The most common reaction I get to character demographics in the Alpennia books is, "OMG all the queer women, this is fabulous!" But very occasionally I get reactions along the lines of, "Why is everyone these characters hang out with a lesbian?" One of my first principles in historic research has always been, "If you find yourself asking 'Why is X true?' step back and ask, "Is X true?'"
There are two responses to the underlying question. The first is: Um...you do know that we hang out together on purpose, right? The second is to point out the saliency bias in this observation, because the actual proportion of lesbians in the social circles of my characters isn't as high as these reactions seem to indicate. So let's talk about both of those angles.
How many lesbians or bi women are part of Margerit and Barbara's immediate circle? In Margerit's family, she's the only one. Barbara is directly connected socially to Jeanne and to Antuniet. The only reason that Barbara and Jeanne are close socially is because they were lovers. This is not a matter of random chance or of coincidence. The social connection wouldn't exist without that past relationship. And what about Antuniet? Isn't it awfully coincidental that these two cousins both love women? Well, it's worth emphasizing that Antuniet is demisexual and that her sexual orientation is better described as "Jeanne-sexual" than as lesbian or bi. So that keeps bringing us back to Jeanne as a locus of the purported unbelievably high rate of lesbians in Rotenek society.
It has been made clear in several of the stories that Jeanne actively cultivates a discreet "inner circle" of women who love women. When she made invitations to the Floodtide party at Margerit's estate in Chalanz (in The Mystic Marriage) she was very specifically inviting women who knew about and participated in this part of her life. In fact, she's probably slept with most of them at some point. This is how life works, believe it or not, especially in closeted communities.
Even so, let's look at the sixteen women who formed that party: Margerit and Barbara as hosts, of course, Jeanne as organizer. Akezze is confirmed as straight and was present because she was accompanying Margerit for the summer as tutor. Antuniet is present because Jeanne specifically asked for her to be included and she already has ties of friendship and blood to Margerit and Barbara. Seven of the other eleven women are named. Tio Perzin is attracted to women and open-minded but she's also very happily married, and her friend Iaklin has been dragged along but is very definitely straight (and perhaps a touch scandalized to find what company she's in). Four of the other named five are noted as either married or having been married in the past. This is the reality of their lives. Yes, they love women, but this is not some implausibly separate and openly queer social group. This is people making deliberate connections of affinity within a society that doesn't recognize those relationships.
Once you start breaking down the details, the "coincidence" is far from coincidental. How large is Jeanne's "inner circle"? What percentage of Rotenek's high-society sapphists does it include? And what percentage of all of Rotenek society does it encompass? Is that percentage truly unbelievable? Given the characters on which the series focuses, it it unbelievable that members of this "inner circle" would appear repeatedly?
In point of fact, of the attendees at that party who are significant continuing minor characters (i.e., excluding the four viewpoint characters) we have Akezze (straight), Tio (in a committed heterosexual relationship), Helen Penilluk (most commonly mentioned as a society hostess and not for her discreet and entirely off-page relationships with women), and Marianiz Pertrez. (A marginal character. She features in passing in Mother of Souls--on the other hand, MoS was not included in the books that generated the "too many lesbians" reaction).
Looked at another way, of all the named women who are coded in my database as being "part of Jeanne's larger social set" (i.e., excluding servants and those "not part of society", and also excluding viewpoint characters) six are lovers of women and eight are not. (Probably more in the latter category by now because I have't updated the database entirely for relationships in Mother of Souls.) If you look at all the named women that Margerit interacts with socially, I think the only lesbian/bi one that she didn't meet through Jeanne is Serafina. Too much coincidence? But the specific reason that Serafina "came out" to Margerit is because she recognized the nature of Margerit and Barbara's relationship.
So, getting back to the question of "why does it feel like all the women my characters know are lesbians," the first answer is that they aren't. Only a small proportion of them are romantically interested in women, and not all of those act on it. The second answer is that, in a closeted society, it is a very natural and expected phenomenon for queer women to form close connections with other queer women and to maintain those connections even outside the bedroom. The third answer, of course, is that within all the possible stories there are to tell in Alpennia, I have deliberately chosen to tell the stories of queer women. This is frustrating to some of my readers and I don't necessarily intend to hold to it as a permanent rule, but at the moment it's been a guiding principle and will be for at least the next two books. Could I tell part of the story from Akezze's point of view? Absolutely. Would it be interesting to see what's going on through the eyes of Anna Monterrez? Definitely. (She gets at least a novelette sometime in the future, don't worry.)
Telling the larger story through the eyes of queer women is a deliberate choice--exactly as much of a choice as telling stories through straight points of view is for most authors, even when they don't realize or admit it. Personally, I find it unbelievable how few queer women there are in many stories. Now that is implausibly coincidental.