A dead queer woman is not automatically a serious story.
Sometimes she is only evidence that the writer wanted danger without doing the work. Kill her, expose her body, let somebody straighter and safer discover his feelings over the remains. The camera gets a wound. The hero gets motivation. The woman gets no more verbs.
Crime fiction cannot promise survival. It should not. But it can tell the difference between writing a death and spending one.
The body is not the character
The test is simple. What did she want before the plot wanted her dead? What did she do badly? Who did she desire when nobody was watching? What did she know that survived her? If the story has no answers, it did not lose a woman. It purchased atmosphere.
The “bury your gays” argument became unavoidable in 2016 after more than twenty-five lesbian and bisexual women were killed across scripted television. The complaint was never that queer characters must be immortal. It was that a small field of representation kept being harvested for the same tragedy.
Death must leave ownership behind
If a queer woman dies in a crime novel, the book owes her more than sympathy. Her choices should deform the investigation. Her private life should make the official version impossible to keep clean. Her desire should belong to her, not to the detective looking at photographs afterward.
The better question is not whether a writer is allowed to kill her. Of course the writer is allowed. The question is whether the book can survive her scrutiny.
Who profits from the death? Who gets believed? Who becomes eloquent only after she cannot contradict them? Follow those answers and the victim stops being heat. She becomes the case nobody can close neatly.