Does it really come up that people are tired of coming of age LGBT stories and want to see an LGBT story of some other flavor? If it does, I think that kind of makes my point that the trope has been beaten to death.
So, it's been demonstrated that, for instance, when the people in a room are equally divided between men and women, a person looking at the room will describe it as being filled with mostly women. When there are, say, twenty or thirty percent women, it will consistently be described as populated half and half, equal amounts of men and women.
So, let's say there's a party. And quite a few guests come up to the hosts to say, "Wow, there are an awful lot of women here! Didn't you invite any men?" Would there actually be a problem, there? How likely is it that there are, actually, lots and lots of women and hardly any men?
The thing is, we notice what's not default. Default is invisible. Default, in this case, is straight, of course, and as has already been pointed out, coming of age stories are incredibly common. The ones you're noticing, you're noticing because they've got non-default characters. You're not noticing them so hard because there are so many of them, you're noticing them so hard because they aren't default. The comments aren't proof the numbers are skewed, they're proof that the commenters' perceptions are skewed.
I would also like to point out that "coming of age" happens to people who are straight, and people who are LGBT. The coming of age of an LGBT person is not automatically
about their being LGBT, but there's a tendency to see stories about non-default characters as being
about their non-defaultness. Because of course, if it's not about that, then why are you not just using the default, right?
Well, not right.
You suggested counting stories--which, you know, you could do yourself if you liked--but I'm wondering, what would actually be an acceptable proportion of coming of age stories featuring LGBT characters, vs coming of age stories featuring straight ones?
It's just something to think about--I don't necessarily want you to give me your math, I'd just like folks to think about what it means to assume every story with an LGBT protagonist is about their being LGBT, and what it means to say there are too many such stories.