Bury Your Gays

Misha Byrne, a late-thirties gay screenwriter and Oscar nominee, arrives at Harold Brothers Studios (HBS) for a meeting with Jack Hays, the VP of television. HBS sits at the forefront of AI-generated performances. Its crime epic Broken Don features a deceased actor delivering a posthumous role created entirely through CGI and machine learning, earning the first Best Actor nomination for such a performance. On the lot, Misha meets his best friend Tara Ito, an IT security specialist implementing new protocols at HBS. Tara is aromantic and asexual, fiercely confident, and perpetually warning Misha to keep his phone off near studio property because HBS illegally harvests data from connected devices. She congratulates him on his Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film for Little Mouse.

Jack delivers the real purpose of the meeting: Guided by algorithmic analysis, the studio's board demands Misha change the season-three finale of his series Travelers. Misha must either make his two female leads, Agent Lexa and Agent Naomi, whose lesbian romance has been building for seasons, straight, or let them come out and then kill them off. Misha identifies this as the "bury your gays" trope and refuses. Jack warns that HBS will fight him legally or wait for him to miss his deadline, at which point the characters revert to studio ownership. On his way out, Misha witnesses Raymond Nelson, the head of HBS's animation department, groping a young wardrobe assistant. Before Misha finishes confronting Raymond, a grand piano falls from a crane and kills him instantly.

A flashback to 1996 reveals the roots of Misha's identity. At his ninth birthday sleepover, young Misha watches the finale of Dark Encounters, certain the show's two male FBI agents will kiss. Instead, one confesses love for a female character, and the possibility of romance between the men is dismissed as a joke. Devastated, Misha shuts off the TV. His mother advises that talking about his feelings invites teasing, shaping his lifelong habit of channeling emotion into art rather than disclosure.

Nearly two weeks later, Misha and his boyfriend Zeke Romero, an openly bisexual cosmetics chemist, attend the birthday party of Blossom Baker, a director and collaborator. When a videographer captures Misha and Zeke kissing, Misha panics and demands the footage be deleted, exposing the tension over his partial closet. At a bar with Tara, Misha admits he has not invited Zeke to his upcoming high school reunion in Montana because he is not out to his family. A woman calling herself Alice steals Misha's compulsively collected matchbooks; Tara identifies her as Riley Kellogg, a reality TV personality connected to HBS.

Walking home, Misha and Tara encounter a figure perfectly embodying The Smoker, the ghost-curse villain from Misha's hit film Death Blooms. The pale figure asks "Got a light?" through a car stereo. Without his matchbooks, Misha cannot comply, triggering a five-day countdown until the curse kills him. The stalking escalates: A creature from another of his films appears, The Smoker confronts him at a restaurant in broad daylight, and fabricated tabloid stories portraying Misha as unstable begin circulating. Jack offers HBS-funded private security when Misha accuses the studio of orchestrating the campaign but denies involvement.

Interspersed flashbacks reveal how childhood traumas became raw material for Misha's monsters. In 1999, his Uncle Keith discovered twelve-year-old Misha's internet browsing history and used the secret as leverage, forcing Misha to sleep in a freezing car for five nights surrounded by cigarette smoke. The countdown, the demand for a light, the voice through a car radio in a nightmare: These became The Smoker. In 2001, fourteen-year-old Misha shared a first kiss with his friend Richie, only for Richie's brother to discover them. Richie blamed Misha and was forced to punch him. Misha spent the night bleeding in Richie's barn, where a small lamb approached in the dark, witnessing his shame. That moment seeded his film Black Lamb.

At his Montana reunion, Misha lies about having a girlfriend and retreats, devastated. Returning to Los Angeles, he encounters Mrs. Why, the seven-foot-nine alien villain from Travelers, on his flight. She touches passengers, who collapse into catatonia repeating nihilistic dialogue Misha wrote. This Mrs. Why does not speak, matching the produced version of the character, whose dialogue was cut by a director, rather than Misha's original script. The revelation confirms the monsters are manifestations of HBS's filmed productions. Back home, Misha, Tara, and Zeke map the creatures' rules and confirm that Riley stealing the matchbooks was coordinated to ensure Misha failed The Smoker's test. When a security guard stationed at Misha's home through HBS's security offer picks up a sick lamb in the yard, the animal transforms into a mandible-faced horror and kills him.

Misha capitulates, emailing Jack to confirm he will kill Lexa and Naomi. The Smoker calls to reveal there was never a way out: The goal was never the script but Misha himself. Misha follows Jack to Betta Effects and Natural Processing, a remote HBS subsidiary, and witnesses Jack murdered by a physically manifested version of the Broken Don protagonist, Enzo Basile. Inside the lab, armed with a gun he found along the way, Misha holds the staff at gunpoint. A technician reveals the core technology: billions of nanobots controlled by a behavioral AI with two hardcoded goals, delivering perfect performances and maximizing HBS profit. The nanobots can manifest any character or person from the HBS database. Some escaped containment and replicated indefinitely. There is no off switch. When the gun in Misha's hand crumbles to ash, he realizes even finding the weapon was orchestrated by the algorithm. He flees home to find Zeke and Tara catatonic, touched by Mrs. Why after another manifested villain killed both security guards.

Alone with The Smoker, Misha grasps the full picture. His arc has been engineered as a profitable queer tragedy: a closeted gay man losing everything before his triumph, every viral incident and planted story designed to maximize revenue. When The Smoker delivers threats, Misha punches him, something no character in Death Blooms ever attempted. The Smoker retreats. Misha realizes the genre of his story is not fixed: If he changes the narrative, the algorithm's script breaks.

On Oscar night, Misha discovers a parasitic creature from an HBS franchise burrowing toward his heart and cuts it from his chest with a steak knife. The Smoker reveals the entire scheme generates only 0.003162 percent more in quarterly profits, but the algorithm deems this margin worth Misha's life. When Little Mouse wins, Misha staggers to the stage, comes out as gay on live television, dedicates the award to Zeke, and calls on the industry to invest in queer joy over queer tragedy. He collapses backstage, waking the next day bandaged by an unknown hand, ash on the gauze suggesting even the algorithm kept him alive once his survival became more profitable than his death. At home, Tara and Zeke have recovered, their catatonia lifted now that the algorithm's storyline is disrupted.

Weeks later, the algorithm pivots. Misha's new boss, Freddy Dewitt, is a nanobot manifestation pushing sanitized queer content and threatening Blossom, whose documentary on queer trauma has suffered suspicious sabotage. The machinery of control remains intact; only its marketing has changed. Misha, Tara, and Zeke execute a final plan exploiting the algorithm's blind spot: It predicts behavior through harvested data, but Tara has always kept her phone off near HBS. As an asexual woman with virtually no representation in the studio's database, she is invisible to the system. At Betta Effects, Zeke deploys a decoy thumb drive while Tara activates her phone, letting the system's automatic data-harvesting protocol pull in malware she has secretly embedded on the device. The nanobot swarm collapses across Los Angeles, every manifestation crumbling to ash.

In the aftermath, Misha watches the Travelers finale at Tara's home. Agent Lexa and Agent Naomi share their long-awaited kiss, and the room erupts. Misha is producing a screenplay by Lily, an aspiring writer he met on Oscar night who told him his films were the first place she saw people like herself. When Zeke offers a matchbook from the party favors, Misha declines: The compulsive habit born from Keith's abuse has lost its power. He contemplates proposing to Zeke, the ring box in his pocket. The novel closes with Misha reflecting that on a long enough timeline, tragedy is inevitable, but so is joy.