Mr. Ratburn being gay. Was this always intended?

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I have somewhere where some people have said that they think that Mr. Ratburn was always secretly intended to be gay and that were hints of it in the earlier Arthur episodes as opposed to them just suddenly deciding to make him gay for that episode where he gets married to a man.

I've only maybe watched two or three episodes of the entire series so I don't know, but seeing how the episode was banned in some parts of the US it's understandable why they kept him in the closet for so long.

Humans are still really living in the Dark Ages. When Sesame Street first came out in 1969 it was banned on some US PBS stations for showing people of different races living peacefully together. When Charles Schulz came out with Franklin, the first black Peanuts character in 1968, a Southern editor wrote to him saying that while they didn't mind a black character being in the strip, they didn't want to see Franklin in the same class or even the same school as the white characters. Charles said he didn't answer the guy's letter.

Too many people think giving people who are LGBT, disabled, non-white, non-christian or female the same rights as they have will bring the world to an end. But *they're* the ones who are bringing the world to an end.

I don't think that was always 'intended' from the start that the character was meant to be gay, but I watched the show a lot as a kid (and would even sometimes catch it when I was older when there was nothing else on) and the vibe I got from Mr. Ratburn was that he was kind of...ambiguously gay.

Like a lot of his personality could be read as him being gay but it was never outright said that he was (nor does it necessarily mean that he was intended to be gay from his debut and they just kept it as subtext).

No one intends to be gay. Being gay is not a choice.

Mr. Ratburn is a fictional character, so his orientation is entirely the author's choice, no?

Yes, for real people being gay is not a choice.

However for fictional characters, the designers can choose whether or not to make them gay. Since they are fictional, everything about them including their sexual orientation is consciously chosen by their authors.