Any good books where the character is gay but it is never explicitly stated in the book...

The best you'll get is ambiguous homo shit like A Separate Peace.

I once wrote an entire novella based around a character who had attempted suicide and damaged the tendons in his right arm but there was never a natural moment to mention it so he goes the entire story semi-crippled without the reader ever finding out. It's a first-person narrative and the character is used to it so it just never comes up.
Of course that is irrelevant to this thread given the gay orgy scene in a Finnish bath house but I am picking up what you're putting down so to speak.

The Hollow Needle by LeBlanc
I'm not even fucking kidding. At one point, I flipped the book around and reread the synopsis, because I was convinced that I'd missed something. Exceedingly gay.

>Like the author's intention was to write a gay character but included no actual evidence of any homosexual attitudes, actions, or thoughts in the text.
What the fuck does this mean? you wouldn't even be able to write a straight character this way. By evidence do you mean any kind of conscious "trace" or just explicit statement of sexual habit or predilection? If you had that in mind even in the faintest sense it would probably make its mark somehow on the overall characterisation unconsciously.

Unless it's completely naturally emerging it seems like just a strange political novelty. when constructing a character the nature of their sexuality is going to be quite a big part of that, and while there's many circumstances where you would not positively mention it at all, it seems very unnatural to somehow excoriate all evidence of it, by sifting through and destroying all unconsciously projected overtones and undertones

Death in Venice

desu

The Gospel of John.

Confessions of a Mask (though the protagonists fascination with men is strongly emphasized)

OP, how did this not come to mind?

Confessions of a mask I guess.

Maybe In Search of Lost Time, Proust was probably gay and his critique of homosexuality and women was really implicitly gay

No one has mentioned Gatsby. Or is it too explicitly mentioned?

Catch Him in the Rye

Dorian Grey

In Cold Blood

Brideshead Revisited

dude it's about how his father never loved him

This. He married the man-faced red headed sister of his best red headed friend.

symposium by plato

>i get to make up whatever i want and the author has no say because college professors told me so

Look at this pleb.

Try Mishima's immanently gay narration

The catch 22 here is that you literally cannot write a gay character with announcing so, either directly or through action, because without something to announce sexuality it's just an identity title for people to interpret and as such, intrinsically meaningless.

It's not gay, it's just ripped naked guys killings themselves and ejaculating

Trainspotting's Begbie. Irvine Welsh imagined him as a repressed homosexual, while for the film Rob Carlyle did so too. Incidentally so, apparently.

Speaking of catch 22
>tfw finding out Colonel Korn is black after several hundred pages of imagining him white.

Idk about books, but the villain of the James Bond movie Skyfall was gay and it was never addressed. Just implied.

>I haven't even bothered to read the five pages of Barthes it would take to understand the argument and therefore assume it derives from authority

all of gore vidal's shit the fucking queer

he literally jerks off to a dude r u kidding me

he is not only gay but a pedophile too. and its not even subtle.

I read 2010 recently, and there is a veeeery vague suggestion of gay/bisexual encounters on board the ship.

The Pupil by Henry James is like this iirc. It's a short story though.

Nick Carraway doesn't even do anything overtly homo other than be an older guy who isn't married and kind of reject the advances of vacuous and shallow women.
So basically he's a Veeky Forums poster.

Vautrin in some Balzac novel, no one noticed at the time supposedly

>Hermione was black and Dumbledore was gay
protip: no

Well, he does bring a guy into his bedroom in Pere Goriot...

Just about ANY Horacio Hornblower novel.

so you can't write a straight character either?

apart from the City and the Pillar.

Hermione being black is obviously revisionary (and also contradicted by the text), but isn't Dumbledore being gay hinted at in the books? Or, at least, Rowling clarified it pretty closely after the fact, I thought

Nope. Sexuality is defined by words and actions. Without them you cannot impart that trait to a character meaningfully.

Billy Budd by Herman Melville.

The Great Gatsby.

Seriously.

Goodbye to Berlin

Basil and Lord Henry in Dorian Gray?

Not as many as the good books where a character is straight but it is never explicitly stated.

Damn saw this after posting. Definitely lots of homoeroticism in Dorian Gray but none of the characters are explicitly gay afaik.

Anything by DH Lawrence. That guy was a closet faggot for sure.