Writing LGBT Coming Out Scenes

Spoilers for Owl House Season 3. 

Recently I saw the first special of the third season of the Owl House. It has a type of scene that is becoming more and more common in media; a scene about a character's sexual orientation, in particular a very brief point where Luz expresses that she is bisexual to her mom, that I was very impressed with. As someone for whom these scenes are hypothetically written for, there's a lot of them I don't like, and it make me think why I don't like them. So I wanted to write on what makes me like or dislike a scene like that. Hopefully if you are a heterosexual person you'll find this interesting and maybe even helpful if you wish to write an LGBT character.

This is not about when characters are simply shown to be in a relationship with a character of the same sex, this is about scenes whose specific purpose is when a character expresses to another character or to the audience their orientation. I would divide these scenes into three tiers.

Low Tier: These I actively dislike

So the reason I dislike a lot of these types of scenes is a combination of two factors. One is that they are often very over the top and grind everything else to a halt. The other is when they are disconnected from anything else going on in the plot. In other words it stops what's going on for a whole scene to do something unrelated, which is never good. This is the type of scene people criticize for just being about looking good to the audience for being diverse. It's these scenes that stop the plot for several minutes to have the character dramatically they're gay. The reason I don't like this is multifaceted but you would never do something like this for a straight character. It ironically makes a character being LGBT seem like it has to be a big deal. Beyond that it's just awkward. I wouldn't like the plot to be stopped for several minutes for an awkward unrelated joke scene yet that's usually what it feels like; throwing something else in there that has no relation to anything on the grounds that maybe x group might like it.

Mid Tier: These I feel fine towards

These come in two varieties but in both cases I have no strong positive or negative inclination towards inherently.

One is that it's over the top and stops everything, but is actually important to the plot. Imagine a story where one of the subplots is a character who presumed they were straight is constantly unhappy in their relationships and there's a big dramatic scene where they realize the reason their relationships haven't worked is because they are gay but weren't aware of it. That conceptually sounds neutral to me, and would depend on execution.

The other is that it's subtle and doesn't interrupt the plot but also doesn't really tie into anything. This is when it happens to come up in a random one-off line or scene. For example a male character casually mentioning that he learned to play x game from "an ex-boyfriend of mine." No emphasis is being drawn to it and it doesn't disrupt the scene at all. It feels more natural and down to earth. I've seen some writers try and write it in a little bit unnaturally, but that's moreso just writing natural sounding dialogue in general. This too feels conceptually neutral to me, and would depend on execution.

High Tier: Ones I really like

I don't expect any of these coming out scenes to be this, this is an exemplar, I expect most to be mid tier. The ones I really like are combining the best parts of both, making it naturally fit into the plot connecting to it and reinforcing what is trying to be expressed in. This is the ideal to me for really anything in fiction, that it blends together harmoniously into the plot. The Owl House's is a great example of this. A significant theme of the third special of the Owl House is Luz feeling set apart from others, with a sequence shown of her childhood constantly being the weird kid. This is also the special Luz tells her mom that she's bi. Not only does it not interrupt the scene, in fact it's in the INTRO of all things, it naturally feeds into the theme that is being expressed, that Luz has always felt like a bit of an outcast and now with Amity she no longer has to be.

To me this seems fairly intuitive. It's just sort of a general rule of storytelling that you should devote more time to things that are more important to the narrative so the more important a character's orientation is to the narrative, the more time it makes sense to invest in it, through truly great writers can tie even tiny details into the big picture. Once again I don't expect this from every coming out scene, writing things to tie naturally into the greater narrative is difficult and for a coming out scene in particular to do that you're almost necessarily making a point about the LGBT community or the experience of living one which I imagine is harder to do authentically if you aren't one. I just hope this has given a good impression what makes one of these scenes better or worse in my humble opinion.