Cast Full of Gay

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"...an absolute fleet of Berties!"
QI

The overwhelming majority of fictional works center around heterosexual characters, with anyone else being a Token Minority or nonexistent. Some gay-themed media, however, does the exact opposite by making most (if not all) of the characters gay or otherwise non-heterosexual.

While many gay-themed works are created by straight writers, the Cast Full of Gay is almost always created by gay or bisexual writers (at least in Western works ). As such, it will generally have a wider variety of Queer As Tropes instead of pigeonholing the characters into one particular stereotype, sometimes making the characters into sort of a gay Six-Student Clique or Five-Token Band. The few token straight characters that appear will usually be fag hags, dyke tykes, token homophobes, or family members of the main characters.

Interestingly, the mortality rate of gay characters tends to drop significantly in cases where most of the cast is gay, while the chance of a Happy Ending increases. This can also be attributed to the fact the writers are usually gay themselves.

Something to note is that in Japan, with the popularity of both the Boys Love and Yuri Genre, many straight writers do actually create works that fulfill this trope. These works still mostly have happy endings as the author is very likely a Yaoi Fangirl or a Yuri Fanboy.

Not to be confused with Everyone Is Gay, which is about fanfics where the entire cast is suddenly gay because Het Is Ew. Also, in spite of the fact that some examples center more around bisexual characters, this is distinct from Everyone Is Bi, in which gender and sexual orientation are simply treated as a non-issue.

Despite what you might expect from the oft-referenced 10% statistic, this is actually reasonably common in Real Life, since people typically build social circles around shared perspectives and experiences, making a gay character with mostly queer supporting cast is as much to be expected as a soldier character with mostly military supporting cast.

Examples of Cast Full of Gay include:


Anime & Manga

  • Sons of Eve, a manga by "With Love from Eroica" creator Aoike Yasuko. There is only 1 heterosexual, and maybe 2 bisexual characters in the entire series, and this includes one-shot characters.
  • Justified in the sci-fi novel/OVA Ai no Kusabi which is set on a planet where there are so few females that all the men have to find some other ways to *ahem* relieve the stress.
  • Axis Powers Hetalia: Well, of course it's subverted in that almost nobody's sexuality is actually stated - save Sweden, whose old character notes state it, France whose character description in Book 1 states that he goes for both men and women, and Austria and Hungary, who used to be married. There are hints to some others' sexuality, Italy in the Valentine's Day strips confesses that his first love was a boy (Holy Roman Empire) and Spain claims he wants to marry both North and South Italy, and waits until 2005 when Spain legalized same-sex marriages. But still, considering most of the characters are male...
    • Austria was also married to Spain at one point, and Poland and Lithuania were married (one of the first things Poland did was ask Lithuania to show him his penis).
  • Creo the Crimson Crises has enough of its cast lesbian to make an all girl Love Dodecahedron.
  • Gakuen Heaven, justified in that the series takes place at an all-boys school. Which is named BL Academy - just in case you didn't get the memo that this is a yaoi series.
  • ICE; when there are no men anymore, what are the remaining women to do?
  • Iono the Fanatics and The Mikos Words and The Witches Incantations by the same author. The former takes this Up to Eleven by having the eponymous queen's lesbian harem number somewhere in the thousands.
  • Kurogane Pukapuka Tai, an Fundamentally Female Cast in which only one female character has been shown to have interest in men.
  • Everybody (and his brother) in Love Mode.
  • Lyrical Nanoha has all the main characters except the few males and older women probably lesbian.
  • Otome Kikan Gretel outdoes even Strawberry Panic as every character shown has to be a girl interested in other girls.
  • Paradise Kiss has bisexual George, transgendered Isabella, and recurring gay Seiji. Justified in that it takes place at a fashion design school.
  • The anime Saki has a huge mostly female cast. Within the cast, the girls show a fair bit of romantic interest in each other and absolutely no interest in any guy. (Yuuki forms an exception as she seems to be the token heterosexual girl).
  • Sasameki Koto centres on a group of highschool lesbians who form a clique together.
  • Strawberry Panic has no men in sight anywhere, and almost every character is either in or pursuing a romantic relationship with another girl.
  • Strawberry Shake Sweet, about an idol at a talent agency. She's gay, her junior's gay by the end of the manga, her hair dresser's gay, her hair dresser's Stalker with a Crush is gay, the person two levels below her manager is gay, and the random photographer who takes Ran's picture is gay, and the random model is gay, and the only band in the entire world is composed of 4 lesbians.
  • Strike Witches has almost all of its Fundamentally Female Cast members showing attraction towards females ranging from subtle to overt.
  • Sukisho is notable for having no women depicted at all within the anime. All relationships, pornography, and everything is male-oriented homosexual in nature. Raising the question, how were they all born if there are no girls? And why does Sora seem to be so weirded out by homosexuality in the early episodes, given that it seems to be the norm?
    • Since most of the young kids in this show are basically the older cast in miniature, it's been speculated that there's some cloning/genetic tinkering going on.
  • Junjou Romantica, justified in the fact that it is technically a yaoi series.
  • Ouran High School Host Club parodies this when Tamaki declares that the rest of the characters are Homosexual Supporting Cast. The other students get revenge on him later in the episode by letting him complete a ridiculously ineffective plan.
    • This also is taken into account when a rival school explains to the Host Club that woman are superior and the thus the entire girl's school would only be in romantic or non-romantic relationships with other girls.
  • Vandread. Justified in that the main cast comes from planets that are all female and all male.
  • Yuru-Yuri has a main cast of eight girls, all of which have romantic connections to at least one of the others.
  • Chintsubu has a cast of four boys, all of whom are either gay or bi.

