Lesbian representation in media has grown enormously over the past two decades, but the story is more complicated than a simple progress narrative. For much of film and television history, lesbian characters were confined to a narrow set of roles: the predatory villain, the tragic figure destined for suffering, or the titillating spectacle framed for a presumed male audience. While visibility has expanded across scripted TV, streaming platforms, film, reality shows, and even global comics traditions, recurring problems with how lesbian characters are written, filmed, and ultimately treated in their own stories have sparked significant audience backlash and academic scrutiny.
The “Bury Your Gays” Pattern
One of the most persistent complaints about lesbian representation in television is the frequency with which lesbian and bisexual women characters are killed off. The phenomenon has a name widely recognized by audiences and scholars alike: “Bury Your Gays.” The trope describes a pattern in which characters who are sexually or gender diverse are denied happy endings or simply written out of the story through death, often shortly after their identity or relationship is made explicit on screen.1The Journal of Popular Culture. The “Bury your Gays” trope in contemporary television: Generational shifts in production responses to audience dissent The pattern is not limited to lesbian characters, but they have been disproportionately affected, and the repetitiveness of the trope across different shows and networks has made it a flashpoint for public frustration.
What makes “Bury Your Gays” more than a storytelling pet peeve is the context in which it operates. When the overall number of lesbian characters on television is small, each death carries outsized symbolic weight. Killing a straight character in a cast of dozens barely registers as a pattern. Killing one of a handful of lesbian characters across an entire network’s lineup sends a message, whether intended or not, that these stories are disposable. The widespread online commentary reacting to such incidents reflects a genuine public concern about what these narrative choices communicate about the value placed on queer women’s lives and relationships.2The Journal of Popular Culture. The “Bury your Gays” trope in contemporary television: Generational shifts in production responses to audience dissent
Queerbaiting and the Promise That Never Lands
If “Bury Your Gays” is about what happens to lesbian characters who make it on screen, queerbaiting is about the ones who never quite get there. The term describes a practice in which showrunners and writers drop heavy hints of a romantic connection between two women characters, enough to attract and hold a queer audience, without ever making the relationship explicit or canon. The dynamic plays out across both the show itself and the promotional material and interviews surrounding it, creating what scholars describe as an interpretive space between text, paratext, and the broader context of how queer people are represented in media.3Transformative Works and Cultures. Between text, paratext, and context: Queerbaiting and the contemporary media landscape
The CW series Supergirl became one of the most talked-about examples. The show’s writers repeatedly placed the characters Kara and Lena in scenarios that mirrored romantic relationship beats, effectively courting a queer audience while never allowing the relationship to materialize on screen. Fans of the “Supercorp” pairing recognized the pattern and pushed back, using the gaps between broadcast time zones and social media to reclaim a queer narrative they felt the show was deliberately withholding.4PubMed. #Supercorp kissed…or did they?: lesbian fandom and queerbaiting Shows like Rizzoli & Isles and The 100 similarly drew scrutiny, with researchers noting that both noncanonical pairings (where the relationship is never confirmed) and canonically queer narratives (where it is confirmed but then undermined) can exemplify the queerbaiting dynamic.5Transformative Works and Cultures. Between text, paratext, and context: Queerbaiting and the contemporary media landscape
The frustration runs deeper than fans simply wanting their preferred pairing to become canon. At its core, queerbaiting exploits the scarcity of genuine lesbian representation. When almost no shows depict these relationships straightforwardly, the subtext-laden ones become the only game in town, and the audience’s investment in reading queer possibility into the gaps becomes both a survival strategy and a vulnerability that networks can monetize.
How the Camera Sees Lesbian Stories
Even when lesbian relationships make it to the screen unambiguously, the way they are filmed matters. A comparison between two adaptations of the same source novel illustrates the point clearly. Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith was adapted twice: once as a BBC television film directed by Aisling Walsh in 2005, and again as Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden in 2016. Researchers who analyzed both films across dimensions of intimacy, sexuality, betrayal, and narrative closure found that even when a male director consciously attempts to avoid objectifying his subjects, the influence of the male gaze persists. The study concluded that the male-directed version could not fully escape framing the lesbian characters through a lens shaped by heterosexual male desire, while the female-directed version handled the same material with a different visual and emotional register.6Communications in Humanities Research. Male Gaze in Fingersmith: How the Director’s Gender Impacts the Visual and Narrative Style of Cinema about Lesbian
This matters because the majority of mainstream films and television episodes are still directed by men. When lesbian intimacy is filmed primarily for the pleasure or curiosity of a presumed straight male viewer rather than from the perspective of the characters experiencing it, the result is representation that technically exists but does not serve the community it depicts. The difference between a sex scene that treats its characters as subjects with their own desire and one that treats them as objects to be observed is often immediately legible to the audience, even when it is hard to articulate in formal terms. Director gender is not the only variable at play, but the research suggests it is a significant one that shapes how lesbian stories feel on screen.
