While many people today are familiar with the “Bury Your Gays” trope in literature, film, and television, few are aware of its origins or the fact that it was once a legal requirement of the industry. In 1934, the Motion Picture Production Code (more commonly known as the Hays Code) prohibited—among other things—the depiction of “sexual perversion,” functionally banning the depiction of queer and gender nonconforming individuals on-screen. Though other restrictions from the Hays Code were quickly abandoned, this one stuck around, impacting the depiction of queer characters to this day. But the impacts of the Hays Code stretched far beyond the confines of television.
Though no such code ever came to fruition within the book publishing industry, the dominant public and professional opinion at the time aligned itself with Hays—creating a functionally identical ban in works of literature. However, there were nuances within this ban. If someone deigned to write about queer characters and give them a happy ending, they would be seen as “promoting homosexuality,” and the manuscript would never make it past its own creation. But if those characters were to die at the end (or meet some other similarly gruesome fate), then the work could be hailed as a cautionary tale.
Even after the Hays Code was overturned in the 1950s when the Supreme Court ruled that films were protected by the First Amendment, its impact continued. After all, homosexuality was still deemed a “sociopathic personality disorder” by the DSM until 1973. And while the queer publishing industry was very slowly able to get off the ground in a post-Hays world, its depictions were still hardly flattering. As paperback revolutionized the publishing world post-WWII, lesbian pulp fiction became the first widely successful and available example of mainstream explicitly queer books. However, the success of these books was far from a result of their positive depictions of lesbians and lesbian life. Not only were lesbians not the intended audience, but authors were required to conform to pathologizing narratives wherein happy endings were never a possibility—even if both women remained alive at the end of the story.
Toward the end of the twentieth century—after homosexuality was removed from the DSM, when the gay liberation movement was reaching its peak, and the AIDS crisis was ravaging the queer community—queer publishing began to truly find its rhythm and place in the world. Gay and lesbian publishing houses were formed and even attended the American Bookseller Association expo, where their booths displayed rainbow flags and truly announced their presence (and power) to the publishing world. During this time, classics such as Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues found their way into the publishing world. But despite the success of these books within their limited audience, big publishers largely bailed on queer literature before the onset of the twenty-first century, and queer bookstores began to close, driven out of business by larger companies.
This trend continued until just a few years ago, when the publishing world experienced the second “queer boom.” In 2019, queer fiction experienced a small but significant uptick in popularity—a trend which has surged in the years since and reached record-breaking heights in 2023, with sales up 200% from the spike four years prior. Even as general book sales and popularities have slowed in the wake of the Covid-19 book boom, the popularity of queer books has remained untouched, continuing to rise. For the first time in history, this has created the expectation that publishers will have queer titles in their catalogs, lest they lose sales. Even in the face of a rise in book ban attempts, queer readers are being recognized as a valuable and essential market.
Written by Ash Murray.
Instagram: @ashalexanderrr