Comic Books

  • Dykes to Watch Out For. It's all in the title.
  • Many other queer comics like Chelsea Boys, and Bitchy Butch.
  • Though the focus of the story is a heterosexual man and his relationship, there is an inordinate number of gay supporting cast members in Scott Pilgrim.
  • In most of the comics by the German cartoonist Ralf König, the main characters are all gay men. He has even been accused of being a bit of a sexist, since the supporting female characters that appear in his comics tend not to be shown in a positive light.
  • The message boards of Pride High consist overwhelmingly of gay characters. And since these characters are often given cameos instead of generic extras in the actual comic, Poseidon Prep may be the gayest superhero school in exstance.
  • Small Favors takes this to an extreme; on top of having an all-lesbian cast, there aren't even any men among the background characters or mentioned in dialogue.
  • Circles is a gay furry comic book series featuring 6 gay men living in one apartment building. Even beyond this, a questionable number of shopkeepers and friends also seem to be gay.
  • Another well-known furry comic Associated Student Bodies also falls victim to this trope, but as it's gay-themed erotic fiction this was probably to be expected.

Film

  • But I'm a Cheerleader, which is set in an ex-gay camp. It also has one of the most straightforward examples of Six Homosexual Clique.
  • Velvet Goldmine.
  • The Boys in the Band is the earliest film example of this trope, right down to the diverse set of characters with little in common besides their homosexuality.
  • Better Than Chocolate, which is set in Vancouver, B.C.'s lesbian community. The cast also includes bisexual and transsexual characters.
  • The Broken Hearts Club is set in West Hollywood and revolves around the lives of gay friends.
  • The 2004 Slasher Flick HellBent. However, the mortality drop rule is averted as it is, in fact, a Slasher Flick.
  • The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. Straight cast (most are icons of machismo, actually), gayest characters possible.
  • Another Gay Movie, apparently set in a world where straight people don't exist.
  • The Troublemakers, The Yo-Yo Gang, and The Lollipop Generation - three queercore films by G.B. Jones that are as gay as they come (but she prefers the word "queer").
  • Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith
  • Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger
  • The heroine, her boyfriend, and an anonymous minor ballet dancer are the only straight characters in the 1948 movie The Red Shoes. Given the time period, this trope is played more subtextually than is typically the case for works of this nature.
  • High Art

