"The Han dynasty is split into two halves because of a brief usurpation by an outsider, and out of the 12 recognized emperors in the first half, the Western Han dynasty, 10 were recorded to have male lovers. I'm not sure if it was something in the air or in their genetics, but they really loved their men."
In real life, the causes of homosexuality, alongside sexual
orientation in general, are unclear. While modern science favors biological theories for explaining the cause of sexual orientation, one hypothesis, as counterintuitive as it may seem, posits the existence of a "gay gene" that increases the chance of someone being gay. At the very least, there is research that shows that every son that a woman has is statistically more likely to be gay than the previous son.
In fiction, of course, it's up to the writer. Fairly often, you may see gay characters who have relatives who are also gay. In particular, if a gay character has kids with The Beard, or via Homosexual Reproduction, those kids are more likely to be gay than not.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Tomoyo of Cardcaptor Sakura has an unrequited crush on her best friend and second cousin Sakura. It's later revealed that her mother had the exact same relationship with Sakura's mother.
Comic Books
- Fun Home: In the autobiographical comic, lesbian Alison Bechdel comes to wonder if this was the case with her and her closeted gay father.
- Gender Queer: A Memoir: Maia and eir sibling Phoebe have a lesbian aunt, while both turn out to be queer (in different ways).
- Green Lantern: This ends up being the case with Alan Scott/Green Lantern and his son Todd Rice/Obsidian, in DC Infinite Frontier continuity. Originally, Todd was established to be gay in the pre-Flashpoint universe. In the New 52 continuity, he was Ret-Gone'd because Alan only existed as a young man on Earth 2. The writer felt bad about losing a gay character, so this version of Alan was given Adaptational Sexuality. Then when the Golden Age characters (and their descendants) were brought back into Earth-0 history in Doomsday Clock, this was backported back onto the "classic" Alan Scott. And finally Infinite Frontier #0 confirms all this by having Alan coming out to his kids and asking Todd if it's always this difficult.
- Smut Peddler Presents: Silver: Majdi from "Fi Yidina" is himself queer of some kind with an old, tumultuous relationship with a Rabbi, and his estranged daughter is herself a lesbian who worries about coming out to him.
- Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman's whole family sports a bisexual instance of this troupe. Not only is Diana bisexual like her mother, Hippolyta, but so too is her twin brother Jason and her (originally biological, now adopted) twin sister Nubia. Certain versions of Diana also include Zeus as her father, who has philandered with both men and women in mythology.
- Young Avengers: America Chavez is a lesbian, the daughter of two married lesbian women, and her only known grandmother is also Ambiguously Gay. Taken to the extreme in her original backstory from America (2017), where she actually comes from a dimension where all humans are biological women and homosexual, because women in this dimension can have biological children with each other. This was subsequently retconned as a delusion she'd come up with to cover up the trauma of her real origins in America Chavez: Made in the U.S.A., with her mothers instead being adoptive rather than biological.
Comic Strips
- AJ & Magnus: AJ's father John is gay, and as seen in the January 09, 2023 strip, AJ's first crush is a boy.
Fan Works
- Crimson and Noire:
- In Chapter 39, Adrien is worried about telling his father that he's going to the school dance with Luka. As it turns out, not only is Gabriel open-minded about Adrien being bisexual, he's bisexual himself and had dated a man back in university.
- At one point Lila casually reveals she has two moms. While nothing direct about her sexuality has been made, it's been Implied she has rather possessive feelings for Marinette.
- Eyes on Me:
- Hope is a lesbian just like her grandmothers Ruby and Sapphire, though she was adopted by their daughter Garnet, so there's no biological factor in this case. That being said, however, Hope's gestational parent Malachite is a transmasculine non-binary person who's dating a woman by the time Hope and her twin brother Jonah are attending college in Be Wherever You Are.
- Jasper is a trans lesbian, and her daughter Amy is sapphic.
- Goldie is a lesbian while her twin sister Maya is bisexual. Their younger sister Petunia is also bisexual.
- In Choosing Life Verse, Elisabet only seems to have a thing for women — first Tilda, then Vanasha — and her clone/daughter Aloy winds up having a thing with Ikrie in their brief time in The Cut before moving on with Talanah.
