A further and less kind view would be that Dc at the time wanted to butch up their heroes. BRAT PACK and a lot of other stuff at the time focused on the gay underpinnings of characters like this in a way that, nowadays, would definitely be considered homophobic. Which was part of a general conversation in comics that began then concerning the sexual undepinnings of superheroes, that has evolved in our time to the wonderfully advanced "context is for the weak" tag.
I thought Pat Mills dealt with this issue much more intelligently in MARSHAL LAW than Rick Veitch did in BP--I'm sorry, but I do think the Midnight Mink is a repulsive character born of Wertham's worst wet dreams, that's more meant as a crude, ugly caricature of gay men(really, more child molesters--I wondered, reading it, if Rick knows the difference) than Batman. Whereas Mills' Batman analogue didn't molest his sidekicks, he harvested them for spare parts, which is much more to the satirical point, never mind that it's not homophobic and still holds up.
Point is, there was a lot of that, and god knows comics boys can be sensitive about that. So, DC, I'll just say it, felt that compared to Marvel their characters that had underpinnings to a quainter and sillier era seemed kind of "gay." Look at a lot of the "darkening" changes after the Crisis in that light and see if a lot of it isn't really based in that general sense. They wanted their characters tougher. So Superman's--well, almost everything, or Hal's ass? Problem number one. (Consider which white GL WAS popular then, Guy Gardner, the Red State Lantern if there ever was one) Also the bare-chested guy wearing wings. And so forth.
And when they did try a gay character? He had to be so flaming he might as well have his name be "Gay Man." Oh wait, they did. Extrano.