Who cares if 76 is gay or not. It makes no difference to his personality, to his morals, to his reasons for fighting, it doesn’t make him any less or any more of a good or bad person. That is normalization. Not letting one particular aspect of his character, his orientation, in this case, define the whole.
With that said…
“Revealing” a long-existing character’s sexuality, only after so much time, easily seems like pandering. In this modern age one’s sexual orientation is not and shouldn’t be a big deal, anymore, to anyone. LGBT people, straight allies, writers, producers, casting…etc. cannot stop talking about “normalization”, and yet… they cannot help but sensationalize sexual orientation and even ethnicity and gender (and gender identity), almost every time. There has been plenty of tokenization and retconning of ethnicity and sexual orientation in the past few years, of comic book characters both in print and in live-action and that’s because today’s writers are too lazy to create original characters. Instead they re-skin and change an already well-established, long-existing character’s skin-color and/or sexuality (to tick off boxes), and rarely anything else about them, then they jump up and down yelling “See how much we do for diversity and representation, we’re so inclusive!” and the woke crowd laps it up, without even realizing how little effort they’re actually making and how insulting it ought to be to be given token handouts, which are akin to crumbs swept under the table.
And if the only way some people can see themselves in a character and identify with them and feel represented is if they happen to share one superficial aspect (skin color, orientation, gender, gender-identity, religion), if nothing else that they already have in common, that they already like in the character can enable them to do that and they absolutely must have that one particular thing in common, then, that’s their problem for being so shallow, for letting their so called community tell them that the only way they can identify with a character and see themselves in them is if they share one particular aspect.
But, as an olive-branch, it is understandable why they feel that way, why they crave representation and the need to identify with a character over some characteristic they coincidentally share. Ever since media became a thing, for the past 50-100 years they had no representation, their stories and experiences weren’t told, either in print or on screen, so every little thing, even if it’s just token representation can and will mean a lot to them and they’ll cling to it, and fight anyone, tooth and nail, even those who tell them it’s very little, because even those comments they will consider an attack. People like myself, when we say all this pandering is pathetic and lazy, we mean it’s not enough. We see it for the minimal, bare-minimum, token effort it is, while it tries and often succeeds in passing itself off as something more, often still relying on stereotypes and one-dimensional characterization when it comes to personalities.
When the new Masters of the Universe: Revelation came out, Kevin Smith and Co. admitted the reason they tokenized the Andra character, instead of inventing an original, dark-skinned character, was because they were afraid of the backlash, that people wouldn’t grow to like a completely new character, when that is what the majority of fans would easily accept. Much like religious extremism, only a small minority are actually genuinely racists and bigoted, who’ll hate and dislike a character for their darker skin or different sexuality, and whether they’re new or tokenized wouldn’t even matter. And their tweets and their voice gets amplified by social media, to the point where they seem like a rampant, rabid, racists and phobic majority, when, actually they don’t speak for any more than a small minority, much like the religious fundamentalists or the woke crowd, and yet their influence has taken over the entertainment industry and social media so effectively it seems they’re everywhere and believe they speak for everyone and with the effect of the media and social media they make themselves appear a much bigger beast than they really are.
