No need to lay into you.  Northstar, as created by JB, was always supposed to be gay.  From the FAQ:

Was it your intent when you created NorthStar that he would be a gay man?

JB: When I created Alpha Flight they were basically half a dozen characters who could survive a prolonged battle with the X-Men. They had very little depth -- tho I am a compulsive creator of backstory, so I knew something about their histories even then -- and were not really created with any thought toward them eventually getting their own title. Unfortunately (?) they proved enormously popular, and so Marvel began pushing me to do an ALPHA FLIGHT book. Eventually I relented, and agreed to do the series -- which meant I had one problem instantly: I had to find ways to make those characters more three dimensional.

One of the things that popped immediately into my head was to make one of them Gay. I had recently read an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on what was then (the early 80s) fairly radical new thinking on just what processes caused a person to be homosexual, and the evidence was pointing increasingly to it being genetic and not environmental factors. So, I thought, it seemed like it was time for a Gay superhero, and since I was being "forced" to make ALPHA FLIGHT a real series, I might as well make one of them Gay.

From there, it was a process of elimination. I didn't want the homosexual character to be one of the girls, since that was something people tended to associate (rightly or wrongly) with Claremont books. Mac Hudson and Heather were happily married and I did not want to mess with that. Michael was widowed with a daughter, and that way lay what I considered too much of a cliche, if he turned out to be Gay. Besides, as a Native Canadian he was already the resident "minority". The new guy, Puck, had his own set of problems. Sasquatach would be just too damn scary!! So I settled on Jean-Paul, and the moment I did I realized it was already there. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have been considering making him Gay before I "decided" to so so.

Of course, the temper of the times, the Powers That Were and, naturally, the Comics Code would not let me come right out and state that Jean-Paul was homosexual, but I managed to "get the word out" even with those barriers. (8/24/2004)