Literature

  • Les Amitiés Particulières by Roger Peyreffite is one of the earliest examples of this. It can basically be summarized as Dangerous Liaisons with young Catholic boys. The story takes place is an extremely religious boarding school for boys... Except Peyreffite shows how such an environment actually augments the chances of one embracing homosexuality. Most characters are gay or bi.
  • The Counterfeiters by André Gide is an even earlier example of this. Most of the male characters seem to be either gay or bi and (sometimes unacknowledged) homoerotic feelings for each other abound. There is also an inversion of Bury Your Gays, as the only character that dies (by accidental suicide) is absolutely straight but simply too good for this earth.
  • The Sarah Waters novel (and later BBC series) Tipping the Velvet. Almost all of the characters are lesbians, and at one point the Bifauxnen heroine actually works as male prostitute...for male clients. Yeah.
  • The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan. Two of the three main characters are canonically gay. Plus numerous side-characters, several who act as love interests for the MCs.
  • The Warchild Series. 95% are either confirmed gay or bi.
  • The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, a classic pulp series that explores the intertwining lives of several lesbians (and their Gay Best Friend) in 1950's Greenwich Village.
  • Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. The only straight characters with more than half a line are the main character's best female friend and her ex-boyfriend. All the others are gay, lesbian, or transgender.
  • Daughters of a Coral Dawn and its sequels are set mostly among female-only settlements, both on Earth and the distant planet Maternas. This is justified: Men are now über-arseholes and the women are super-intelligent Half-Human Hybrid lesbians (with a dash of Kissing Cousins) who can reproduce by using an illegal fertility drug called Estrova. This gets taken to One-Gender Race in the third book.
  • Laurie J. Marks' Elemental Logic fantasy series.
  • The main characters in Rule 34 are a lesbian cop, her bisexual old flame, a married man who cheats on his wife with other men and a bisexual sociopath.

Live Action TV

  • Most stuff Russell T. Davies has done since 1998:
    • Queer as Folk was about the gay scene in Manchester. All three main cast members are gay.
    • Bob and Rose is about a gay man falling in love with a woman and being ostracized by the gay community.
    • Torchwood, had, according to Word of God, five bisexuals (well, four bisexuals and a omnisexual) in series 1 and 2, one of whom happens to be in a stable straight relationship. All of the main characters are shown with both men and women, although with varying levels of bisexuality. (In order of queerness: Gwen is seen kissing a girl when she's under mind-control; Owen is seen hooking up with a man once; Ianto claims he's only attracted to Jack, not to all men, but dates him romantically; Tosh dates one woman and doesn't elaborate on her overall sexuality; Jack is properly omnisexual.)
  • In the US version of Queer as Folk, half of the actors in the cast are openly gay. They ended up (either by design or by coincidence) pairing one gay actor (those playing Justin, Ben and Emmett) with one straight actor (those playing Brian, Michael and Ted).
  • The L Word, which is Queer as Folk with lesbians
  • Also, though it's far less well known, there's Noah's Arc . In fact, pretty much any scripted Logo show will likely feature this trope.
  • Played for laughs in Little Britain, in which it seems that pretty much everyone in Daffyd Thomas' village is either gay or bisexual. Considering that Daffyd is a stereotypical Camp Gay who bases his entire identity on smugly asserting that he's "the only gay in the village" (despite the fact that he may not actually be gay at all), this is a source of considerable horror and frustration for him.
    • Also played for laughs in the Prime Minister sketches starring Anthony Stewart Head in which the Prime Minister is blithely unaware of his entire staff being composed of flamboyantly gay men who do everything short of making out on his desk.
  • Action turns into this by the end. Stuart, exec Bobby G, and action star Cole are all gay. Wendy and Janice turn out to be bisexual. Peter, the main character, is straight ... but that doesn't stop him from enjoying a blow job from Cole.
  • Most of the humour in the first episode of the second series of The IT Crowd comes from the three (straight) main characters being dragged to a truly terrible gay musical called Gay!: A Gay Musical and their reactions to it.
  • Dante's Cove. Almost every character on the show is either gay or bisexual. Except for the one Token Straight Woman, who is, of course, a villain.
  • As noted on the Mistaken for Gay page, a literal Cast Full of Gay appears in Frasier—much of the (male) cast is gay IRL, which resulted in their characters being Mistaken for Gay at least once.
  • Lip Service, which appears to be a British version of The L Word.
  • Plan V, an Argentine production full of lesbians.
  • While the not all the characters in Glee are gay, they do have three gay guys, one lesbian, and one bisexual girl, all in high school. Quoth the series creator: "It's show choir."
  • South of Nowhere started to evolve into this during the third season. More lesbian characters are introduced in recurring roles. All and all the are 5 lesbians, 1 bisexual, and one gay guy that really doesn't do much for the plot.
    • Justified in that Spencers Coming Out Story was the series A-plot, and by the third season she was A) out and proud, and B) Had broken up with her first girlfriend, so it is only natural that she should try to find other girls to date and to be reaching out to other LGBT-persons.
  • Most of the main male characters on Smash are gay or implied to be gay.

