To use one example of that realism factor as applied to queer people in my stories

I use three approaches. First, the queer people in these stories are fully rounded people with lives, family histories, interests, histories of doing things, and in all of that they’re queer, either lesbian, bi, gay, trans, or what have you. It is a part of their lives and neither all-consuming and a substitute for anything else with the character, nor is it minimized and given only lip service. Meaning, in short, that if two queer characters have sex with each other it gets the same level of attention as straight characters in the story. Short of outright smut stories, it gets treated as a matter of fact part of life, not all of it. Which is how sex and sex lives work in the real world.

Second, there is a diversity of body types, appearances, and multiple types of queer people. Including specific efforts to include people who get left out in real world discussions. Two of my main original characters in one fandom are a butch lesbian and the bi lover of a deceased (or not) canon character. One of them is a survivor of one of the roughest, most brutal units in her society’s wars and comes out of it with a wee bit of an Eddie Blake from Watchmen vibe. She works as a foil to the canon character she’s usually shipped with and the two embody the gap between ideal societal self perception (canon character) and much more unpleasant reality (original character).

The other is the partner of a deceased character in many stories but not in all of them, who sticks together with the other person in the triad…..and while bi and a man he also has a hypermasculine macho aura that is in its own way a blatant bit of queer performance art that subverts the pretense which is no small part of how he gets away with it under the Sozin laws. He’s basically a gender flipped de Maupin for the Sozin era who’s basically ‘fuck your rules.’

And of course there’s Azula, who is neither butch nor femme, but somewhere in between with a clothing choice that’s both/and and not either/or.

In the Sailor Moon fandom Kunzite and Zoisite are portrayed as gay in both past lives and the present, and no less badass than their canon selves. They’re both very pretty men in one way, but also showcasing that pretty/femme gay men can be every bit as badass as the more conventional 'macho’ types.

Haruka and Michiru are written in a specific way that goes for a different approach to standard fandom. The Kaiohs do not like Michiru’s gayness, so she gets booted out and lives with everything provided for her but nothing from her family but that. She is 100% gold star lesbian, and a femme hyper-feminine lesbian.

The Tenohs do accept Haruka, who is butch, lesbian, but like lesbians in real life she did date a man and her first relationship was with a boy. Said character sometimes shows up and isn’t entirely reconciled to Haruka being gay, in some storylines, and is entirely accepting in others (and not actually the main villain in any case but more of a sitcom arch nemesis for Michiru in the sense that he sees himself as this and she barely deigns to notice his existence at all).

So in this sense it subverts things in standard Sailor Moon style that the more obviously gay character is the one who has full heartwarming familial acceptance and the lipstick lesbian is the one who got kicked out and 'we don’t talk about Michiru'ed.

With Adora and Catra, they’re both gay as I write them, with Catra being more butch and Adora more in between/not really giving a damn about clothes. Adora is 100% Catra-sexual, Catra spends a lot of time in denial of feelings that drive her actions and which shape their dynamics in the Magicatra AU while giving Catra the Mistress of Mixed Signals moniker in a way that makes, of course, things fun to write. LOL.

There are a variety of different experiences and realities with this in real life, and I aim to capture that in fiction while using it to amplify that sense of realism.