In general, I think people should basically play what they like to play. Some folks like to play ale-swilling dwarves and will even play this archetype in games of transhuman sci-fi in one way or another. Some folks like to play super-magical nerdy types. Others play warrior-women, or nature-hippy-lovers or Awesome Dudes On Fire or lithe, dexeterous types, or witty spy types, or whatever.
Some folks just like a particular archetype (or two or three or four) and don't generally go outside of that, and that's fine.
Others like to play a variety of characters inside and outside the norm (I count myself among that population), with what they choose to play based on their own particular predilection at the moment, or random chance, or whatever. That's fine, too.
Amongst the galaxy of archetypes and character types, the "
Camp Gay" is one of them. Not one of them everyone likes or wants to bother with at their table, but one of them.
One of them that inevitably inspires bawdy jokes. It's balled up in the archetype: the character is
about their sexuality, to a large degree.
So it's one that only very...er...open...parents would probably be willing to share with their young 'uns.
I don't recall playing a gay character myself, ever. Mostly because my characters usually don't wear their sexualities on their sleeves, anyway. I've had a few gender-swapped characters (most recently, a gnome artificer and a thri-kreen ranger), but neither one had any real romantic prospects. They may as well be asexual. My male characters, for the most part, are the same way.
I've had female characters and gay characters and gay female characters and camp gay characters in games I've run. I've played with a pretty diverse selection of players, though, too. From the gay player who played the straight male character who was a telepathic womanizer to the gay male player who played the gay woman character who worshiped Athena to the straight female player who played the "omnisexual" male cleric of love and lust. I've seen a pretty big diversity. Whenever a player played up the sexuality of the character, there was hilarious color commentary often involving wang puns. It had a lot more to do with the
presence of sexuality as a major character trait than it had to do with the genders or sexualities of the assorted folks at the table.
One of my recent campaigns involved a gay man who played a gay character who was a Fey-pact Warlock (4e) who claimed he got his powers by sleeping with and becoming the "favored boy" of a particularly beautiful (male) Fey Lord, and who then used his powers to bang everything, particularly dudes. Sexuality and power were woven together in the character, so of course, sexual jokes were hurled about, because that's part of what the character was about.
I think some groups just don't really like being concerned about their characters' sexualities overmuch. Which is fine. It's not always an identifying characteristic for people. It isn't always part of a character's (or player's) bag of things they want to have fun pretending to be in D&D. I think sometimes people who spend a lot of time thinking about their own sexualities (and occasionally have that reflected in their D&D characters) might forget that the dude across the table playing the ale-swilling dwarf probably devoted more thought to chainmail vs. paltemail than they did to what the dwarf likes to bang. And that's a valid playstyle. Also, it is valid to worry more about sexuality than equipment, if that's what you want to do.
It should be said, though, that the more sexuality is a part of your character concept, the more it becomes a bit...PG-13, at least. If a big part of your character is what they do in the boudoir (or in public), it's going to get commentary, just as that drunk dwarf probably gets commentary on how he's had a few drunk accidents, or how he rolled a 1 because he began to sober up, or....
