So I think this was a masterpiece of a book.
I gave Camp Damascus a good review, but (as I said in the review) that was in no small part out of affection for the author as a person. It wasn’t bad, by any stretch, but I didn’t think it was all that great either. It had a bit too much of the classic Tingler in it to make it work as a serious book, in my opinion.
None of those complaints apply to Bury Your Gays. This was, I say again, a masterpiece.
The protagonist, Misha, is a Hollywood screenwriter who mostly does queer horror. He’s doing well enough to make a living; the stuff he writes is broadly well-reviewed and modestly commercially successful, but with a hard core of dedicated fans who love it. And he’s on the rise; he just got an Oscar nomination. But then he’s in a meeting with a studio exec to talk about an X Files-esque series he writes. He’s been building towards the two (female) agent leads getting together as the season finale, but the studio exec says that’s not going to work. He has a choice: abandon them finally confessing their feelings for each other … or have them do it, but they need to die at the end of the episode, as per the long-standing Hollywood trope of killing off gay characters. It’s not that the studio exec is a homophobe or anything, Misha is assured; it’s just what the algorithms say will sell the best.
As he wrestles with the decision of what to do - give the studio what they want, or stay true to himself and burn down his career - things get more interesting when monsters from various movies he’s written start showing up threatening his life and those he loves.
The story is very well crafted - it’s a master class of tension-building. Misha has to deal with his career choices, his own personal demons (he’s “Los Angeles out,” not “Montana out”), and more literal demons. His past is addressed as well; there are flashbacks to what it was like growing up in Montana knowing he was gay, and all the trauma he had to deal with. There were a few emotional stomach-punches along the way, and an excellent reversal of a climax that I should have seen coming but am kind of glad I didn’t.
Beyond the obvious, it touches on a bunch of other themes, both timeless and topical. AI in Hollywood; MeToo; the tension between movies as art and movies as business; corporations happy to celebrate Pride as long as it’s profitable; a recognition of conflicting pressure on gay people to come out against their own desire for privacy.
Putting on my /r/Fantasy Moderator hat for a moment: we frequently get threads where someone asks for a book featuring someone like them themselves. This could be a queer person, a person of color, a disabled person, or anything else. About the only version of this we don’t see is “I’m looking for a book with a cishet white male protagonist,” for obvious reasons. And almost without fail, someone will ask why it matters. Why can’t people just enjoy a book and not worry about the color or orientation or whatever of the protagonist?
The answer is that representation matters. Reading a book where you can see yourself in the protagonist matters. It matters for everyone, but I would say it’s especially important for kids growing up in not the most welcoming of homes, who might see no one like them in the movies and books they love and reach the conclusion that they are wrong in some way. I want everyone who doesn’t understand why representation matters to read this book. I’ve been a reddit mod too long to not be cynical about how much good it would actually do, but (as Chuck Tingle would be the first to say) it’s always important to try and make the world I want to live in.
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