Fan Communities as a Force for Change
The audience has not been passive through any of this. One of the defining features of lesbian media representation in the 2010s and beyond is the role that organized fan communities have played in pressuring the industry to do better. After the death of a prominent lesbian character on The 100 in 2016, the fan response went beyond the usual cycle of online outrage. Researchers studying the aftermath found that fans organized what amounted to a social movement, using Twitter and Tumblr to challenge the television industry’s treatment of women-loving-women characters. The response was analyzed through a lens of communitarian ethics, with fans articulating obligations of duty and mutuality: if a show invites queer viewers in, it owes them something better than watching the characters they identify with die.7PubMed. Bury Your Gays and Social Media Fan Response: Television, LGBTQ Representation, and Communitarian Ethics
That particular backlash had measurable downstream effects. It contributed to the creation of industry resources tracking queer character deaths, pressured showrunners to publicly account for their creative choices, and helped shift the conversation from whether lesbian characters should appear on screen at all to what kinds of stories they deserve. The fan movement around The 100 is frequently cited as a turning point in how the television industry thinks about its responsibilities to marginalized audiences, even if the actual pace of change has been uneven.
Who Gets Left Out
Even as lesbian visibility has increased, the characters who get the spotlight remain narrow in demographic terms. One of the most striking gaps is age. Older lesbians, particularly those over sixty, are almost entirely absent from mainstream film and television, and when they do appear, their stories tend to follow a bleak template. Research examining the depiction of old lesbians across a range of films found that these characters are trapped at the intersection of multiple forms of cultural otherness: female gender, lesbian sexuality, and old age, all within a society oriented toward heterosexuality and youth. Their storylines almost invariably center on illness, death, mourning, and widowhood, producing what scholars describe as a “ghosted” presence: technically visible but stripped of community, joy, or future.8PubMed. Ghosted images: old lesbians on screen
The problem extends beyond age. Lesbian characters of color, disabled lesbian characters, and those from working-class backgrounds remain underrepresented relative to their real-world prevalence. A study of French-language scripted series on Canadian streaming platforms found that while there has been a genuine trend toward including sexual, gender, and racial diversity, non-normative characters are still qualitatively marginalized, mostly relegated to supporting roles rather than leading the story.9SAGE Journals (Convergence). Streaming Diversité: Exploring representations within French-language scripted series on Canadian SVOD services The pattern suggests that the industry has gotten more comfortable including diverse characters as part of the ensemble without yet being willing to build entire narratives around them. Presence in the background is not the same thing as centrality to the story.
Reality Television as an Unlikely Pioneer
Scripted television and film get most of the critical attention, but reality TV has arguably done more to normalize queer visibility in everyday viewing than any prestige drama. From early seasons of Big Brother through competition shows and docuseries, unscripted programming has been one of the most prolific spaces for gay, lesbian, and otherwise queer representation. Scholars have argued that the specific conventions of reality TV, its emphasis on emotional authenticity, its investment in personal revelation, and its celebrity-making machinery, have shaped how queer people become visible in ways that scripted media cannot easily replicate.10Springer Link / Palgrave Macmillan. Reality TV and Queer Identities: Sexuality, Authenticity, Celebrity
The argument is counterintuitive because reality TV is often dismissed as exploitative or shallow. But the genre’s obsession with authenticity, with participants being their “real selves,” creates a framework where being queer is just another dimension of being genuine rather than a narrative problem to be solved. A lesbian contestant on a dating show or a competition series is not a metaphor or a plot device. She is a person whose sexuality is part of her story in the same way any other contestant’s background is part of theirs. The research challenges the popular assumption that reality TV is a damaging space for queer representation, arguing instead that it has pioneered a form of queer-inclusive broadcasting where authenticity, rather than heterosexuality, is the baseline expectation.11Springer Link / Palgrave Macmillan. Reality TV and Queer Identities: Sexuality, Authenticity, Celebrity
The Global Spread Through Yuri and Beyond
Lesbian media representation is not exclusively a Western phenomenon, and one of the most interesting cross-cultural developments is the global spread of yuri, a Japanese term for narratives centered on love between women. Within Japan, the definition of yuri has been debated and evolved over decades. But once the concept crossed borders, something interesting happened: overseas audiences adopted the term to mean any narrative of love, whether romantic, sexual, or intimate, between women, without needing the definitional debates that surround it in its country of origin.12Transformative Works and Cultures. On Defining Yuri – Section: Yuri overseas
The spread has been bidirectional. Non-Japanese creators who want to tell their own lesbian stories have drawn on yuri as a framework and a label, with European comics anthologies of lesbian romance tagging themselves as yuri without further explanation.13Transformative Works and Cultures. On Defining Yuri – Section: Yuri overseas This cross-pollination is significant because it means that lesbian media is not developing along a single Western trajectory. Creators and audiences in different cultural contexts are borrowing from each other, building shared vocabularies, and producing work that does not neatly fit into any one national tradition. The result is a richer and more varied media landscape for stories about women who love women, even if much of it remains outside mainstream visibility in any given country.
