I guess I did kinda create a thread that was asking a similar question from the opposite angle 
which was more going into when and how one might tackle discrimination themes in an interactive fiction medium… This topic.
Ah, so if I were to distill my opinion very briefly, I don’t think there’s really one right way to do it. Depicting a setting without discrimination can be quite nice; when it is present, especially if it’s a real world thing, or something with analogues to real world things, then you’re going to need to be careful not to be bigoted about it.
One key, I think, is that it’s generally best to make sure you’re not really closing off options to a player character for being a member of a minority or a woman. That said, I do sometimes, depending on the setting, like a little acknowledgement when I’m playing a gay character (i.e. literally every single game except Choice of the Dragon) of things that might be a little different for that reason… it can make it feel like the option to be gay is less of an afterthought.
As far as examples… Hollywood Visionary was a game where I actually would’ve liked my storyline to feel a little different for being gay, due to taking place in the 1950s… not to the point of being stopped from doing anything, but just a bit more of an acknowledgement, and maybe fueling the paranoia a little more. (Especially when my male love interest talked about previously having been married to another man… that didn’t really feel like it’d been written with gay '50s characters in mind…) There’s actually a brief scene I really liked which never displays when playing, because it’s hidden under *comment, in which an unpleasant character makes a brief homophobic insult… and then another character steps in for some major comforting time… and that comforting time gave me really warm and happy feelings… so I liked having that.
6th Grade Detective is the classic example of a game which I really like (a lot), but which I felt made an unfortunate decision when it comes to playing a gay character… namely a bit of banter where a love interest’s uncle will tease the main character and that love interest about being a boyfriend/girlfriend… but you’ll only get this tease if they’re opposite genders. The teasing was cute. I don’t want to be deprived of cuteness due to playing as gay 
Moving from LGBTQ to gender, there’s Slammed!… if I recall correctly, if playing a woman (which I haven’t done, so I’m going on hearsay), there’s a bit of a plotline involving challenging sexism in wrestling, which I think sounded optional, one of the paths you can pick near the end, and not available for men. That sounds to me like a good way of handling this, since it’s giving more plot material, rather than depriving the player of plot material, and it’s targeted to showing the discrimination as wrong, and you can choose a different plot if you want to.
Now, in @Spyder’s WiP, The Oval Office, I did recently give some advice in terms of gay characters that maybe other people might disagree with. I mean, I was only giving the advice from the standpoint of what I, personally, might like to see. Basically I was just saying that, if I’m playing a gay president, I might like to see some mention of this… and I was saying this not from the standpoint of “please hurl challenges and abuse at me 
!” but from the standpoint of “becoming the first gay president would be a big achievement. I would like to be recognized for this.” There was already a similar question from a reporter for someone playing a female president, about how it feels to be the first woman president… anyway, wondering how others might feel about that bit of advice…
Also, when it comes to realism, I think one of the main problems is when people use “realism” as an excuse to bash other people for writing something inclusive… but I do also think people can write something with realism and inclusion, and can even write something that depicts a setting where discrimination exists but write a story that is still inclusive.
One of the big things is that people use use discriminatory settings as an excuse not to write characters from the group discriminated against… “this is a patriarchal and homophobic setting, so of course all my characters are straight men.” I strongly feel that, in such cases, it’s very important for such a story to really use characters from the disadvantaged groups… “this is a patriarchal setting, and therefore I shall write about women and GBTQ men.”
(I would like to see more settings without all this discrimination too… I just think there’s more than one viable approach here…)
Let’s see…[quote=“ParrotWatcher, post:1, topic:27311”]
Firstly, and I hope I don’t need to belabour this point, is it wrong to include LGBTQ minorities in a work, even when “realism” suggests that they wouldn’t be there? Of course not; representation is important, both for LGBTQ readers, and for non-LGBTQ readers.
[/quote]
I don’t even really think there’s going to be many situations where it’d be unrealistic for such characters to be present. In some historical settings, and settings based on those, it might be unrealistic for them to be open about that, true. But I think people tend to underestimate how present LGBTQ people have been in history, maybe because it often gets censored… and people tend to think that a lot of settings were way more intolerant than they actually were. The early middle ages, for example… not exactly a great time to be gay, but while the church considered it technically sinful, it wasn’t really considered a major sin, so even a 100% realistic depiction of the middle ages
Also, I would like to emphasize that this is not necessarily true. History is not just the history of Abrahamic religions, and even Abrahamic religions have not always been uniformly homophobic and transphobic. There have been other cultures with homophobic and transphobic attitudes, but not most of them. And it comes in different degrees too… there’ve been a lot of societies where it’s okay to have gay relationships but heterosexual marriage is expected… this still isn’t great, but it’s more complicated than just complete condemnation.
I think this might be where our opinions are diverging a little ( 
)… but, ah, I certainly agree that the example you give is something that people should refrain from writing. I’d say that goes to the point of whether you’re actively discriminating against the player’s storyline for choosing a gay character… are you cutting out narrative options, and closing out a happy ending? Then yeah, that’s unfair. But you can still work with such a setting and provide sorta bonus material, without closing any doors… then that won’t be to everyone’s taste, sure, but I don’t think that’s wrong.
I do think I’ve seen too many stories, plays, movies, etc., where the gay couple gets a substantially worse ending than the hetero couple. Which always feels like it’s saying “gay people don’t get to have happy endings. Now, heterosexual people, go feel bad about that. But not too bad, or it will disrupt your happy ending.” Let’s try to avoid doing that.
I’m not familiar with that film… I googled a little, and I wonder if this might be something to do with the fact that the film sounds like it’s more focused on a formerly bigoted character, and not so much on the people dealing with the bigotry? 
Yeah, me too 
I feel like I, personally, have a strong emotional need to have both of these things in my stories. I really want to enjoy and have stories and games where being gay is not an issue, and there are other problems driving the story. I think that people using so-called “realism” (I say “so-called” because it usually isn’t 
) to disparage those are deeply misguided. But I also occasionally like to wallow in something that’s more about gay issues… and I also really like sometimes a story about overcoming those, or at least trying to…
).
