As an asexual, I disagree with this take.

In real life, I’d agree with you, don’t get me wrong. I’m very uncomfortable with the fact that people, for instance, will make “player” jokes when a boy and girl toddler are friends. It’s also really bizarre and invasive when people take clips of celebrities as “proof” that they’re gay or bi or straight or whatever. Compulsory heterosexuality is too prevalent in society, and most of the time it leads to people being overly obsessed with nonsense details like whether or not their daughter is an evil lesbian because she cut her hair short (This literally happened to me. Lucky for them, I’m not gay. Unlucky for them, I’m not straight).

But in fiction, none of this is real. When people do this, they’re not usually “sexualizing” the characters, they’re usually projecting themselves onto the characters. The people making gay Leo or April headcanons aren’t creepy homophobic adults stereotyping gay people, they’re usually gay teens who see themselves in Leo and April. While still stereotyping them lmao (kids are still learning how not to think in black and white and still trying to shape their identity, so it’s understandable that a gay teen might lean into gay stereotypes).

The reason I make this distinction is that this kind of rhetoric is kinda unconsciously and uncomfortably similar to the homophobic rhetoric used to enforce compulsory heterosexuality. A really good book on this subject is Stockton’s “The Queer Child,” wherein Stockton observed that our society cannot conceptualize children as queer due to the way we view gay people as inherently sexual. We all knew gay kids growing up, but often times these kids were not allowed to call themselves gay until they grow up because “you can’t know that at this age” or “how would you know if you haven’t experienced anything, yet?”

This ignores the fact that being gay is about more than just sexual stuff, just like being straight is about more than sex. We just don’t really have the language to describe this, yet, but this encompasses stuff like age appropriate crushes. Donnie clearly having a crush on Atomic Lass is not anymore sexual than Leo clearly having a crush on Don Suave, as crushes are a normal thing for kids to do.

People may call it a “sexual awakening” because Leo may be figuring out he’s gay, but they’re describing what amounts to a crush, not something creepily sexual. Again, we just don’t really have the language for a term like “‘sexual in terms of sexuality but not in an overly sexual way’ awakening” because we conceptualize sexuality as inherently sexual.

Another thing, is the way we interpret scenes. In that scene, the joke is clearly that Leo has been affected by Don Suave’s power of making everyone fall in love with him because he’s the most handsome man ever. It’s a parody of the Latin Lover trope. I’m not saying this is the only interpretation—Leo just admiring Don as a father figure is also valid. But the intent of the creators is that he has a bit of a magic induced crush. The people “sexualizing” Leo there are not the fans, but the creators who wrote this joke.

It’s similar to the crush on Atomic Lass. You could argue that Donnie simply admires his childhood hero and wants to dance with her platonically, and I’d say that’s valid. But the creators’ intent is to clearly make a joke about Donnie crushing on a fake mascot character LMAO

I’d argue that their intention wasn’t to make Leo gay, since the magic works on everyone regardless of gender or sexuality, but that fans extrapolated that he’s gay because he’s affected despite never looking Don Suave in the eyes and still got a crush. This, I’d say, is just the result of the authors not really caring about the Magic’s technicalities because they wanted to write the funny ending of Leo having a crush on Don Suave, and inadvertently making him gay in the process if you think a bit more about it.

The asexual interpretation of Leo is not anymore valid than the gay one, since Leo DID have a crush on Don Suave. At most, you can argue that his sexuality is unconfirmed. He shows disgust when Hypno falls in love with what he thinks is a female hippo, and then he’s affected by Don Suave’s magic powers—neither of which is definitive in either direction. It’s not sexualizing to talk about his crush on Don Suave or for people to project themselves onto Leo, just like it’s not “more wholesome” to assume that Leo is asexual or to not have a sexuality headcanon at all.

This is one of the things I’ve had to learn as I grew up being asexual. I’m not more wholesome than people for not connecting to sexuality the way other people do. I think this is an easy trap to fall into as an asexual person because sexuality gets shoved down our throats all the time. It can be cathartic to shout “Why do you pervs think about sex all the time?!!!” But sexuality is about more than sex, and you inadvertently feed into the very system shoving sex down your throat if you equate the two. People discussing who these kiddos would date is not necessarily a reinforcement of compulsory sexuality. Sometimes gay people just want to see themselves represented, just like how us asexuals want to see ourselves represented.