- Ragyo Kiryuin in Natural Selection is a Depraved Bisexual and two of her daughters (Ryuko and Nui) are psycho lesbians.
- Earth-27:
- Suprema and her daughter Wonder Woman are both bisexual.
- The Amazon Menodora and her daughter Scandal Savage are both lesbians.
- Sibling version in The Fallen Miracle, where both Mirabel and her older sister Isabela are dating women in the afterlife.
- The Soulmate Timeline has the Bisexual Madoka, Mami, and Sayaka all have non-straight relatives. Madoka's mother is Bisexual, having once nearly married Madoka's teacher Ms. Saotome, while both Mami and Sayaka have female cousins who also have female Soulmates.
- In the Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) fanfic Tangle vs. Whisper, Tangle the Lemur has two moms and just grew up assuming she'd be a lesbian too.
- my youth is yours: Adopted family version, but Alex is gay and so is her younger sister Kara.
Film — Animated
- In Heavy Traffic, all of the Godfather's sons are gay transvestites.
Film — Live-Action
- In Another Gay Movie, Andy is gay and his father is either gay or bisexual (and his mom is a drag queen, although the character is apparently female). Played for squick when the two nearly hook up in a public men's room. The sequel gets squickier when the two had anonymous sex, finding out the truth only after.
- August in the City: When her daughter Ana comes home with a girlfriend, August remembers how she'd secretly dated a woman years before, and is a closeted lesbian.
- Crush (2022): Gabby is a lesbian, while her twin AJ's bisexual.
- Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives: One of the women in the film mentions her oldest daughter is also a lesbian (to outrage from her ex-husband).
- Giant Little Ones: Both Franky and his father (when younger) experienced attraction to women, and then a sudden revelation that led them to re-evaluate their sexuality. While Franky's dad seems to identify as gay, his own sexual orientation is left unclear.
- The Incredibly True Story Of Two Girls In Love: Randy, plus her aunt whom she lives with, are both lesbians.
- It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Winnie has a gay brother and lesbian aunt. By the end of the film, after dating a boy initially, she is all but dating Bernie, another girl.
- Maggie & Annie: Maggie relates that her mother is also a lesbian, so in her case, when she came out, her mom was actually overjoyed (she'd run away with a neighbor's wife). One of Maggie's lesbian friends implies that her brothers are all gay too, though she may be joking.
- Naomi And Ely's No Kiss List: Ely's the child of two lesbians, and he's gay himself.
- Uncle Frank: Discussed when Frank's mother tells him his great uncle was also gay and speculates that if curly hair can be inherited, then why not this too.
Jokes
- One old joke has a client going to a doctor about his attraction to men, and how his father, his brothers, his uncles, and his cousins also have that. When the doctor asked if there was anyone in his family who was not attracted to men, the client replied that his sister isn't.
Literature
- In Cyteen Jordan is heavily implied (and outright stated in the sequel) to have a gay relationship with his male azi assistant Paul, his son Justin has a similar relationship with an azi named Grant. Of course, Justin is also a clone of his dad.
- Volle is completely gay but has two sons from an Arranged Marriage. Volyan, the older son, turns out straight but Yilon, the younger one, shares his father's preferences.
- In the Heralds of Valdemar series, Vanyel of the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy was a Famed in Story gay man. He still had four children via being a Chosen Conception Partner, and muses that since one of them who's otherwise the most like him, Brightstar k'Treva, is quite interested in girls, he doesn't think being gay is hereditary. Hundreds of years later, in the "main" time period, Brightstar's descendant Firesong is showy and flamboyant and very gay, though several of the other members of that Secret Legacy are straight.
- All descendants of the elves in Labyrinths of Echo tend to be bisexual, which includes the current ruling dynasty of Echo. The protagonist of the series is very surprised to learn that His Majesty Gurig VIII has both male and female "favorites".
- Murder Most Unladylike: Both Daisy and her brother Bertie happen to be gay.
- Murdle: The School of Mystery reveals that Inspector Irratino had two mothers; Irratino himself is all but stated to be in a relationship with Deductive Logico in the main books.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Prince Oberyn is openly bisexual, and his second-eldest daughter, Nymeria, is attracted to women (it's not clear whether she's bisexual or a lesbian).
