And when do we get to have complex story lines outside suicide or gay bashing?

There’s a 99% chance that one of you will die in the next 4 minutes and 7 seconds.

Remember two years ago when Hozier made waves with the video for Take Me to Church?

In it, a gay man is forced to watch as his partner is brutally kidnapped, beaten, and ultimately murdered in cold blood.

If you haven’t seen it and can’t be bothered, how about Brokeback Mountain? Rent? Lost and Delirious? Or any Tennessee Williams play?

LGBTQ characters die. It’s so obscenely prominent that it’s officially a trope.

Sure, there was some progress, like having a gay couple on Modern Family. Sure, they’re superficial, poorly written, and about as cliche as you can get, but so is every character on any sitcom ever. So long as Mitch and Cam don’t get identified as top and bottom at some point, we’ll consider it progress.

I’ll take what I can get at this point.

But media seems to have a rule about LGBTQ characters: if you want a story line, you pay for it with your life.

There hasn’t been progress on this front. Two years later, in the year 2016, the most complex story line featuring two LGBTQ characters is the music video for The Veronicas’s most recent single “On Your Side.”

The video itself will make you smile, cry, and possibly rage against the machine. It has two major things working for it: it was directed by the insanely talented Ruby Rose and it was released less than two weeks after the global LGBTQ community (and every other minority community) took a collective gasp and began to fear the future.

Is it exploiting a collective emotional rawness across the English-speaking world? Yes.

Is that harmful? Not necessarily. For a lot of us, the video is close to our reality — a reflection of the current zeitgeist, both real and potential.

But it breaks my heart that the most complex story line featuring two LGBTQ characters in the year 2016 is from a music video — and that one of them still has to commit suicide to be taken seriously.

Do I want it to be a hit? Fuck yes. Ruby Rose crushed it.

But god I hope 2017 has something to offer in the way of complex, developed, flawed, humanized LGBTQ characters who manage to survive their own stories.

Hi! I’m Michael Noker. I’m an LGBTQ YouTuber and writer who shares opinions on things like social media and pop culture and women’s issues and gay stuff. You should totally follow me on Twitter and check out my YouTube channel! You know. If you want to.