Chuck Tingle probably needs no introduction, although I’ve been surprised. His book will get one. Bury Your Gays is a horror novel that is too long to be a novela, but it’s not long. I hope it will one day be an early Tingle horror, but for now it’s just one of his few traditionally published non-eroticas.
Misha, a successful Hollywood queer horror author, has been ordered to kill his queer coded characters if they have a gay kiss on TV – because of the algorithm, and totally not because of homophobia. When Misha refuses, he is suddenly being targeted by the horrors of his previous work. The guy who wants a light and will kill you if you don’t have one for him, the cute lil lamb that’s actually a demon monster, etc.
I have never been scared by fiction or anything in the horror genre. This isn’t a brag or challenge, although people tend to hear it as one. If I know something isn’t real, then it’s not scary to me. No more, no less. Until this book. I actually had to put it down a few times because I was getting scared. My therapist and husband pointed out a number of probable reasons for this fear (which have nothing to do with the book’s subjective scariness) but I’d like to think that’s because it’s actually scary.
As I read, I thought the horrors would end when the protagonist came out as gay. Being privately semi-out and publicly closeted are clearly a major weight Misha is carrying and being hurt by. Retrospectively, I was supposed to think that. And one minor character shrugging at the helpfulness of coming out was a sign that coming out isn’t the answer. (Especially when the novel’s author wears a sack over his head and uses a pseudonym.)
Coming out and “living your genuine life <3 ” did a huge blow to the evil algorithm that demanded the protagonist bury his gays to start start with. But the homophobic evil was just replaced with a comparably evil rainbow capitalism algorithm that required queer joy… or else.
You want to tackle something as unjoyful as homophobia in your next project? Well the algorithm will tackle you straight into a body cast. As a warning.
What really defeated the evil was adding an ace character to the mix – who wasn’t actually added because she had been there all along. It made the evil algorithm act like a supercomputer trying to divide by zero. They say, “error, does not compute,” and then melt. Or so the Third Doctor’s era of Dr. Who would have me believe supercomputers do. I’ve never actually tried to plug in x/0 into one.
But this isn’t about Dr. Who. This is about diversity. The answer was diversity, not coming out or having queer joy, no matter how necessary those two things were to one character’s happy ending. Those things can’t exist alone. There can’t be any single well done example of representation, because good representation needs to be diverse and that requires differences. The queer joy, the queer horror, the being out, being closeted, and everything in between and outside.