- In Call Me by Your Name, Elio's father not only susses out that Elio is bisexual and in a secret relationship with Oliver, but hints pretty strongly that he recognized the signs because he's also bisexual.
- Lightly parodied in Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda: after coming out to his family, Simon tries to deflect attention by accusing his sister Alice of having a secret boyfriend at college. She responds by asking him if he's sure she isn't hiding a girlfriend instead. She's joking - she's just worried about her family embarrassing her in front of her new boyfriend.
- The Simonverse spin-off novel The Upside of Unrequited features Deuteragonist Cassie, who self-describes as non-specifically queer but who is in practice exclusively interested in women. Cassie's mothers are a lesbian and a bisexual woman, and later books in the series reveal that her cousin Abby is also bisexual. Downplayed and Averted with Cassie's twin sister, the novel's main protagonist Molly, who is straight.
- In The Wicked Years, all four generations of the main character's family have at least one bisexual individual: Elphaba, her legal father Frexspar, and her son Liir all have one male and one female love interest apiece; while her granddaughter Rain's love interest magically changes gendernote midway through their romance, which leaves Rain noticeably unfazed.
- The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst features three generations of the titular family as the central characters. The main protagonist, Johnny, is an openly gay man in the mid-late-twentieth century. His life is often overshadowed by the fact that his father, David, was involved in several scandals in the 1940s and 1960s due to having affairs with men, even though over the course of his life, he married two women he made a show of being deeply attracted to. It's left very ambiguous as to whether David was really bisexual, a closeted gay man who kept getting in over his head trying to lead a double life, or actually straight but willing to sleep with his queer friends if they'd give him something he wanted in return.
- Just Juliet: Juliet and her cousin Lakyn are both gay.
- The Lost Language of Cranes is about a young man Philip, who comes out to his parents. As it turns out, his father Owen is himself a deeply closeted gay.
- Discussed in Dan Savage's book The Commitment, chronicling his decision to go to Canada to marry his long-term partner Terry Miller (it wasn't legal in the US yet). Their adopted son DJ was still in the "girls are icky" phase, and during the trip, he tells Dan he wanted to be gay like his fathers. Dan gently told his son it doesn't work that way, but in the book, he joked that Christian fundamentalists' hearts across the country must be breaking now. For what it's worth, the now-adult DJ has since come out... as straight.
- Presidential: Emily and her older sister Sutton are both lesbians.
- Proud Pink Sky: Set in the world's first gay state, where gay parents tend to have gay children – implying that sexuality is somewhat socially determined.
- Shatter the Sky: Kaia has two mothers, and is also seeing Maren, another girl.
- The Change Room: Shar is queer, liking men and woman, while her aunt's a lesbian.
- Vigilauntie Justice: Baz and her granddaughter Daisy are both trans women.
- Daughter of the Sun: Orsina is a bisexual woman, and it turns out she has two fathers. Given the story's set in a world with a bisexual majority, it's probably the norm.
- Quarters: Vree and her twin brother Bannon are both bisexual.
- Her Spell That Binds Me: Iona and Elise, who's revealed to be her first cousin, are both sapphic girls.
- To Be with You: Victoria's a lesbian, and it turns out that her little brother Wade is gay.
- Make Room for Love: Mira and her late aunt Miriam both desire other women. She's bisexual, while Miriam had been a lesbian.
- Legends of Ithyria: Talon is a Butch Lesbian, entering relationships with Erinda and Shasta in Sword of the Guardian. Her sister Lyris turns out to be a lesbian as well at the end of Prayer of the Handmaiden. Additionally, the Prophecy of Mondera implies this will be the case with Princess Brita—who is Shasta's second cousin, Talon's niece, and their adopted daughter.
- There's Magic Between Us: Lydia jokes about this when she finds out her grandma isn’t straight. She's pansexual, while her grandma once was involved with a female faerie.
- The Last Hours: Anna Lightwood is openly lesbian, while her cousin Thomas eventually comes out as gay.
