“Unbury Your Gays”: Queer Phantoms in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth
At its root, the “Bury Your Gays” trope is simple: in a work with an overt or implied same-sex couple, by the end of the story at least one of the lovers “must die or otherwise be destroyed” (Hulan 17). Today, it is often used in film for shock value, as seen with Tara’s death on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2002 and Lexa’s death on The 100 in 2016, which drew mainstream attention to and backlash against the trope (Deshler). But Bury Your Gays has not always involved straight storytellers unnecessarily killing off queer characters.[i]
The exact term has murky origins in early 2000s social media, but it can be traced back to a 19th century literary trope which allowed queer storytellers to make queer stories visible in historical and social contexts hostile to queerness. Haley Hulan’s genealogy of the trope marks Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as an early example of this form of Bury Your Gays as “refuge,” in which queer storytellers used the trope to protect “themselves, their publishers, and readers from laws and social mandates against the ‘endorsement’ of homosexuality,” making it a mode of queer survival and resistance (24). Hulan argues that our context, unlike Wilde’s, is no longer hostile to queerness, so we no longer have to bury our gays as Wilde did.
However, though queer storytellers today face less risk than in Wilde’s time, and we should celebrate gains in LGBTQ+ rights, grand narratives of progress are dangerous. As current book-banning and anti-transgender legislation makes clear, queer stories and bodies are still threatened (“HRC”; Monteil). To turn away from queer death in our storytelling now would be to ignore reality. In fact, many queer authors are still telling stories of queer death, including Tamsyn Muir in her 2019 novel Gideon the Ninth, which I read here alongside The Picture of Dorian Gray. I reject contemporary usage of Bury Your Gays for shock value by straight storytellers. However, I argue that in reclaiming our buried gays, queer storytellers can deconstruct and “queer” the Bury Your Gays trope with queer voices that speak and act beyond the grave in order to pave a path for queer futurity, whether in 1890 or 2019.
This venture is a big one, so this excerpt is one tiny part of a much larger whole. First, a disclaimer: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gideon the Ninth are very different texts: one is a Victorian fin de siècle novel about a beautiful man who exchanges his soul for eternal youth and the other is a sci-fi epic fantasy novel about lesbian necromancers in space. However, I read Dorian and Gideon as what Jacques Derrida calls “phantom texts,” in which “no text is an independent entity since all are intertextually haunted by others” (Palmer 14). This resonance can be especially relevant for Victorian/contemporary textual comparisons (Mays 446). Dorian and Gideon’s intertextual haunting begins with the unburied gays in both texts—queer figures who appear to die or “be destroyed” but actually transgress and resist the trope by creating rather than erasing queerness, leaving the text queerer than they found it. That is, if they truly leave at all…
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the central queer figure is The Picture, a portrait that Basil Hallward paints of Dorian Gray which seems to take on Dorian’s sins and age after Dorian declares he is jealous of the portrait’s eternal youth and beauty and makes the wish: “Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!” (Wilde 26). The second, in Gideon the Ninth, is the Lyctor, a saint-like necromancer who is “not born immortal” but “ascends” and is “given eternal life” through a series of challenges which require the teamwork of a necromancer adept, Harrow, and her cavalier,[ii] Gideon (Muir 83).
A key aspect the Picture and Lyctor share is that their immortality is a matter of merging and continued haunting. Dorian is the Picture’s subject, but Basil is its creator. Though both are dead by the end after Dorian kills Basil, and then himself when he tries to destroy the Picture, the Picture remains, lovely and undying. The Picture is both a representation of Dorian’s soul and Basil’s body through the materiality of the painting’s brushstrokes, which Basil recognizes as his own even after the Picture changes (131). Similarly, though Gideon dies at the end of her respective book, she sacrifices herself to save Harrow by offering up her soul to give Harrow the powers of both a necromancer and a cavalier, as well as immortal life and immutable form. The ghost in the Picture and the Lyctor is a promise of what could have been, what could be, and ultimately, that death is not the end of queerness in these stories.
It is the aesthetic ghost of “that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream” which draws Basil to Dorian in the first place, and Basil says that Dorian “became to me the visible incarnation” of this ideal, embodying this ghost (Wilde 95). Basil lays bare the ghost when he confesses why he never wanted to display the Picture, telling Dorian, “I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it” (96). In returning to the “ideal” Basil originally had for the Picture, Basil emphasizes the honest, vulnerable feeling and beauty originally intended in it. In his confession and desire not to display the Picture, the Picture is also a site of intimacy: its original secret was not that it was hideous and sinful, but that it was too full of Basil and Dorian, too “haunting” and “exquisite” to be seen by others. Yet Basil continues speaking of the ideal, reanimating it in the text and suggesting it may not yet be lost. Even after Dorian kills Basil, this presence lingers as Dorian turns to sketching in order to distract himself from Basil’s murder, unexpectedly channeling Basil’s ghost: “every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward” (136). This suggestion of a ghostly painter lingering after the mortal painter’s death, along with the Picture which remains after both of their deaths, is a refusal of The Picture of Dorian Gray to neatly, fully bury its gays.
