You may just simply—because of things you’ve already established in your story or where you see the story going—may not want to explicitly make a character gay, but you may feel that subtext is appropriate for your story.

So for example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer the scene where her mother is saying, ‘Have you ever tried not slaying?’ Was that queerbaiting?

“We were using a gay metaphor, we were using a metaphor equating slaying to being gay that I thought was very powerful,” Espenson said.

“If you say any time that something is not canon that it’s just metaphorical, it’s queerbaiting, then you lose that opportunity. Then I think it also scares creators away from taking their first tentative step into using a gay character. If they start with some subtext and are rebuffed they’re never going to go near it. So I think let’s have better assumptions about people’s intent.