- The Trials of Apollo: The titular character is openly bisexual, having dated both men and women (and capable of conceiving with all of them, since he's a god). One of his demigod children, Will Solace, is gay and dating Nico di Angelo.
Live-Action TV
- Played with in 13 Reasons Why. It's revealed that Courtney Crimsen, who has two gay fathers, is a lesbian, though she was adopted by her dads so there's no biological factor in this case. It's Played for Drama; due to growing up with people being homophobic about her fathers, Courtney herself is extremely reluctant to come out of the closet and feels driven to do some morally questionable things to hide her sexual orientation. She also feels uncomfortable that people would assume she's gay just because her dads are. She does eventually come out and her dads are very supportive; she also starts dating a girl and takes her as her date to the Spring Fling.
- A League of Their Own (2022):
- Max, a closeted lesbian, learns her maternal aunt Bertie is also an "invert" after overhearing her parents talking about why her mom's estranged from her. It turns out Bertie's a trans man, though.
- Jess and Lupe also hit on lesbian identical twin sisters in the secret gay bar who are fans of the Peaches team.
- Scarlett, the protagonist of the two-part opener of American Horror Stories, is the lesbian daughter of two gay dads. Downplayed in that it's never once drawn attention to in-universe.
- Avocado Toast: Molly's bisexual. It turns out that her mom's queer.
- The Baby-Sitters Club (2020): Dawn's father is gay, and she's later revealed as open to dating people regardless of their gender, indicating pansexuality.
- Cold Case: One episode focuses on a gay man who was murdered during the AIDS crisis. It turns out that he was attempting to blackmail some prominent closeted men to either get them to publicly help fight AIDS or at least put pressure on his homophobic father to get his sick partner into an AIDS trial. At the party where he announced this intention, he learned that one of the men had dated the victim's brother. The brother wound up killing him, out of fear the victim would out him to their father.
- Come Fly With Me: Fearghal is one of eleven brothers who are all air stewards; they're also all gay (except the one who's bi).
- Degrassi: The Next Generation:
- Paige's older brother, Dylan, is gay. Paige herself later enters a long-term relationship with a woman, although it's not really clear if this is a case of being bisexual or If It's You, It's Okay.
- Defied on Degrassi Junior High. After discovering his brother is gay, Snake nervously asks if that means he is too. Glen is quick to reassure him that's not how it works.
- Drop the Dead Donkey: Helen is a lesbian, but anxious about coming out to her parents. When she finally does to her mother in "But is it Art?", she tells her that she suspected that it is the genes of their family - after all, she was a bisexual herself with Auntie Aggie apparently being a girlfriend of hers.
- The Fall of the House of Usher (2023): Among the Usher half-siblings, Propero is in a threeway relationship with a man and a woman, Camille uses Sexual Extortion on a male and a female employee, Napoleon has a male partner and cheats on him with women, Victorine is married to a woman and Tamerlane is Ambiguously Bi (she enjoys watching her husband sleeping with other women but it's unclear if she has attraction for them).
- First Kill: Juliette, one of the lead characters, is a lesbian. Her older sister Elinor turns out to be a bisexual woman.
- Downplayed on Game of Thrones. Loras Tyrell is a known homosexual. His sister Margaery is Ambiguously Bi.
- Gossip Girl (2021): Max, who's bisexual, has two dads.
- How to Get Away with Murder has Connor's dad, who came out as gay late in life, divorced his mom, and found love. This has cast a long shadow over Connor, who came out as a teenager and has always had to measure his idea of queer happiness against his dad basically leaving his mom in the lurch because he couldn't figure things out.
- I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021): Identical twin sisters Lennon and Allison both turn out to be bisexual.
- Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, whose Armored Closet Gay status is a longstanding Running Gag for most of the series, has two gay cousins. The first one appears as an easily forgotten Bit Character from the pilot. The other one, "Country Mac", is presented as a Foil who acts like Mac but without all his bad qualities (including being open and confident with his sexuality). Mac's father has also displayed bisexual tendencies, although that might be a result of having spent years in prison. And he later meets his estranged uncle, Donald, who is heavily implied to have been ostracized for being gay.