Lesbian Spaces in Music and Audio Culture
Media representation does not begin and end with screens. The women’s music movement of the 1970s and 1980s created an entire parallel infrastructure of festivals, concerts, and touring circuits that served as both entertainment and community organizing for lesbian and queer women. Researchers have used archival materials, including tour schedules, concert flyers, and personal correspondence from musicians like Alix Dobkin, to reconstruct these often impermanent cultural spaces. The records reveal not just a performance circuit but a network of feminist bookstores, women’s centers, and community venues that served as gathering points for lesbian culture in an era when mainstream media offered almost nothing.14Taylor & Francis Online (J Lesbian Stud). Off the beats and track: Finding historical lesbian and queer women’s feminist spaces through musicians’ tour schedules, concert flyers, and correspondence
These spaces were not free of internal conflict. Dobkin’s papers, for example, offer insight into debates within lesbian communities about anti-racist politics, ethical consumption, community organizing, and the deeply contentious question of transgender inclusion and exclusion.15Taylor & Francis Online (J Lesbian Stud). Off the beats and track: Finding historical lesbian and queer women’s feminist spaces through musicians’ tour schedules, concert flyers, and correspondence The women’s music movement is a reminder that “media” is broader than what arrives through a screen. For decades, live performance and the DIY distribution networks surrounding it were the primary media through which many lesbians encountered reflections of their own lives. The decline of dedicated women’s music festivals and the migration of community organizing online has changed the form but not the underlying need: people want to see and hear stories that acknowledge their existence, and when mainstream channels fail them, they build their own.
The Streaming Era and Persistent Gaps
Streaming platforms have dramatically expanded the number of shows featuring lesbian characters. Services competing for niche audiences have financial incentives to greenlight programming that traditional broadcast networks once considered too risky, and the result has been a genuine increase in the quantity of lesbian representation available. But quantity and quality are not the same thing. The study of French-language Canadian streaming content found that even platforms positioning themselves as diversity-forward still tend to place queer characters in supporting rather than leading roles, a pattern that holds across sexual orientation, race, and disability status.16SAGE Journals (Convergence). Streaming Diversité: Exploring representations within French-language scripted series on Canadian SVOD services
The streaming model also introduces its own vulnerabilities. Shows with dedicated queer audiences can be cancelled abruptly when subscriber metrics shift, and because streaming data is less transparent than traditional ratings, fans often have little warning and less leverage. A lesbian-led show that would have been a modest success on a broadcast network can be classified as underperforming by a streaming algorithm optimizing for a different set of engagement metrics. The result is a landscape where more lesbian content exists than at any previous point in media history, but where individual shows feel precarious in ways that broadcast-era programs, for all their problems, did not.
There is also the question of what kinds of lesbian stories the streaming era favors. Coming-out narratives and first-love stories remain disproportionately common, in part because they have built-in dramatic tension and in part because they are legible to a broad audience that may not share the characters’ identity. Stories about settled adult lesbian relationships, about professional lives, about aging, about parenthood, about anything beyond the initial moment of self-discovery, remain comparatively rare. The gap is closing, but slowly, and the continued dominance of the coming-out plot sometimes gives the impression that lesbian identity is perpetually new, perpetually in the process of being discovered, rather than something people live with for decades.