I've wondered about this thread's question, but I sort of thought the gay men would just be answering the question, not asking it...!
A large contingent of TV show fandoms are those who go for action and flashy effects. It's true for some shows more than others. With Trek, there's a massive crowd that doesn't seem to appreciate ST as drama in the vein of the science-fiction literary genre, and judges it by how frequent and elaborate the explosions, ray-guns, and spaceships are.
I can do without that part of fandoms. I don't wish them any harm, but I want to feel "at home" in a fandom, and they're alien to me. I'm someone who is utterly baffled that anyone would even want the ST episodes "remastered" with flashier images of ships and planets, but that's another story.....
Maybe gays go more for atmosphere than action? If so, good, me too. 1897 gets a bit action-y, but overall, there isn't much in DS for the people who want fistfights and gunplay.
I'm not sure why I need to say it here and now, but I feel (and always have felt) just about as alienated from society as gay men have, if not more. I mean, in childhood, up to the present. I've had to fight all my life to believe that there really isn't anything deeply wrong with me, after all. I'm not gay; it was about more general, less easily identifiable traits or viewpoints....
It seems to me that Barnabas's near-certainty that he WAS guilty of terrible things, and not just a misunderstood outsider, probably parallels guilt ingrained very deeply into gays from their first moments, especially back then. He has a big black question mark hovering over him all the time. Sure, he's reformed, and didn't have a choice in being a vampire, but part of any human being probably doesn't care about fairness when assigning guilt. After all, he's cursed by God... (indirectly...)-- cursed without a judgment or a trial. Simple cursing by a witch seperates you from God forever, and God apparently doesn't care if you did anything to deserve it. The vampire's nature is inherently evil, and Barnabas is stuck with it, as evidenced by the fact that crosses hurt him. The universe isn't fair, to put it mildly.
Same with gays, at least decades ago. You may know you're hard-wired for gayness, it's your nature, and people around you judging you may not even disagree about that part... but even if it's not a "choice", it's still "wrong" and maybe even "evil", etc.. Yes, you may be just a damn (insert epithet here), it's not anything you did, it's something you just are..., and that thing you are is supposedly loathesome.
It's a weird, very destructive and unfair form of blame that becomes internalized. I'm losing focus as I always do, and I'm not sure if the point got made. I hope so.