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Notes -
I was. Not gay, also not a football player. The TTRPG scene in the 80s and 90s skewed liberal (it was an even nerdier space then than it is now) but "queer" was still a dirty word; gay kids didn't gravitate towards D&D, they gravitated towards theater or music.
Like @Iconochasm says, the rise of games like Vampire :The Masquerade (heavily influenced by Anne Rice's homoerotic Vampire Lestat series) and other games focused on drama over miniature skirmishes was responsible for bringing a lot of those kids into RPGing.
GURPS writer Willian Stoddard once described the core thesis of all the WhiteWolf games as something like "You are a unique locus of suffering and drama, and from this you derive powers and abilities that affirm your special nature." Those games introduced a whole genre of personalities to TTRPGs, coming from music and theatre, and the gay kids came with them. I remember so many huffing sighs at the guys who couldn't remember their attack rolls, but had very strong opinions about how their character should look.
Tbf, that era of games had a lot stronger opinions about how your character should look (or how local coinage should work, lol Exalted) than the mechanical ramifications of any of their attack rolls, too. But even the more mechanically 'robust' splats were very much, even if they were also very far from any of the modern-day story games.
And Changeling was pretty queer whether the authors intended it to be gay-queer.
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