Bury Your Gays (Chuck Tingle)

Bury Your Gays
Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Growing up, Misha never could've imagined he'd find success as a Hollywood screenwriter, but now - with a rising career penning horror movies and TV shows and an Oscar nomination for a live-action short - his dreams are coming true... almost. Deep down, he's still the scared boy who can't even come out of the closet to his family, though he's been dating Zeke for over a year and his works are heavily queer-coded. At its heart, though, the film industry still clings to traditional ideas, particularly the notion that openly gay characters don't get happy endings... thus, his latest argument with his agent over his hit supernatural show Travelers, when he's ordered to either closet the lead detective duo or kill them off in the season finale. Misha has invested too much of himself in the storyline to betray the characters (and the audience) like that; it's too much like betraying himself and the boy he used to be, who longed to see people like himself on TV. Thus, he fails to heed his agent's warnings about the consequences of defying the studio board - and that is when things start going very, very wrong for him, as monsters out of his own works begin stalking him.
Is it an elaborate hoax or particularly committed stalker? Is his mind cracking? Or is he up against something far more dangerous and powerful than he can imagine?

REVIEW: The entertainment industry can be downright brutal, moreso for those who lie outside the norms and push the wrong envelopes in the wrong (read: likely to lose money) way. As shareholders and algorithms gain power over more and more aspects of creativity and output, it becomes even more brutal, to the point where original ideas and outlier voices are nearly eliminated (see also: why everything seems to be a remake or reboot or lightly-redressed version of the same stuff). Even when Hollywood appears to make progress on issues like LGBTQIA+ representation, that progress is often little more than window dressing, and all too often the maxim of "bury your gays" - eliminating non-straight characters, not allowing them to lead or have happy endings - seems to hold true. Here, Tingle presents one half-closeted creator who dares stand up for himself and his artistic freedom, only to find out the hard way how little the system (and the studio's bottom line) tolerates defiance by the people it sees as mere profit-generating property.
From the start, there's an ominous air as Misha drives into the Harold Brothers studio lot for his meeting with his agent. On the one hand, he seems to be living the dream of countless would-be creators who come to Los Angeles in general and the dream of the boy he used to be in particular, the one who grew up watching Harold Brothers cartoons and popular TV shows and started telling stories to himself to get through the hardest times of his life. On the other, the feeling of something off-kilter, something even predatory, sets in early, even before he gets the news from his agent that he's being ordered to ax the queer love story he's been slowly laying the groundwork for in his TV series that's meant to come out in the open with the season finale, and if he won't ax the story, he has to ax the characters living it. He grew up watching Hollywood tease audiences with "queer-baiting" only to weasel out of their own plot developments and clear story beats, betrayals that left a very bitter taste in the mouth of a boy who was still figuring out his sexuality but knew on an instinctive level that a punch had been deliberately pulled - or, rather, the punch had been redirected into his face, and the faces of a good chunk of the viewing audience, by studios that consider queer viewers lucrative enough to string along but not lucrative enough to openly validate or embrace. Most of the horror stories Misha pens, the ones that built his career, have roots in his past, and seeing them come to life on screens big and small has been a triumph, but an incomplete one if he's not allowed to follow through on the stories that are most important to him, such as the relationship at the heart of his popular TV show. He knows defiance will have a cost, even for a current studio darling (his Oscar nomination makes him a temporary golden boy), but is too furious to consider how steep that cost might be... and even then, he can't begin to imagine the collateral damage to his friends and even total strangers who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as his own monsters appear to be coming to life around him.
Even as Misha finds himself literally fighting a system that wants to erase, or defang and minimize, certain ideas and content, he also must confront an industry that seems intent on erasing humans from the creative equation altogether; in the first scene, as he enters the studio lot, he watches a big poster going up advertising a blockbuster movie starring an actor who died three years ago - an actor whose performance was created entirely from CGI and AI via a secret proprietary process, and the first such performance to earn an Oscar nomination. The fact that the actor in question would never have played a villain role when alive only makes it that much more of a betrayal to the spirit of the late artist, a dismissal of humanity in favor of marketing and dollar signs... one that audiences and academy voters seem all too willing to validate. The decision to kill the core storyline on Misha's show is also spurred by the number-crunchers on the nebulous board of directors behind the studio, based on algorithms and projected demographic appeals and other data points and analytics and other ways to maximize shareholder returns while minimizing actual creativity and humanity. By refusal to comply, Misha becomes a threat to the bottom line, and soon learns that even a proven track record of popularity and profitability is no shield from a board that smells a chance at even more profit (and hardly wants to encourage defiance in any of its property - Misha and the rest of the creators and actors and other employees being mere objects of little more consequence than office chairs or potted plants). Facing a rising tide of horror that threatens his safety and his sanity, he must dig deep into his own convictions and his own reasons for creating art in the first place, as well as learn to trust his friends; just as movies take a team to create, Misha will need a team if he is to survive the horror movie that his life quickly becomes.
Things move fairly well, and even the few lulls are filled with tension and backstory to fill things out. There are several twists and (often dark) turns, and some real pain revealed in both the here-and-now events and Misha's backstory, the events that led to him using horror as a medium to explore and process traumas. His friends sometimes feel a little flat and convenient, but ultimately form a decently solid team, though Misha must ultimately be the one to drive things forward, even through his failures. Along the way, Tingle plays with horror tropes, sometimes turning them on their ear and sometimes having Misha's attempts to outsmart them falling apart as he underestimates the forces set against him. It ends on a solid and satisfactory note.

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