A year ago today, Lexa was killed off on The 100, sparking fury and outrage like TV had not seen in a long time.
Lexa Deserved Better
This December, I was having dinner with some friends in Philly and one mentioned she’d never felt that hurt before. Here was a relationship, Clarke and Lexa, where everything was set against them. They had to be on opposite sides of a war for their people, they had to make choices to put themselves second. And yet, against all the odds, it was clear they did have feelings for each other and they somehow managed to struggle back to where they were both in a safe place and could start stepping into a relationship.
And then Lexa was shot and killed by a bullet meant for Clarke.
Every single Buffy fan screamed. We’d seen it with Tara, after all. But for a lot of fans, especially younger than my cough 40-ish, this was their first experience with seeing queer women in love ripped apart like that. They found themselves faced with the cold hard truth that they’d been played by The 100 and by Jason Rothenberg. They had been promised beautiful things, and they were hurt so badly that the fan community had to immediately post suicide-hotline numbers.
But it’s just a show!
It was just a show. But it was a show that, for the first time, had a bisexual woman as the main character on young adult marketed product. It was a show that gave young people hope that maybe their future wasn’t to be hated. I find it unsurprising that teen suicides among queers has dropped since gay marriage was legalized in the United States. We’re human beings. We crave acceptance and feeling loved.
And when we turn around and see ourselves dying in every single television representation…
Tracy said we have to stop grasping at the crumbs. We have to demand better. We deserve better.
Yes, it’s just a show, but it’s endemic of our world, where women who love women aren’t allowed to be happy.
Share Bury Your Queers
When I started working on this site, I knew I wanted to have a way that people could show solidarity with the pain these deaths have caused. I can write and write all I want about how being given a little hope and having it yanked away is damaging. I can talk to my friends about television rarely shows queer people with happy endings. I can make an entire website that documents, lists, codifies, and demonstrates that it’s safer to be on the Titanic than to be a lesbian on TV.
We aren’t the only site out there tracking queer females on TV. LGBT Fans Deserve Better has a TV Database. But there’s something I can do here that a lot of other people can’t. I can also make it easier for you to say you see this problem too.
If you have a WordPress site and you want to show people that a disproportional amount of queer females die on TV, if you want to list the last dead, or if you want to know who’s died today in years past, we have a way for you to do that.
Bury Your Queers is a WordPress Plugin. Go to your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Plugins, add a new plugin. Search for “Bury Your Queers” and install it.
Once activated, you can put a widget on your site to show the most recently killed queer female on TV, or if you want to remember who died on March 3rd….
[lez-watch data=”on-this-day” date-format=”03-03″]
You can do that too.
We Deserve Better
39 queer females died in 2016. To date, 16% of all queer females on TV have died.
Things need to change.
As humans, we deserve some happy endings. We deserve to see ourselves reflected in the media of the world in a positive light.
We deserve better.