Music

  • The queercore genre generally involves bands with homosexual members who discuss LGBT themes. An example would be Shitting Glitter who are currently composed of five lesbians, but had a camp gay as keyboardist and his boyfriend as dancer, and the keyboardist's straight brother as guitarist early on. As would be expected they have N-Word Privileges and often use words like such as 'dyke', 'tranny', 'fag'.
  • Three of the four B-52's are gay, as was their deceased guitarist Ricky. The exception is Cindy Wilson who has been married since the Seventies. In recent years Fred Schneider has really amped up his camp nature, with his band the Superions...whose other two members are gay.
    • Judging from their mailing list, it would also appear that The B's gay fanbase easily outnumbers their straight one as well.

Theater

  • Rent features seven main characters, including a gay black philosophy professor, his transgender street-drumming girlfriend Angel (biologically male), a bisexual who can't seem to stay faithful, an uptight, straight-laced African American lesbian... and the three straight ones. Of course, Angel is the only character who actually dies during the show, though Mimi (straight) won't last long after the show's over.
  • Of the eight main characters in Angels in America, all five men "have sex with other men" (only three identify as gay), and there's something to be said about the apparently female Angel and her orgasmic kiss with Hannah.
  • The Boys in the Band, as noted in the film section.
  • The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer. Also literally (somewhat) true for the 2011 revival cast (Joe Mantello, John Benjamin Hickey and Luke Macfarlane are all out, at least).

Video Games

  • Artificial Academy by Illusion. It is the players choice of who and what they want in their game and play as anyone in the class they have created themselves. You can have a class full of girls only or boys only falling in love with each other, as long as you set the 'homo' option for the character in the maker.
  • The Metal Gear series is arguably the best example of this trope. Of course given the main characters, this is probably justified.
  • The Sims games allow you to create a situation like this, either in a single house/family or in a entire neighboorhood, but all sims can go either straight or gay.
  • Embric of Wulfhammers Castle. Good luck finding a female main ANY female character that isn't into women.
  • While it is fairly ambiguous, Persona 4 counts as an example. There is an abundance of Ho Yay and Les Yay, and Kanji and Naoto are possibly [1] in a Transparent Closet and Transgender respectively. Rise is just about the only member of the Investigation Team that is undeniably straight. Probably justified in that they're teenagers.

Visual Novels

  • The Visual Novel series Sono Hanabira ni Kuchizuke wo is a cast full of lesbian with parents being the only characters that show any heterosexual feelings.
  • There exists a full genre of yaoi games, mostly in the visual novel format. Many of them have this trope in action. For example, in Silver Chaos the only female that can be seen is in one of the CGs and very much dead.
  • Lampshaded in Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, when Taylor asks if she's the only straight person in the entire class.

