One of my major characters is gay, but it has never been brought up on account of me (mostly) writing non-romantic stuff, and the plot as such being focused on other matters. Would it be better to have his sexuality firmly established in text just to open a new perspective of the character to the reader, or do you think I should wait until it's actually relevant to the plot - even if it may never be?

Alexis Hall Oh gosh. Well, firstly I don't feel super qualified to answer this because different people will have different opinions and there is no one right answer here.

I think what I'd say is, that you probably shouldn't crowbar something in if it would feel forced but that there's important caveats to be aware of with that. The first is that a lot of people are quite rightly bothered by LGBTQ+ characters whose LGBTQ+ identity only exists in meta-commentary (although I should say a lot aren't - look at the varied reactions to JK Rowling announcing Dumbledore was gay in the Harry Potter books). The second thing I'd say is that I think we forget how invisible explicit references to sexuality are when that sexuality fits into a heteronormative paradigm -- which I appreciate is a lot of words that aren't necessarily fairly meaningful. Basically, what I mean here is that an awful lot of fictional characters are explicitly heterosexual even though their being explicitly heterosexual isn't "relevant" because it's actually very natural (obviously depending a lot on context) for characters to talk about their love-lives, sex-lives, past relationships and so on without us even noticing. Weirdly Dumbledore is another good example here - there's quite a famous anecdote that JK Rowling had to tell one of the script writers for the Harry Potter movies that Dumbledore was gay long before she made the formal announcement about his sexuality in an interview because the script writer had included a throwaway line where Dumbledore made reference to an old girlfriend. And

I think that's kind of the issue - if you were writing a straight character you'd probably think nothing of having them make an off-hand reference to their ex in a way that directly drew attention that person's gender. It's just when that character is gay it feels like you are "forcing" your "political agenda" into the story. Which, I'd argue, you aren't.

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