- The crew from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit once investigated the deaths of two HIV-positive gay men and discovered that one of them had infected a partner who later died from AIDS. They later discover that a gay activist was the likely culprit because his brother was the partner who died. One detective comments that it's likely their homosexuality was hereditary.
- Lost Girl: Tamsin and her daughter Dagny are both attracted to women.
- This trope was discussed in one episode of Louie; after Louie and his brother learn that their mother came out as a lesbian, his brother becomes anxious about it, as he believes that he might have inherited "gay genes" from his mom.
- Lucifer (2016): In season 6, Lucifer is bisexual while Rory, his daughter from the future, is shown to be attracted to women.
- The L Word: This turns out to be the case a number of times.
- Cherie Jaffe is a lesbian (she's married to a man, but later confirms her orientation), like her daughter Clea.
- Helena Peabody is a lesbian, while her mother Peggy's a bisexual woman.
- Dana's a lesbian, and her brother Howie turns out to be gay.
- Molly, like her mother Phyllis, turns out to be a lesbian.
- In Generation Q, Alice interviews a sportswoman who's a lesbian, and her twin sister is too.
- Bette and Tina's daughter Angelica turns out to be queer, coming out to them and dating her lesbian friend Jordi.
- The Mini Series Man in an Orange Shirt is about a gay man learning about his (now deceased) grandfather's forbidden love for another man while serving in the military. Given the period, the grandfather had it much harder.
- Mary & George: The titular Mary Villiers and her son George are both bisexual with same-sex lovers in this series.
- Implied in Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song".
"I cut down trees, I wear high heels, suspenders, and a bra! I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear Papa!"
- In Queer as Folk (US), Michael learns that his father is a drag queen.
- Often discussed on RuPaul's Drag Race. Dahlia Sin from Season 12 has a twin brother who's gay and, to her chagrin, had recently started doing drag. Also, Season 14's Alyssa Hunter and Canada Season 2's Synthia Kiss both revealed that their fathers are gay. Perhaps reaches its peak in Season 15, when twin biological siblings and drag queens (yes, they're both gay) Sugar and Spice compete against one another.
- Riverdale:
- Recurring character Moose Mason is bisexual, and his RROTC leader father actually attempts to scare him straight in an episode. It is later revealed that Moose's father is gay and did go through conversion therapy.
- The penultimate episode of the entire series reveals the gay Kevin Keller's father, Tom Keller, is also gay (or bisexual) as Kevin Keller walks in on him post-coitus with Archie's uncle Frank getting out of the shower. But this may just be a Frank Keller that never was supposed to exist due to the timeline shenanigans that were happening. It's a Long Story.
- One episode of Seinfeld reveals that Susan's father once had an affair with John Cheever. After she and George break up, she starts dating women.
- Station 19 has the openly gay Travis, who later in the series discovers that his unaccepting father is also gay.
- In Transparent, Josh eventually realises that everyone in his family is attracted to women, and he's the only guy (this makes him just about the only cishet character in the main cast).
- Vida: After their mom's death, Emma and Lyn discovered she had been married to another woman. It soon turns out that Emma's also attracted to women.
- We Are Who We Are:
- Fraser's birth mother Sarah is a lesbian. He himself is clearly attracted to guys (but may be bi).
- Caitlin's mom Jenny is at least bisexual, being married to her father but also secretly cheating with a woman. It soon turns out that Caitlin herself is bisexual, having shown attraction to boys and girls.
- Will & Grace:
- Vince is a gay man whose sister is a lesbian.
- In the 2017 revival, Jack's grandson is sent to "conversion therapy" when his ultra-religious mother fears that he's gay, partly due to her anxiety over this trope.note The kid's certainly got campy interests and mannerisms but is really too young to say with certainty yet.
- Years and Years: Daniel is gay, and eventually we learn that his sister Edith's a lesbian.
- Willow: Scorpia flirts with Jade as they fight and calls her "gorgeous", while she's been with Boorman in the past. They turn out to be half-sisters. On her part, Jade proclaims her love for her female best friend Kit after this.
