The book's protagonist, Thomas Kell, has a team assembled around him in Turkey, and it just so happens that one of his assigned team members is covertly gay.

And it just so happens that the Lady in Charge of providing the team to an in-but-not-quite-fully-in burnt spy doesn't even know, even though she's meant to be some sort of Stella Rimington type who should know these things.

Some of the readership got their desired Identity Character … or did they?

The SIGINT part of the team found out first, relayed the information to the Lady in Charge, and had the gay agent pulled from front-line duty just as he was likely to be compromised by the likes of Turkey's MIT.

In the book, all that happened to the gay agent was that he was "sent home", and that the character was never seen again, but …

In the service, however, this is the sort of revelation that isn't all that welcome or tolerated. Withholding interesting and potentially dangerous unconventional lifestyle choices from everyday people is one thing, but withholding that information from the service is quite another.

And so we don't see the character again because of security pragmatism: the gay agent isn't employable anymore in front-line work, and may not also be trusted with … no, we shouldn't make such puns, should we.

But the point is this: although the gay agent may be employable in situations where there's a need for one, there wasn't a need for one in this situation, and in fact his presence could have compromised security for more than just one mission.

You need to know going into these situations whether any of your team happen to be Queens who can be coerced into being Pawns.

Failure to disclose signals a deeper failure of character, and it's interesting how Charles Cumming showed that could be an operational security issue with this particular community.

The bigger problem: these people so badly want to pass for "normal" that they can't accept that the best thing they could do at this point in time is to maintain separate communities with negotiated exchanges.

They so badly want their quasi-utopian revolutions now that they can't see that they need to maintain less hopeful but more survivable strategies.

What activists within these communities especially don't understand in general is the notion of tolerance: people in general have been willing to tolerate their existence in theory as long as they don't have to become aware of their existence in fact.

Push hard enough and many people will seek an actual absence when a theoretical absence won't suffice, because they'll see risks with no rewards and behave accordingly.

I do have to admire the cleverness of the author: you Alphabet Letter Soup people at the publisher's and elsewhere got what you wanted, but that didn't mean that you were going to like it.

Homosexuals are like cockroaches… The moment you refuse to kill the first one you see, there will be 50 more before the week is out.
The VERY first thing they do, always, and in every culture where they are not eliminated on sight, is to start corrupting the youth, raping them, and twisting their sexuality to be just as sick as their own. The spread, they recruit, and they pervert and destroy every single thing they touch.

It doesn't matter if they 'do it behind closed doors', they are EVIL and their lord, their master, has ensured that they crave youth as much as their twisted contemporaries… Gay literature is always filled with older men corrupting boys or older women 'introducing young girls to the mysteries of witchcraft'.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, and thou shalt not allow abominations to roam, sin, and corrupt freely. Because children are their favored prey, always, and you would not allow a child-eating wolf to sleep in your kennel, why would you allow a child-screwing faggot to live in your community?

Is there fear? Yes, but it is not a phobia, it is the well-founded fear of the destruction of your most precious family members, the helpless young that cannot protect themselves from the depredations of Groomers. Any more than a sheep's fear of a cobra is some kind of reptile phobia.