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ohmage_resistance 's review for:

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
dark hopeful medium-paced
Yeah, I was hoping to like this one and the ending would bring it together, but that did not happen. The parts that I liked were the horror and flashbacks/exploration of being gay and closeted as a child. The rest of this review is going to be a rant, because the themes totally didn't come together for me in the way I would like, and if there's something I'm willing to talk about at length, it's queer representation.

I'll just start out that first person present tense was a kind of annoying tense to read a book in, and the themes were about as subtle as an ax to the face, which is honestly to be expected from Tingle. That wasn't really my problem with the themes, though. My problem with it is for a book that's really about homophobic tropes, this book is deeply uninterested in actually critically examining why they exist. Seeing tropes only as pattern recognition without putting deeper thought into why they exist besides
" the algorithm" is deeply ironic for a book also about the flaws of AI (writers have intent, AIs don’t, humans are capable of analyzing the intent of the work/the reason why it exists or is written that way, AIs can only pattern recognition their way to something that sounds right, if I understand them correctly. So why is the book acting like an AI that's interested in patterns but not the reasons why certain tropes happen, which is the exact thing it's criticizing in other ways). It also doesn't make sense, because this sort of social bias being perpetuated comes from the data it was being trained on—so it's really human queerphobia, at the end of the day.


So my question the entire book was "ok, why does bury your gays exist? Hayes Code isn’t mentioned? Why is burying gays so profitable? Who are the people enjoying it? Why does TV tropes did a better job exploring this than a 300 page book literally called "Bury Your Gays". I wasn't expecting a full history lesson, but  Hayes Code isn’t even mentioned once. The plan of the villains is literally Step one: kill off queer characters/people, Step 2: ????, Step Three: PROFIT!!! That's not very meaningful commentary. And no amount of "gay people need happy endings too!" (white true) was really going to make up for that for me. I think it was because Tingle wanted to blame corporate greed for homophobic tropes to the point where he is straight up ignoring the audience of these works and the role they play in shaping what's popular. Honestly, like, the only factor explored in this book that influenced the popularity/profitability of a trope was
literally an awards speech by the main character, which is not how tropes or awards speeches work.


And then when the book actually does say about "Bury Your Gays" I don't think is very interesting. It's a shallow Tumblr level take, a basic “we just need a diversity of stories (both queer joy and queer tragedy), that will solve all the problems”, and I hate it. Like, yeah, we do need a diversity of queer stories, but no amount of diversity in storytelling will fix the "bury your gays" trope or shallow corporate pride depictions of queer characters. It'll hopefully just make people less dependent on those shallow representations, but it won't make those stories individually any more meaningful. The problem has always been more about what the tropes say rather than how common they are. Like, after the Hayes code era (which was a long time ago), it's never been only queer tragedy that exists. There were also shallow tropes like the Gay Best friend coexisting with queer tragedy, and they still weren't much better.

And if the problem is what the tropes say, reading comprehension is a skill we can use! (Well, until AI ruins that for us too :| Kids these days…I'm a bit worried for them, and I'm saying that as someone not much older than them). We can be capable of analyzing a story to try to tell when creators are killing off queer characters to sweep them under the rug to appease both people who want queer rep and homophobes, when characters who are killed off happen to be queer, when queer stories of tragedy are explored in respectful ways, and when it’s explored in a fetishizing exploitative way. I’m not saying we will all magically agree, but we can look at the evidence and make arguments based off of it. We can have a great diversity of queer stories, some tragic, some joyful, and books that use queer tragedy in exploitative queerphobic ways will still be a problem. 

It also tried to address corporate pride, which I also think it was pretty unsuccessful at. On showing how cringe it could be, yes, it was very successful. (
The "Queeroes" poster or whatever it was hurt my soul, and my identity wasn't even included in it!
) But as deeper commentary, well, the one measure of representation that actually mattered in this book was big mainstream media corporations. There wasn't much recognition of indie media or other ways to find representation, which is what you actually need to counteract the dependance on large media corporations/Corporate Pride. Like, this book itself is a product of Corporate Pride in a way, as a Very Gay (TM) book published by a big five publisher with a decent amount of marketing. And for all the poking fun of the way that the Over The Top Shallow Gay Executive Stereotype that
the AI came up with
, I couldn't help notice that Tara spent the entire book unironically talking the exact same way. IDK, Corporate Pride is a bit of a spectrum, and this isn't the worst I've seen, but you know, I think it's far enough along that spectrum that I don't think it could critique it in a way I would find very effective.

