In a 2011 blog, Platonic Forms of the Marginalized, Joshua Sawyer talks about his experiences writing Arcade Gannon, and his advice to other writers creating LGBT characters:
This brings me to my own experience with normative audience expectations of a character in a marginalized group: Arcade Gannon. Arcade is a companion I wrote for Fallout: New Vegas. In addition to being a Caucasian male, a doctor, and a swell guy, Arcade is also gay. Though Arcade has no more than five lines out of several hundred that relate to his sexuality (and even those are, at most, strong implications), players have given more attention to his sexuality than any other aspect of his character. Perhaps the most heated discussions were generated by an article Jim Sterling wrote titled Homosexuality and Fallout: New Vegas: A gay marriage made in gay Heaven. At the heart of the debate was Jim's assertion that Arcade was a great gay character because his sexuality is so downplayed, so "unremarkable". Internet posters far and wide both supported and contested this view, often explicitly stating their preferences for how gay characters should be portrayed. Like Lara Croft's sex, Arcade Gannon's sexuality dominated the definition and discussion of his character. The obvious problem is that no character can meet every individual's expectations of how a group should be represented. Despite this, as long as a group is significantly marginalized among characters in media, whether due to simple omission or active exclusion, audiences will continue to turn rare specimens into exemplars.
