do you think it's easier to add queerness to a villain or at the very least antagonistic character then it is to make a hero character something other than straight when they weren't initially written that way? if so, do you think that derives from the ol

It is a totally fair question.

Here’s one thing that makes this thorny. The average superhero writer creates a LOT fewer new heroes than you might think. When you see a year of comics, you see a lot of new heroes, but that’s shared by a ton of writers. If you have one monthly book, you have twelve issues max, and you have to maintain your main characters. Odds are you will create no more than one or two good guys a year.

But each of those issues needs a villain. Odds are again that you will create several bad guys each year, possibly a team of them, it adds up. 

So because these are new characters being created with a modern audience in mind, more of them will be POC and lgbtq than the host of characters created in the Jurassic era. And then it starts to look like all the new lgbtq characters are villains. So it’s EXTRA important, when we get the chance to create new heroes, to make an extra effort at diversity. Otherwise we get into creepy territory really fast.

Two other factors are, I don’t really consider anti-heroes like, say, the Secret Six or even the Runaways (teams that aren’t quite the Avengers, I mean) to be villains. I think having a character like Scandal Savage is still important, she isn’t the Joker, but she’s not Captain Marvel, and that’s okay. 

And finally, it’s also interesting that if we DON’T create some villains who are lgbtq, there is a lot of criticism from the LGBTQ community, which I think is pretty awesome, it shows that they don’t want every gay character to be put on a pedestal of perfection, they want real, believable lgbtq characters all over the morality spectrum. I always think that’s very cool.

But to answer the first part of your question directly, I don’t think any of it is is ‘hard,’ I think it’s just something that needs to be done, we have to bring comics into this century for basic decency, for the readership, for hopes of a more diverse range of creators and characters, and for the survival of comics, as well. 

A lot of the people saying it’s ‘hard,’ just aren’t trying, I feel.