Webcomics

  • My Life in Blue, which centers around a bunch of young Into Musical Theatres. Marius is Transgender, Alex is gay, and the most of the supporting characters are gay or bisexual to at least some degree. Unsurprisingly, one of the few straight characters, Alison, is a Fag Hag.
  • Carpe Diem.
  • Khaos Komix. The only apparent heterosexual of the main eight is Jamie: Nay and Charlie are clearly bi, Murfs is label-averse but seeing Tom, Tom is gay, as Mark and Amber appear to be, as does Steve, although he considers he might be bi.
  • In Ménage à 3, for a while, it seemed like every major character who wasn't explicitly gay or bisexual was at least very deeply uncertain. This was scaled back somewhat shortly before the one-month Time Skip, when Didi stopped identifying as bisexual, Sandra and Gary stopped wondering, and Kiley and Erik became more important as characters. This still, however, leaves six of the fifteen cast page entries (four more of whom - three possible Asexuals and a cat - are listed as variants on "unknown"), plus Jordan, probably Jake (who calls out Matt's name during sex), and maybe Senna (who seems to be hitting on Sandra at one point).
  • The main cast of Boy Meets Boy consisted of a gay couple, a bisexual guy, a heterosexual guy secretly in love with the bisexual guy, and the couple's landlady.
    • Interestingly, the spin-off series Friendly Hostility centered around a 90% heterosexual guy and his asexual boyfriend (later gay) living with nothing but other heterosexuals. It isn't until the very end of the series that any canon homoerotica goes on with anyone else, and that's between Derringer and Rudd which is...difficult to explain. Fatima did have a female stalker, but that's because she's Fatima.
  • YU+ME: dream.
  • Of the three leads of Shortpacked, Ethan is gay, Amber is (probably) straight, and Robin describes herself as "straight with an exception" even though her inner monologue shows she has at least two. Also, Leslie, Mike, Drew, and Conquest are clearly not straight (as well as Drop-In Character Thad and his late boyfriend Evan), Malaya thought she was bi for the first nine months she was in the strip, Rick and Faz are such Cloudcuckoolanders that it's impossible to tell, Galasso seems to be Asexual but does not understand what sex is, and even Ronnie seems to imply he's had affairs with men in one strip, leaving essentially just Roz, Jacob, and Ken. This is a phenomenon Amber's commented on several times.
  • Penny and Aggie didn't start out this way, but it became clear early on that Sara of Penny's Girl Posse was gay, and when she came out halfway through, bit characters Fred and Daphne were seen to be gay and began getting a lot more screen time, forming a second Cast Herd with Sara, Aggie, and Aggie's friend Lisa, who shunned labels throughout. The eponymous pair themselves were questioning throughout, especially later on, coming out in the final arc; Stan, one of the most important supporting characters outside the two cliques, seemed to have a crush on a male friend obvious enough for other characters to comment; and Depraved Bisexual Cyndi was the closest thing to a villain for about a third of the strip's run.
    • The spinoff, QUILTBAG (look at the title), stars Sara and Lisa, with Stan playing a small role, as well as Sara's mother, who seemed in P&A to have firsthand experience with homophobia, as does their RA Hank. Of their floor, at least three others seem to be bisexual (albeit at least two of them Contest Winner Cameos), one a lesbian, and literally no character thus far is definitively straight.
  • El Goonish Shive has only three confirmed gay main characters, but a lot of queer ones. Of the eight characters in the main cast, we have a gay male, a lesbian, a girl with bisexual inclinations who identifies as homosexual, a straight crossdresser (but only while genderbent), a straight girl with gender issues who sometimes wishes she were gay, a shapeshifter whose sexuality is a bit iffy, a seemingly straight girl who is attracted to her boyfriend regardless of his gender, and a totally straight male who happens to be the character who ends up Gender Bending most frequently. Confusing matters more, all of these characters have been genderbent at least once (including once simultaneously for one night) and felt attraction towards what normally would be their own sex. Then there are a couple lesbian supporting characters. All this gender fluidity is justified for a comic in which Gender Bending is easier than changing clothes.
  • Homestuck has the trolls, who are all bisexual with the exception of Kanaya, who is explicitly lesbian. The Kids by contrast are almost Token Straights (and fanworks often ignore that entirely). It should be noted that But Not Too Bi is very much in effect, however.
    • And now we have a gay kid as well with Dirk. And a strongly impliedly bisexual one with Jake.
  • Straight characters are a minority in the cast of Bridges.

Web Original

  • The core cast of Tales of MU is predominantly gay or bisexual.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series. Played for Laughs.
  • The whole point of Poe Cottage at Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe. The school administration has put into one safe zone every student who admitted on the entry form that he/she/it is either lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or intersexed. Because turning into a mutant and starting high school isn't hard enough...
    • Most of them are closeted to anyone not in Poe, though. The "official" cover story is that Poe is for the "emotionally disturbed" mutants, which has all kinds of Unfortunate Implications.
  • Aress in Wonderland for...well. Obvious reasons.

Western Animation

Real Life

  • It seems that one city in California named West Hollywood have a population with 41% are gay men, and a rainbow-colored city seal. Notice: 41% are gay men, not 41% are homosexual. If the sex ratio is still 1 to 1, that means 82% of men in this city are gay.
    • Wikipedia actually describes the female to male ratio as 100 : 129.9 as of the 2010 census, so it's actually only 73% of the men who are gay... not that this isn't still a very large ratio.
  • American prisons, Or So I Heard.
  • Any middle or high school gay-straight alliance has a high likelihood of being this for obvious reasons.
  1. The game itself is ambiguous on both