- Yonderland: In the Christmas Episode "It’s The Thought That Counts", we are introduced to the Youngers, the Elders’ children. At one point in the episode, they tell each other their secrets - all things that are a nod to their parents. Elder Ho-Tan is a trans woman, and her Younger - who is played by a girl - says "I’m a boy!" - in other words, they’re both trans.
Video Games
- Val in Dream Daddy is romantically involved with a woman and has a bisexual father (her dad, Robert, was Happily Married to Val's late mother, and is one of the male player character's possible love interests).
- Implied to be the case in The Sims 3 with Gobias Koffi and his deceased father, Gaylord.
- Sibling protagonists Kassandra and Alexios from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey are both bisexual, as are all of their potential love interests. (Justified by the Everyone Is Bi setting of Ancient Greece.)
- Damien from Monster Prom has two Happily Married dads and is attracted to men, women, everyone in-between, and anyone who exists outside the human gender spectrum altogether. Downplayed and Justified thanks to the Everyone Is Pansexual setting of the game.
- Two of Byleth's possible love interests in Fire Emblem: Three Houses are Mercedes and her younger half-brother Emile, AKA Jeritza. They can both reach an S-Support with both male and female Byleth at the end of the game. Both versions of Byleth can also romance Rhea and her mother Sothis.
Web Animation
- Helluva Boss:
- Blitzo and his twin sister Barbie Wire are both pansexual. His adoptive hellhound daughter Loona is bisexual.
- Stolas is gay, and his daughter Octavia is asexual. Octavia's uncle Andrealphus is also gay.
Webcomics
- Umlaut House
- Rick and his father are both gay and came out on the same day even.
- Jake is bi but leaning toward male preference, and his dad commented that he thought he was gay before meeting Jake's mother.
- Volair and his son Pearce are bisexual.
- One of Amanda's daughters, Alice, is bi like her. The other one, Lain, is straight.
- In an aversion, Rhonda, Rick and Jake's genetically engineered daughter, is straight.
- That Cyanide and Happiness strip where a kid comes out to his parents, who both follow suit and break up.
- In Homestuck, Dirk Strider is gay, and his ectobiological daughter Rose is in a long-term relationship with a female alien. His ectobiological son Dave also turns out to be bisexual, meaning that everyone directly related to Dirk is non-straight in some way.
- Austen of Always Human has two daddies and she's interested in women. And Word of God says she's genetically related to at least one of her dads.
- In Shortpacked!, Mike claims that legalizing gay marriage is actually part of a secret plot to exterminate gay people, because being gay is at least partially genetic, and increasing societal acceptance means that less and less gay people will feel the need to stay in the closet by marrying beards and having children, therefore homosexuality will eventually be bred out of existence. Of course, this is Mike, so he almost certainly doesn't actually believe this and is just making it up to be an asshole.
- Contrasts: Ahsoka and Barriss both had two mothers, the backstory reveals. Ahsoka falls for Barriss, who returns her affections eventually.
- Something*Positive: lesbian Lisa's little brother Lee comments that he wants to write musicals when he grows up, to which Lisa's girlfriend Monette thinks "Is their family tree a queerberry bush?"
- Much later, Chirag mentions that he, his brother, and his sister are all gay, tattooed, and pierced.
Peejee: What the hell was in the water at your home?
Chirag: Liquid fucking awesome! - Seemingly downplayed in Ennui GO!, but later averted altogether. Izzy is bisexual while her identical twin Adelie is a lesbian. But when Izzy ends up getting a clone named Kirsty, she is presumably straight (the fact that she's only ever shown interest in one person kind of makes it hard to gauge her preferences). Adelie and Bella's son Max also appears to be straight, though much like with Kirsty, he's only ever shown interest in one person. He does, however, derisively refer to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as gay porn at one point, implying such porn does not appeal to him. Min, who was originally thought to be a Split Personality living in Max's head but turns out to be the spirit of his twin sister he absorbed in the womb, is a lesbian like her moms, so it appears that exclusive attraction to women is what's hereditary in this family, regardless of what sex the children are. Max and Min's fishman brother Caliban has not shown attraction to anyone, though since he was Raised in a Lab, he doesn't even know what sex is (which makes Izzy question if he's actually related to her).
