Sexual minorities. They’re everywhere. You can’t escape them. Especially in today’s media, which seems to be getting more and more progressive with each passing day (but I’m not complaining!). However, despite the ever-growing emergence of new queer media, there are always hurtful tropes and harmful portrayals of LGBTQ+ people. Or, media that centers queer characters simply won’t run for more than a single season before being canceled. It seems we can never truly have fulfilling representations of ourselves on screens. There’s always some kind of critique to be made. The representation specifically of sapphics (non-men loving non-men) in media tends to be a hot topic of discussion and critique among the queer community due to prevalent tropes such as “bury your gays,” the violent lesbian/sapphic, and the more frequent cancellation of shows featuring and/or centering around sapphic characters.
The “bury your gays” trope is far from new, it’s been stealing fan-favorite queer characters right out from under them for decades. To put it simply, “bury your gays” is a trope that involves the queer (usually sapphic) characters in a TV show or movie being killed off at some point within the duration of the film. Some examples are Rachel from The Sandman, Sissy Cooper from The Umbrella Academy, Villanelle from Killing Eve, and the list goes on. This trope depraves sapphic characters of having the chance to live the full lives they deserve and presents only one ending for sapphics: death. It also gives sapphic people the representation we so desperately crave, but only briefly before it’s gruesomely pried right out of our hands.
The violent lesbian/sapphic also has a long drawn-out history, which was briefly touched on in the Celluloid Closet and continues to exist to this day. This trope is likely to have been a product of the Hays Code, which only permitted queerness on screen if it was “violent” or “evil.” Since then, we’ve seen this trope manifest in several different ways, including the sapphics in unhealthy relationships who fight each other and the depraved, almost manic sapphic with an uncontrollable urge for violence. Some examples of the first one are Jim an Sapphics d Archie from Our Flag Means Death and Princess Bubblegum and Marceline in Fiona and Cake, and, once again, Villanelle from Killing Eve as the second example of the trope. Obviously, this is a harmful portrayal of queer people as it projects an image that sapphics are obsessed with violence and hurting each other and others. There’s been a trend on TikTok that pushes the idea that cannibalism is a sapphic love language, and while I do think it’s often a silly little joke between sapphics, it could be used to manipulate the image of sapphics if it fell into the wrong hands.
as a love language
Then there’s the fact that only a small minority of shows that feature sapphic characters make it past a season. I can name so many, but I’ll only name a few for your sake: Everything Sucks, I Am Not Okay With This, First Kill, A League of Their Own, Willow, etc, etc. This one makes me the most angry because it feels like we can never get our hopes up when a good sapphic show is released. It’s bound to be canceled!! In contrast, shows with gay male characters, such as Young Royals or Heartstopper, seem to have way higher rates of success and renewal. I think this could be because gay men are fetishized within fandom spaces by cishet women, and they have the support of the general queer community as well because we like to see ourselves represented (duh!). Whereas sapphic representation is mostly celebrated among ourselves, so we don’t get nearly as much attention and praise in fandoms.
Prevalence of cancellations for sapphic shows VS.
Great work! I love the sources you've been able to find to accentuate your writing.
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