It hasn’t been a good year for queer women on television. The infamous Bury Your Gays trope has been particularly brutal in 2016, felling lesbian and bisexual characters left and right — and pushback against the practice has recently reached fever pitch.



After a beloved character, Lexa, died on the CW’s futuristic sci-fi series The 100 last March, an army of fans rose up and demanded better of mainstream entertainment: They forced an apology from the show’s creator and raised tens of thousands of dollars for the Trevor Project in Lexa’s name. In the aftermath, Autostraddle compiled a comprehensive list and infographic of 166 regular or recurring lesbian or bisexual female characters who have been killed in television history. “We comprise such a teeny-tiny fraction of characters on television to begin with that killing us off so haphazardly feels especially cruel,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Riese Bernard.

Against this grim backdrop, two recent episodes streaming on Netflix involving queer female characters — from Easy and Black Mirror, respectively — shine like happy gay lights in the darkness. (Warning: Lots of spoilers ahead.)

Writer, director, and executive producer Joe Swanberg’s Easy is a series of eight stand-alone episodes set in Chicago, all of which loosely explore some element of sex or love. One vignette, titled “Vegan Cinderella,” is devoted to a relationship between Chase (Kiersey Clemons) and Jo (Jacqueline Toboni), who meet each other’s gaze at a concert before going home together. The sex scene, which kicks off a mere minute into the episode, is one of television’s best involving two women: The few little awkward moments that accompany peeling off socks and unfolding the pesky futon are buoyed by laughter and levity; nervous excitement gives way to ardent abandonment. It’s fun and sexy and natural. After Jo and Chase wake up the next morning, they aren’t cloaked in queer shame or wracked with identity crises — they discuss veganism, go get diner breakfast, and casually kiss goodbye.

Easy’s partially improvised, dialogue-heavy realism is worlds away from the twisted (and very scripted) sci-fi future of Black Mirror. In an episode written by creator Charlie Brooker and directed by Owen Harris, another set of queer women — Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) — have fleeting meetups in different decades until they fall for each other somewhere in the swirls of time. It turns out both characters are avatars for elderly women, each having her consciousness wired into a gigantic server; in this programmed universe, they’re able to relive their young womanhood in a beachside party town called San Junipero. As long as their bodies are alive in the real world, Kelly and Yorkie can only sample San Junipero’s wonders, but after death — “passing over” — they have the option to live there forever.

After a few twists that defy Black Mirror’s typical fatalism, Yorkie and Kelly literally drive off into the sunset, seemingly to live together in eternal sapphic happiness. (Technically their bodies do die, but their souls or their minds or whatever live on forever. That counts!) LGBT fans went crazy for the episode, as they did for “Vegan Cinderella” — finally, here were two fully realized plotlines for queer women on TV that didn’t end in homophobic meltdowns, heartbreak, or death.