The Main Mystery of "Unsolved Mysteries": Where are the Gay People?

I'm a sucker for mysterious disapperances.  A hiker is a few feet ahead of you on the trail.  He goes around a bend and vanishes.  A debutante walks three blocks to the post office on a crowded New York street, and is never seen or heard from again.  During a plane flight, a businessman gets out of his seat to go to the restroom -- and never returns.

But I never watched Unsolved Mysteries (1987-2010).  It struck me as one of those shows you might watch on Saturday afternoon on a treadmill at the gym, where they say what they are going to show you, then show you, then say what they just showed you, followed by a five minute commercial break, five minutes of information in a 15-minute segment.

I started watching the 2020 reboot on Netflix due to the lack of other viewing choices and the summer theater season being cancelled.  It is well written; consisting mostly of interviews with the disappeared person's surviving family and friends and location shots.  The few recreations are very subtle, shoes walking down a hallway, silhoettes behind closed windows.  Interesting clues are spaced out between scenes of family and friends saying "Who would do such a thing?" and "It still hurts.  Because the mystery is "unsolved," the clues don't fit together into any coherent narrative.  It's always "how could it have happened that way?"

Mystery on the Rooftop: Ray, newly married, gets a mysterious phone call and rushes out of the house as if he's in a big hurry.  He is never seen alive again.  Days later, his car is found in a parking lot downtown.  Then his body is found in an unused conference room in the prestigious Belvedere Hotel.  He may have fallen, jumped, or been tossed off the 11-story roof, but his injuries weren't consistent with a fall.  And what would he be doing there?

13 Minutes; Patrice, a loving wife and mother, runs a hairdressing salon on a rural road in Georgia.  Around lunchtime, a customer calls, and everything is fine; 13 minutes later, another customer calls, and there is no answer.  Nothing in the salon suggests a crime; her purse is still sitting behind the counter.  Her car is still there.  She just walked out of the salon into oblivion. But a week before the disapperance, she asked her high-school aged son, "If I were to go away for awhile, who would you stay with?"

House of Terror:  French aristocrat Xavier is a perfect husband and father, with a wife and four kids, ranging in age from 13 to 20.  Then the family vanishes.  Days later, their bodies are found buried under the terrace in the courtyard.  Xavier is the prime suspect, of course.  But how did he shoot them in their sleep and drag them out of the house without leaving any traces of blood?  And he had a debiltating back injury --how could he dig holes under the terrace?  And where is he?

You get the idea -- photogenic people disappear.  Their bodies are found later, so the mystery is not "what happened?;" but "who did it, and why?"

Very heteronormative discourse ("they were very much in love -- he couldn't possibly have killed her").  But the "perfect" heterosexual trajectory of house, job, wife, kids is disrupted before your eyes as the vanished person turns out to have a lot of secrets.  There were threats of bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce, "telling everyone what you did!"

No one is gay; no one mentions gay people, no one seems aware that gay people exist..

No Ride Home might be different.  Alonzo, in his early 20s, is a perfect son to a single mother in small-town Kansas.  He has a circle of friends, all male.  No girlfriends or even dates with girls are mentioned.  His friends, interviewed for the program, do not mention wives or girlfriends.

One night they go to a party held in an even smaller town about an hour's drive from home.  they don't know most of the people there.  Alonzo's ride goes on a beer run, gets lost, and finally gives up; he calls another friend to give Alonzo a ride home.  But the two miss each other..  Alonzo is never seen alive again, but his boots and hat are discovered on the side of the road near the house.

Alonzo was black, and everybody at the party in rural Kansas was white.  What happened is obvious.

In this case, instead of unraveling the perfect heterosexual life trajectory, the tidbits of information unravel the "perfect small town" facade, revealing an undertow of racism.  Alonzo stays perfect.

But if he was gay, why didn't anyone mention it?    Were they deliberately closeting him?  Or was he just another straight guy who didn't happen to have a girlfriend at that moment?