Speaking of Tara, if you know anything about me, you probably know I'm pretty passionate about asexual and aromantic representation, so I have thoughts about Tara. She definitely read like she was written by someone who wanted to be supportive to a-spec people but didn't really have good knowledge of the issues or perspectives a lot of a-spec people have, which was definitely compounded by this book having a limited understanding of representation.

I've seen someone describe the aro ace character in this book (Tara) as a gay ace best friend for a gay man, and I was shocked at how well that description held up. Like, literally, at one point in the book, there's an over the top walking stereotype of a gay man, and the audio narrator’s voice for him is pretty much the same as Tara’s voice, because they were written the same way. And this is where, if you're thinking, oh, the only problem with queer representation is certain stereotypical tropes can be come too common, this isn't a problem (Tara being a nerdy hacker is the more stereotypical part of her character). These gay male mannerisms and role in the plot aren't super often associated with a-spec characters, so there must be no problem here, right? Well no, because the gay best friend trope is bad writing and homophobic for more than just being a stereotype, but for the way that it's shallow inclusion, for the queer character only having role in the story of being a nonthreatening supportive best friend who is living for another/giving life/relationship advice while being distant enough to not be too clingy, the fact that they aren't allowed to have a serious life or relationships outside of how they relate to the MC, for the way that their friendships are lopsided to be more about the MC because they should just be lucky to have a friend because they can’t openly get a romantic partner, so they better be happy with this consolation prize. And like, all of that was still the case here, and it was still a problem when applied to the aro ace Tara as when it's applied to a gay male character. It was also wild to me because the last book I read with an a-spec best friend character was Siobhan from The Tales that Twines who literally fit some similar tropes as Tara (Siobhan was interested in fashion and gave out relationship advice to the MC (literally e was the priestex of the god of interpersonal relationships, giving relationship advice was pretty much eir job)),  Siobhan was much better rep than Tara because e had a life outside of how e related to the MC, had character development, had a variety of characteristics that had nothing to do with stereotypical stuff, was allowed to actually have a relationship with the MC that had some conflict at times, and was actually well written. The Tale that Twines also had multiple a-spec characters who played different roles in the story, but that wasn’t the reason why I’ll remember Siobhan for a long time and the only reason I’ll remember Tara (if I remember her at all) is because she annoyed me so much. Anyway, this is why a shallow understanding of representation creates problems. It’s not just about tropes, it’s about an ability to analyze a story.

I really get the feeling allos find the framework of "asexuals are invisible" appealing, and also some a-specs like it as well, but, IDK, I think it's such a shallow message if you just leave it at that? Part of me is annoyed because I have spent literal years of my life reading and creating lists of asexual and aromantic representation to fight the narrative that we don’t have any, because we do have quite a lot when you start looking, but no one is going to look for something that they don't think exists. I will be fair though, this was pointing out mainstream TV representation, which yeah, there’s not a lot of ace representation there. But there is some, not literally none like there's portrayed in the book. IRL, there would probably be like 1 actual ace character in a show that no one heard of that got canceled or a really minor character who's asexuality was super easy to miss, 1 character that was confirmed by a writer or an actor or something, and 1 educational sex ed character from most major media corporations (exceptionally good or bad representation does exist as well (shoutout to BoJack Horseman for good rep, and shame on House for bad rep). And I see about just much complaining from a-spec people about most of those being unsatisfying or poorly written as I do about there not being enough a-spec representation. And, I feel like a lot of a-spec people would actually say that it's better to have no representation than really really bad representation (especially considering how bad that one episode of House was, where in one of the first major cases of an asexual character on screen, a genius TV doctor literally proves that anyone who says that they're asexual is either sick or lying). But of course, the book doesn't really get into any of this, because this isn't really how people, especially allos, tend to think about asexual representation. And the most thorough examination of representation done in this book is like, "x trope being too common is bad" which means that literally any representation for a-spec people must be better than none/very little, right? Which is again, pretty shallow and not how I've seen most a-spec people talk about representation. (I also want to note it didn't get into how fandom responses to gay/lesbian coded characters can also be rife with amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality, because of course it wouldn't. The a-spec community and the gay community are best friends that always get along, right?)


I find it really funny that asexuality is highlighted more than aromanticism several times in the book (aro is really only mentioned pretty much sometimes along with/almost as a subsection of asexuality...), because
aromanticism is more invisible than asexuality and asexuality has actually started to get token inclusion. Not that I think token inclusion is really that meaningful itself, but yeah, if you're going to make a point about invisibility.


For all this complaining, I don't think this is a bad book, it just really wasn't thinking about representation in a way that I would find interesting. I'd recommend this if you want to read a book with a lot of love for horror and queer stories, and you don't tend to microanalyze representation in the same way I do.

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