- Drop-Out (2015): Sugar Kysley is the lesbian daughter of a lesbian couple. Both her mothers were also some form of intersex, and she inherited at least one of those forms; Truth in Television as intersex conditions are more obviously genetically linked than homosexuality. The specific forms aren't stated, but partial androgen insensitivity must be involved somewhere, as Sugar is explicitly the biological child of both her mothers who are stated by the artist to both be cis, and PAIS causes a female-appearing phenotype with viable sperm.
- The Evolutions of Homosexuality and Suicide: A hypothesis for why homosexuality could evolve and be passed down genetically is given in the comic, with the mainstream one critiqued. A hypothesis is also given for bisexuality.
- Rain (2010): Siblings Maria and Rudy are both gay, much to their conservative parents' chagrin. Ky is bisexual (and genderfluid), and their sister Heather is bisexual. Also, Rain's aunt Fara is bisexual. Rain ultimately ends up realizing she's a lesbian, and in the last chapter, we learn that Rain's sister Kellen is dating Heather; previously, Kellen had only been known to date men. And also that Rain and Kellen's gestational parent/Fara's sibling was really a closeted trans man.
- MoringMark - TOH Comics: Ayzee is shown to be some variety of sapphic given that she's dating another girl, though whether she's bisexual like Luz, a lesbian like Amity, or some other orientation altogether is unspecified. Similarly, her girlfriend Milan is also this as well, given that she's the daughter of Skara and Viney (who were Ambiguously Bi and Ambiguously Gay in canon and are depicted as a married couple).
- Exaggerated in Oglaf where Kronar's He-Man Woman Hater Barbarian Tribe are all Manly Gay, they've somehow managed to become a One-Gender Race via Homosexual Reproduction. At least until one of them gives birth to Kronar's daughter (though fortunately she's an Action Girl from birth).
- In ‘’Monsters and Girls’’ Adam, Evie, and Lili are three half-/step-siblings who all express attraction to the same gender. In addition, Adam is a trans man and has two biological mothers, suggesting one of them is trans as well.
- Ennui GO!: Izzy is bisexual and polyamorous, while her twin sister Adelie is a lesbian, and Adelie's daughter Min is a lesbian. Averted with Izzy's clone Kirsty, who is straight and in a monogamous marriage, and Adelie's son Max, who has only ever been with his girlfriend.
Web Original
- Academy of Merlin: There are three siblings — two boys and one girl — who are all gay.
- Xiran Jay Zhao's video on the male lovers of emperors in the Western Han Dynasty notes how 10 of the 12 recognized emperors of the Western Han dynasty were recorded to have had male favourites, to which Xiran wonders if the imperial Liu bloodline was genetically predisposed to bisexuality.
Western Animation
- Combined with LEGO Genetics in the Family Guy episode "Family Gay", where Peter volunteers for a series of gene therapy experiments. The last of which gives him "the gay gene" and makes him gay for the rest of the episode.
- The Great North: Ham Tobin is gay, and his great-aunt Dirt is a lesbian.
- Hazbin Hotel:
- Charlie is bisexual, while her father Lucifer is pansexual.
- Emily is queer, and her sister Sera is a lesbian.
- Hit-Monkey: Main character Bryce is subtly characterized and eventually confirmed as bisexual, and his daughter Iris is a lesbian.
- The Owl House:
- Implied with the Noceda family. Luz is canonically bisexual; and while her mother's own sexuality is never specified outside of her attraction to men, the fact that she had a bisexual pride magnet on her fridge before Luz came out to her suggests that she is bisexual as well.
- Also possibly the case with the Blight siblings. Amity herself is openly Lesbian, and enters a happy long-term romance with Luz. While her siblings' orientation hasn't been officially stated, Edric has been stated to be going out with someone referred to with They/Them pronouns, and the only interest Emira has shown in someone else is when she offered a flirtatious wink to Luz in "Lost in Language".
- Willow is the only named member of the cast who is the child of a same-sex couple (her fathers' exact orientations beyond an attraction to men being unstated), and she was confirmed in a post-series livestream to be pansexual.