Basil and Dorians’s ending is wrought with things left unsaid, but at the end of Gideon the Ninth, Gideon says exactly why she must sacrifice herself to save Harrow when they both find themselves in mortal peril, creating a clearer case of ghostly lingering. Before her sacrifice, Gideon reaffirms their enmeshed queerness with the promise, “There is no me without you. One flesh, one end” (432). “One flesh, one end” is the Lyctoral vow that cavaliers and necromancers make to each other, but in this moment it is also an affirmation that Gideon will not let Harrow die, and as their end will be “one,” Gideon won’t truly die either, but will live on in her in some form, immortally joined. Like Basil and Dorian, this is a messy process, and Harrow’s initial response is one of stunned grief: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” (437). But the Gideon who lingers with her afterwards in ghostly form guides Harrow to take up her sword in a “strange embrace” and drives Harrow to active resistance, retorting, “Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” and promising, “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then” (437). Gideon tempers Harrow’s grief with her signature bad sense of humor, but she also offers a further suggestion of queer death not being an end to, but an extension of, queer relationality. Lyctors are immortal and powerful but not invulnerable, and by framing mutual death as an inevitable state where they will be fully together again, Gideon queers it.
Ghost Gideon continues this promise of death as just part of their journey together with a Bible verse: “The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee” (438). This verse is Ruth 1:17, when Ruth swears loyalty to Naomi. Her loyalty extends beyond death, as she swears they will find each other in Naomi’s familial burial place, where Ruth wants to be buried, and will live in the underworld together. The verse is a resolution to be together in death, but it is first and foremost an oath to be together in life, as Ruth promises she will remain by Naomi’s side. This verse, coupled with Gideon’s following final words, “See you on the flip side, sugarlips” (438), leaves the reader with the promise that Gideon isn’t gone, and death has done the opposite of parting them.
Gideon the Ninth is just one of many contemporary examples of queer storytelling that seeks a “strange embrace” with queer death and, just as importantly, what comes after. Stories of queer happiness and life are, of course, also important. But let us not forget our ghosts, new and old, for these phantom texts have much to say in their shared echoes and powerful rejection of a trope that, at its inception in Dorian Gray, was about a queer refusal to accept that being buried meant being silenced.
[i] The word “queer” as I use it has a variety of meanings. In part it refers to identities under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, in which the state of “being queer” can represent both an orientation and a community. But to be queer is also to be beyond binaries (i.e. alive/dead), to embrace intersections and fluidity, and to provoke a critique of hegemonic ways of being.
[ii] A cavalier is a necromancer’s knight or bodyguard, essentially serving as the muscle to their magic.
Works Cited
Deshler, Kira. “Not Another Dead Lesbian: The Bury Your Gays Trope, Queer Grief, and The 100.” Honors Theses, Whitman College: Accessible Research Materials in Digital Archives. (April 28, 2017). 1-89.
“Human Rights Campaign Working to Defeat 340 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills at State Level Already, 150 of Which Target Transgender People – Highest Number on Record.” Human Rights Campaign, https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-working-to-defeat-340-anti-lgbtq-bills-at-state-level-already-150-of-which-target-transgender-people-highest-number-on-record.
Hulan, Haley. “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context.” McNair Scholars Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2017, pp. 17-24. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1579&context=mcnair
Mays, Kelly. “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Victorians in the Rearview Mirror of Future History.” Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, Spring 2011, pp. 445-456.
Monteil, Abby. “4 In 10 Books Banned in 2022 Are LGBTQ+-Related.” Them, Condé Nast, 20 Sept. 2022, https://www.them.us/story/banned-books-lgbtq-2022.
Muir, Tamsyn. Gideon the Ninth. Tom Doherty Associates, 2019.
Palmer, Paulina. The Queer Uncanny : New Perspectives on the Gothic, University of Wales Press, 2012, pp. 1-22. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/seattleu/detail.action?docID=1889097.
“Ruth 1:17 Commentaries.” Bible Hub, Bible Hub, biblehub.com/commentaries/ruth/1-17.htm.