To me it seems like we have this paradoxical situation where the media want to simultaneously present inclusivity and diversity, but don't dare present any of the real diversity for fear of stereotyping. The end result is some token LGBTQ+ characters who are heteronormative, which is disingenuous.
If it is a choice between no gay character and some gay character who is essentially 'straight acting', I'd choose the former every time.
I often see (edit: readers) mention that a story has gay/straight characters, even when (to me) there is no opening in the plot for characters to express their romantic inclinations. What exactly are you looking at when you perceive a character as $orientation?
Weird how people love to complain about non straight people existing in stories though.
I think because describing external characteristics is something that we all do as we experience the world. “That person has brown eyes. That person has red hair.” Are just part of moving through the world and I perceive this regardless of how consequential they are to the plot of life.
Sharing internal characteristics that aren’t easily knowable is unusual because I wouldn’t necessarily know this without some other information that reveals. If I’m seeing someone, I usually don’t know their sexual orientation so when the author describes them as gay, it can be offputting because that’s not something I would know as an observer. Of course there are many ways to do this properly, so it’s not always offputting, but it can be as it layers on information that’s more than we would normally know.
An example of this that I remember is in Lost, characters describe another character as “the Haitian” without any explanation in story that the person was from Haiti. Somehow, everyone recognized his accent and placed his heritage enough to know his country of origin. And sometimes they would still say “there was a Haitian there” when the Haitian didn’t even say anything so it stood out to me as odd that characters would know this non-observable info.
While we're on the topic of Roald Dahl (who perhaps doesn't quite reach the psychological depth of Henry James), here are a couple of examples that I easily found in The Twits:
"Mr Twit thought that this hariness made him look terrifically wise and grand."
"...his evil mind kept working away on the latest horrid trick he was going to play on the old woman."
And there’s many reasons why an author will describe an internal characteristic and it’s usually either omniscient narrator or first person describing the assumptions that the narrator makes.
I’m not referring to that at all as those are natural and not weird at all. For example “I thought Hernando was gay because I’ve always just had a hunch.” Is different from “I walked into a room and saw four straight people and a gay person.” Without describing why the narrator things one person is gay. It’s as unusual as saying “I walked into a room and saw a person who loved almond milk.”
This is very different from an omniscient narrator and reveals these characteristics because the narrator knows all, internal and external.
In either case, hair and eye color is mentioned to help the reader picture the character in their minds eye. It serves a general purpose other than to serve the plot.
My example of Lost is not because I object to Haitians in tv. It’s because the show has the characters know something they have no reason to know, another character’s nationality. I think the intention was to be nice and not have to say “hand it to the black guy” and replaced it with “hand it to the Haitian.” guy