Listen if you’re out here categorizing Duke as the straight ally without thinking about it I do thinks it’s because you’re racist and some sort of you doesn’t acknowledge him as a full character.
However.
I do think that for the first year of his vigilante career at least, Duke thinks of himself as the straight ally of the family, purely because he’s never had the time to consider otherwise. Basically the entire time he’s been goi by through puberty his priorities have been finding his parents —> leading a gang —> being Gotham’s only daytime Bat. Not a lot of time to ponder your sexuality. I think he gets with Izzy because he thinks she’s beautiful and he loves her, and then once that falls apart (because as much as I love Izzy I do think that’s where their story is going) he just kind of doesn’t think about romance or sexuality for a while.
Then he gets injured or someone’s out for him specifically and he has to spend a week or so locked up in the manor, and for extra angst this would be in a timeline where Alfred is dead and Verity hasn’t shown up yet, so it’s really just him and his thoughts, and he has three or four identity crises all at once. Those thoughts he’d been pushing down about how his parents wouldn’t want him to do this, and if when they wake up they won’t be proud of him? Of how he doesn’t know what it means to feel human, not in any mundane sort of way, not when he’s the only meta in this horde of insane people, fighting a city’s worth of crime alone every day? Of how when nobody talks to you as a civilian, just as The Signal, things like the gender you got assigned at birth feel just as distant as the name you got then? They all come crashing down on him at once, and he crashes out so hard he almost gets tranqued the first time he comes down into the Cave with wild eyes looking like he hasn’t slept in weeks.
