It's perhaps not all that mainstream, but Diane Duane's YA So You Want to be a Wizard series (I first read them in the early '80s) has a fairly clearly gay couple as secondary characters. They're not explicitly identified as gay, but they're two adult males living together, bantering like a married couple. And when one of the main characters discusses revealing her own identity as a wizard to her parents, one of the men talks about the difficulties of passing vs. coming out of the closet--which is overtly about being a wizard, but can obviously be taken in other ways. (Also, one of her adult series has overtly homosexual and bisexual characters.)
And yeah, nobody in the books gets worked up about it. "Oh, look, these are our friends and neighbors living happily together, and they happen to both be men," appears to be the message. Now, the books are nowhere as visible as the Harry Potter books--I'm sure the controversy would be much greater for the latter.
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It's perhaps not all that mainstream, but Diane Duane's YA So You Want to be a Wizard series (I first read them in the early '80s) has a fairly clearly gay couple as secondary characters. They're not explicitly identified as gay, but they're two adult males living together, bantering like a married couple. And when one of the main characters discusses revealing her own identity as a wizard to her parents, one of the men talks about the difficulties of passing vs. coming out of the closet--which is overtly about being a wizard, but can obviously be taken in other ways. (Also, one of her adult series has overtly homosexual and bisexual characters.)
And yeah, nobody in the books gets worked up about it. "Oh, look, these are our friends and neighbors living happily together, and they happen to both be men," appears to be the message. Now, the books are nowhere as visible as the Harry Potter books--I'm sure the controversy would be much greater for the latter.