Bunch of homophones.

I think you meant homophobes? Though that doesn't really make any sense either.....

The only time having a roommate implied you were gay is if you were an older person belonging to the gentry who chose to live with someone else if you didn't need to.

It's not like people were looking at tenement housing and saying, oh yeah "that's the big building where we store all the gays".

People have always had roommates, they just aren't typically the class of people represented in fictional stories of the time.