Baron Harkonnen is most certainly a gay character. His preferences are for men and Frank Herbert made this clear in the 1984 film, when he could be much more overt than he could in the 1960s when writing the book (people tend to forget that Herbert was deeply involved in plotting and structuring the film, and invented some of the stuff fans weren't keen on, like the weirding modules). The
Prelude to Dune trilogy, although non-canonical, does double down on this, Brian Herbert knowing that his father had intended the character to be gay. However, the Baron was also concerned with power, dominance and narcissism, seeing in the handsome young men himself when he was younger. The only time he did have congress with a woman was at the behest of the Bene Gesserit and was against his preference.
Frank Herbert was also working through some issues on this. His second son, Bruce, was gay and they became bitterly estranged over the issue. They did not reconcile before Herbert's death in 1986 and Bruce's (from AIDS) in 1993. A common reading is that Herbert was working out his anger towards his son, especially since he revisited the issue in
God-Emperor of Dune, when Duncan Idaho gets angry at the suggestion that male homosexuality is present in male-only armies (against all kinds of face and reason, when Herbert as a student of Greek history should
really have known).
On top of that, it is troubling when the dictates of inclusiveness imply that a work doesn't reflect reality unless it contains an unrealistically high representation of minority characters.
I don't offer that as a defense for prejudice of any kind, but in the case of a book like Dune which only has 20 or so central characters, and the sexual preferences of only 8 of those characters is discussed, how is it reasonable to complain that those 8 don't include a member of a group that is less than 2% of the population? In the US you are more likely to be Native American/Alaskan than LGBT.
It would seem that "PC" often implies that an over-representation of formerly or currently marginalized groups is a necessary redress for a lack of inclusiveness in the past. And when your goal is to reflect the world as it really is, this is a gross distortion.
I agree this can be an issue, although the 2% figure appears to be quite low and applies to people who 100% identified as homosexual. When bisexual people and people who identify as heterosexual but have had one-off homosexual experiences (or "experimenting") are counted, this rises quite rapidly, in some counts as high as 20%. To what degree this should be reflected in fiction is of course open to debate.
However, this argument also risks being seen as deflective (not in this case), since the most common form of "non-PC" writing is seen as marginalisation of women, who make up 52% of the population but often make up a small number of the characters in a work of SF or fantasy (in the case of
The Hobbit, rather famously, there isn't a single female character in the entire book), and this tends to be the thing most commonly complained about. Although this has also improved remarkably in recent years.
