers. Renly was murdered by dark magic. Loras was burned over most of his body the last book (disfiguring him horribly in the process) and was not expected to survive.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

God yes, forgot about them!

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I swear, one of the reasons I adore Swordspoint so much is that they DON'T die horribly at the end of it -- they wind up TOGETHER. Parts of The Privilege of the Sword tear my HEART out for the same reason. But I still maintain that one of the most beautiful sentences in the world is "I've brought us some fish."

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I don't know why Alec and Richard touch me so very deeply, but they do. They are so real to me and I weep buckets just thinking about them. I don't know if you read The Death of the Duke but I read it for the first time yesterday (or rather, I may have read it before, but it didn't make as much sense until after I'd read TPOTS) and I was incoherent for about 20 minutes afterwards.

the beautiful manservant to an aging Duke (never named) says disbelievingly (when told that the Duke's swordsman killed by blow to the heart ) something like "To the heart? No one bares their heart to the sword."

And the dying Duke pulls him close and whispers, "No. Not no-one."

WAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm crying again just thinking about it.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I DO NOT RE-READ THAT ONE BECAUSE IT MAKES ME CRY. And of course I read it. Before Swordspoint was re-released with the short stories in it at the back, I tracked down the various anthologies that had the Riverside short stories in them, so I could read them.

And oh yes, Alec and Richard are so very, very real. And stubborn and stiff-necked and infuriating and WAAAAAAH. Because they love each other SO much. And Alec so needy, and Richard so guarded, and the two of them together so perfect.

why, yes, their dynamic had something to do with Severus and Evan. How not?

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Love! Valour! Compassion!. Two of the eight are dying of AIDS, and there's a scene where the rest talk about their deaths (most far in the future, heart attacks on the sofa watching TV and plane crashes)

Road warrior one of Humungous' biker gang has a pretty collared boytoy riding pillion. Boytoy dies for no other reason than to demonstrate the lethality of the Feral Kid's boomerang.

From IMDB:
Wez: They kill us, we kill them! Kill them! Kill them! Kill! Kill!
The Humungus: Be still my dog of war. I understand your pain. We've all lost someone we love. But we do it my way! We do it my way. Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. Then you shall have your revenge.


Julian May's Pliocene & Milieu sagas. While she writes any number of gay characters and creates a future in which gay marriage is considered normal, she has a tendency to kill her gay characters:
Gert and Hansi, minor characters. Killed in a raid. We see them through the course of the story, but not much.

Stefanko, gay. Killed by a wild boar. We only see him dead.

Luc Remillard and Kenneth MacDonald. All we see is their wedding. They are very minor characters. Luc was multiply handicapped at birth from bad genetics. Both are secondary to their more powerful and interesting siblings.

Felice Landry and Amarie. Unable to be lovers (Amarie is a nun). Felice becomes psychic, goes insane, kills Amarie and end up contained in a ruby and buried under the Straight of Gibralter.

Johnny. A riverboat pilot. Felice kills him.

Diane Duane's Wizards series.
Tom and Carl, senior advisor wizards to our young heroes, are coded as gay. It's YA, so they can't be blatent. I haven't read past the fourth book, so I don't know if they survive the series.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Goodness, that's a lot of dead!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

As of the most recent book, Wizards at War, Tom and Carl were still living together happily, and being wonderful role models and guides for young wizards.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Ah good. Must have been a bit of fanfic I got wrapped around the reviews of later books.

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

Archie Kennedy. WAH! (yes, yes, not canon, but definitely Hornblower's One True Love.)

And there's always Jack Harkness, but he's the orignal "you can't keep a good man down."

[erastes.livejournal.com]

That's cheating in both instances, but I like the way you think!

[haydenthorne.livejournal.com]

Just about every book I reviewed for Speak Its Name.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

*laughs* yes so true!

[crawling-angel.livejournal.com]

How about if they were both dead from Chapter 2 onewards, lol?

[erastes.livejournal.com]

well, if like Reg Shoe they just continued on with the plot, it probably doesn't count!!

:)

[tharain.livejournal.com]

I HATE THE DEAD HOMO TROPE SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH. OH. MY. GOD. BRAIN. EXPLODING.

This is why robingf and I refused to go to Brokeback. We both agreed: Hollywood has made this film for decades, and I don't care how sympathetic it is, it's the same fucking movie.

This is why all my gayboys are REQUIRED to live HEA. 'Ceptin' Nat, of course, but he's an asshole.

=-D

[essayel.livejournal.com]

A really OLD book. Sword At Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe, about a 5th century warlord called Artos. Two of his warriors are lovers - I read it when I was 12 and it was the first time I'd ever seen any reference to men loving other men. Spoiler below : [hope the whiting out works]


Trapped by the winter far north of Hadrian's Wall, Artos's company are starving and one of the couple [sadly I can't remember their names] takes both's rations and walks out into the snow. They think he has stolen the food, despite his partners protests, but eventually a relief force arrives with food and spare horses and they say the absentee brought word of their plight, then died of gangrene from his frost bitten feet. His lover lasts a few more chapters then dies bravely in battle, obviously not really caring to preserve himself.

[orthent.livejournal.com]

Just passing through, saw this, and couldn't resist adding a couple more:

Carlo from Captain Corelli's Mandolin, who ends up sacrificing himself for Corelli. And Countess Geschwitz from Frank Wedekind's Pandora's Box, who gives up more than anyone else to help and protect Lulu, and gets called a monster by Lulu and killed by Jack the Ripper for her pains.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Adding another dead queer (bisexual) to the list.
Chicago. From "The Cell Block Tango:"

Mona: I loved Al Lipshitz more than I could possibly say. He was a real artistic guy, sensitive, a painter. But he was always trying to find himself. He'd go out every night looking for himself. And on the way, he found Ruth. Gladys. Rosemary. And Irving. I guess you could say we broke up because of artistic differences. He saw himself as alive. And I saw him dead.