It’s International Lesbian Day (no, really)! As an observance, it’s worth noting that until very, very recently, being a fictional sapphic (non-100%-heterosexually identified) woman on a TV series brought with it an extremely short life expectancy. If a character on a TV show was a sapphic woman, the chances of her being ultimately killed off — by sometimes offhanded means — were enormous. Among cultural critics, this came to be known as “the dead-lesbian trope.” The frequency of this stereotype reached a tipping point a few years ago, and after LGBT+ viewer outrage, TV creators (some of whom are sapphic women themselves) are now making a more concerted effort to see that their lesbian/bisexual/trans characters survive beyond the series finale.
Still, it’s worth looking back on the U-Haul load of fictional sapphic
characters who met untimely ends and brought public dissatisfaction with
the dead-lesbian trope to a head. Starting in 2016 and expanded over the years, the website Autostraddle came up
with a list of 212 such sapphic characters who shuffled off their
cathode-ray coils too soon. The article is worth a browse.
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