- Rick and Morty: Rick Sanchez is pansexual, and his daughter Beth is bisexual, as she enters a sexual affair with her clone. Summer Smith, Beth's daughter and Rick's granddaughter, is also bisexual, as is her father Jerry. This leaves Morty as the only member of the main family who is presumably straight.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power:
- Bow is bisexual per Word of God and has two fathers named George and Lance.
- Captain Scorpia from the Horde, who has a crush on Catra, was also raised by two mothers, according to a photo on her nightstand.
- The Simpsons: Patty Bouvier is a lesbian, and multiple episodes show her niece Lisa Simpson having romantic relationships with both men and women in the future.
Real Life
- In 2015, there was a study that found genetic markers that may be related to homosexuality, which was covered in media as "finding the gay gene". However, the study had little statistical power, meaning that the correlation between the genetic marker and homosexuality is likely to be due to random chance.
- A number of studies estimate that around 30% of the variance in sexual orientation is explained by genetic factors. This does not mean that there's a 'gay gene', but rather that a large number of genetic variants may marginally increase or decrease one's propensity towards homosexuality. Notably, while this degree of heritability is significant, it's much lower than the heritability of physical traits like height and weight, or of mental traits like intelligence, openness, and extraversion.
- Various studies have put forward the role of pleiotropy, the ability of a gene to present in multiple ways depending on various factors, as a contributor to determining a person's sexual orientation. It has been noticed that the female relatives of gay men often have an easier than average time getting pregnant and staying pregnant, suggesting that the gene or genes that cause homosexuality when it presents in men also increase fertility when it presents in women, explaining both how it would be passed down and why it would be preserved by evolution.
- The German writer Thomas Mann was bisexual; his sons Klaus and Golo both turned out to be gay, and his daughter Erika was bisexual like him.
- This case in which a teenager decided to come out as bisexual to her mother ... and she responds by confessing that she is also bisexual.
- Homosexuality in males is correlated with having older brothers, and the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay. The most popular hypothesis for this phenomenon is that with each successive boy pregnancy, the mother's body begins to have an autoimmune reaction that produces antibodies against Y-chromosome-linked proteins. In a similar phenomenon, homosexuality in males has also been shown to run in those whose female relatives have more children. These predispositions together form the backbone of the so called "gay uncle hypothesis" which posits that in certain families who tend to have a lot of kids, it may be advantageous in the evolutionary sense for there to be a gay uncle (the genetics on female homosexuality are less clear) who doesn't produce offspring of his own but rather is there to act as help raising nieces and nephews to give them a better shot at making it to adulthood and therefore a better shot to pass on the genes.
- Former professional wrestler Matt Cage posted a selfie of him and his boyfriend on double-date with his father and his boyfriend. He also has a gay younger brother.
- Lesbian actress Jodie Foster was raised by her lesbian mother and the latter's partner.
- In 2023, while taking part in a telethon that raised money to fight anti-LGBTQ legislation, Marcia Gay Harden revealed that all three of her children were queer; with her oldest child being non-binary, her son being gay, and her youngest being fluid.
- Trans actress Laverne Cox has an identical twin brother named M Lamar, who is also queer. He also portrayed her character pre-transition in flashbacks in Orange Is the New Black.
- Fred aka Lucas Cruikshank is gay and has a gay younger brother, though their two other siblings are straight.
- Tegan & Sara, Indie Pop music duo and twin sisters, are both lesbians.
- Chloë Grace Moretz came out as a gay woman in 2024 and has two gay brothers.
- VTuber Sanagi Yuzu is bisexual. When she had her mom on for a "Smash or Pass" about VTubers, she learned her mom is also bi.
- The Wachowskis are a pair of trans sisters who work in movies.
- Gay actor Charlie Carver once discussed how his late father (historian/author Robert Martensen) came out as gay when he was 11 and how he was anxious about hurting his mother the same way he did. However, his identical twin brother Max is straight.
- American past Rev. Frank Schaefer made headlines when he was defrocked, then later reinstated for officiating his son's same-sex marriage. Through interviews, Schaefer (who is heterosexual) revealed that 3 out of his 4 children are gay.
- Vincent Price's daughter Victoria stated that when she came out to him as a lesbian, he responded by telling her about his own relationships with men.