I was thinking more about the Dumbledore example. Just because no sexuality is given does not make him automatically straight, that's just the prejudice people add to it. Of course something written in a time or place where the author creating a gay character would have been unthinkable is slightly different. Then again, isn't this also the time of Oscar Wilde who, though he didn't have any truly gay characters, certainly had homoerotic subtexts? And E. M. Forrester, who wrote Maurice, a gay love story, in 1913?*Edminster wrote:Whether you want to see it or not, heterosexual is the default for written work from way back when. You cannot cannot cannot look at things written during a different era and assume that the worldview is identical to ours; believing otherwise leads to an incomplete understanding at best and a total distortion of the underlying themes at worst.smiley_cow wrote:The only issue I take with this argument is that you're saying that straight is the default sexuality.
Though you're right, the average book written around the time of Sherlock Holmes that didn't give it's character a romantic interest most likely wasn't intended to be gay.
*Admittedly, it was published later, but it was still written in a time where this sort of thing was unthinkable.