Being homosexual doesn’t cause you to emit a rainbow halo or any other identifying trait. At best it might be notable by drawing on various stereotypes of flamboyant clothing and effeminate behavior, but then you’ll be accused of mockery by the LGBT community you’re trying to pander to.
So again, including it as a character detail is just virtue signaling and making the players aware of it is as subtle as a random NPC shouting out “I enjoy foot massages” at them... completely out of place and irrelevant to the PC’s interaction with them.
It seems like you're arguing that the *only* thing in NPC descriptions should be things which are visible at first glance. So there shouldn't be anything about an NPC's background, or relationships, or hidden motivations.
But that's not how old-school NPC descriptions worked. In
reply #159, I just gave a bunch of examples of old-school NPC descriptions that included sexuality by specifying their romantic relationships. That makes sense to me. In real life, sexuality is one of the most powerful of human motivations, and it drives a lot of human behavior. It is featured in most of our popular stories, from Disney cartoons to action movies.
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For me, the key thing about all these objections is that they simply don't match up to my experience. I've included simple mention of sexuality in my NPCs for decades - from Strahd's love for Tatiana to bits of color like the barman's spirited fights with his wife. And yes, that includes gay NPCs. I don't see the problems that other people are claiming. It hasn't made my games un-fun or un-escapist or unrealistic. They've been fun and interesting in play.
From my old
"Favorite Gay Characters" thread, others said similar, like:
There was quite a lot of them.
The most recent wasn't one of mine. It was in my Dark Albion campaign, one of my players was a fighter from a knightly family named Alan Boleyn (a possible ancestor of the future Queen of England). Boleyn's player made it clear that Alan was gay, and the rest of the PCs generally had a strong suspicion, but of course the setting being what it was, he kept it mostly under wraps. He had at one point been a favorite of the Duke of Clarence, who I also played as secretly gay.
Oh, the wizard Lord Krens of Krens' Cairn an NPC in my Wilderlands is pretty cool. He's known to 'prefer the company of men', which caused a political problem as he wouldn't marry one of Lord Vilius Theber's daughters sent to study magic under him; and he was the one Ghinarian Lord to successfully defy Warlord Yusan; Krens' Cairn became the launchpad for the counter-offensive that ultimately destroyed Yusan. Him being gay doesn't have anything much to do with him being a cool character though.
Mordred Midwinter, Eldritch Knight of Valon, is a cool PC IMC who's gay; this mostly manifests in him having no interest in the various buxom noblewomen he interacts with. Also perhaps his occasional prissiness and horror of dirt - player is gay and likes a laugh.
I'm not saying anything about other people's campaigns, because I don't know them - but if I'm told that gay NPCs objectively make a game worse, it doesn't fit what I see.