I’m a trans artist, and my entire main trio is LGBT. (Reason is a bisexual trans man, Charlotte is a questioning trans woman, & Oburan is bisexual.) Their identities are very important to me, but they’re also people first. (Reason is a priest/physician, Charlotte is an exiled mercenary, & Oburan is a retired necromancer.) Unless you’re writing a story about LGBT struggles that you have personal experience with or extensive research towards, your characters shouldn’t be defined exclusively by their gender or sexuality.
I also think the thing that irks me the most is that people only know how to write one type of characters for every LGBT identity. The soft flamboyant gay man, the outgoing bisexual, the super pretty femme lesbian, the indistinguishable-from-cis-people trans character… Yes, people like this exist, but LGBT people come in a lot more flavors. (Though, I’ll admit, it is actually pretty challenging to show the rep that I really want. Reason is a no-op trans man, so I struggle to get around censorship rules surrounding his chest. I have a lot of opinions on that, lmao.)
And I often feel like creators just… don’t know any LGBT people? They write us like fragile fantasy creatures that have to carry our horrible secret, instead of regular people who happen to have a more complicated relationship with gender and sexuality than them. In the end, the easiest way to write a good gay character is to write a character… and then make them gay. If you don’t have firsthand experience with LGBT struggles and stories, don’t worry about giving your character a traumatic backstory related to their gender/sexuality. Sometimes a guy is a super jacked soldier in the coolest armor ever made, and he also happens to kiss his husband goodnight.