Jennifer Jason Leigh made a whole lot of women avoid roommates and get ugly haircuts.
If you ever get the chance to watch The Celluloid Closet, there's a huge montage of dead gay and lesbian characters covering the entirety of film history up until the 90s where gay characters, both sympathetic and not, are bumped off left and right. And the reason for this is simple.
Religion.
Seriously, this trope goes back to the Bronze Age in the form of the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Never mind that the original text indicates that the story is about hospitality and proper treatment of your neighbors, Jewish authors, around 100BC were already using the story as a direct morality tale against homosexuality. In the 14th and 15th centuries, things started to get REALLY bad for homosexuals and S&G narratives became more common with the first English work being Cleanness by the Pearl-Poet. This asshole gave us a full description of the S&G carnage including a dead sea, flaming pooches and ashy fruit.
Fast-forward to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and we not only have both bisexual characters killed but one of them was obviously depraved. Wilde's personal sexuality aside, the story can be seen either as a "gays are bad" tune or a reflection of how homosexuals were treated in Victorian England. Pick your poison, really.
Obviously, because of the religious song and dance, when they weren't being used for comic relief LGBT characters were killed off in cinema because they were viewed as sinful, regardless of how pleasant they were. In 1924's landmark German silent film Michael, even though Claude does manage to get a pleasant death, he's still a dead gay who was in a relationship with a duplicitous thief.
Alfred Hitchcock even got into the game with his 1940 version of the Daphne Du Maurier novel, Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers is all psycho-crazy about anyone replacing her beloved Rebecca. She basically builds a shrine to the woman, saving her clothing and other belongings, and dies in flaming wreckage when she burns down Manderley. (She gets away in the book.) When they made a play of the work, Mrs Danvers dies wearing Rebecca's nightgown.
What I did foooooor looooooooove!
SO, let's bring this to current cinema.
With the shift in public opinion regarding gay people since Stonewall, you would think that this trope would just go away but it hasn't as of yet. We have films like Trailer Park of Terror where everybody gets a "sinfully-appropriate" death BUT the gay guy who just gets hit by a car because showing HIS "sin" would be completely inappropriate compared to the drugs, adultery and violent death displayed elsewhere in the movie. We only know he's gay because he gets bullied by another character. But don't worry. A straight person survives. Grrrrrrrr.
And, then, we have 2001 Maniacs, where the gay guy gets impaled from behind in preparation for the barbeque. Granted, this was a movie where the black guy gets squashed in a cotton press so I'm not sure this is about the character's being gay any more than it is for inappropriate humor.
Mmmmmm. Entrails.
Also? Fucking Dumbledore. Quiet, avuncular, role-model, Dumbledore. Granted, we didn't KNOW he was gay until JK Rowling announced it but still. Her announcement DID validate a whole lot of internet slash fiction, though.
I won't even begin to cover all of the 80s and 90s films that exploit HIV/AIDS by knocking off gay dudes left and right.
I won't even begin to cover all of the 80s and 90s films that exploit HIV/AIDS by knocking off gay dudes left and right.
All in all, though, I do see this trope disappearing. We should be aware of this trope and point it out when it occurs but as the LGBT community is seen more and more as normal, we can only hope that this trope will eventually discredit itself.