Two widely disparate books are the only ones that occur to me: The Mask of Apollo, by Mary Renault, which is notable in that the onstage deaths happen mostly to characters who are understood as het, or whose sexuality we don't know. Meanwhile all the characters who are explicitly gay/coded as gay survive the book just fine, if I remember correctly.

The other one is The Silver Metal Lover, in which Gay Best Friend is kind of one-dimensionally campy but does make it to the end of the book alive and well after having had a sex life and all.

Oh, wait--Francesca Lia Block's books have a lot of gay/bi characters who have a very good track record of surviving to the end of the book and getting on with their lives. There are one or two minor characters who are tragic and victimized and melodramatic, but the mainstays are Dirk and Duck from the Weetzie Bat series, and the title characters from Violet and Claire, and most of the characters in the short stories in Girl Goddess #9.

I recognize that a lot of people find Block insufferable, but I have a deep and old love for her work in general, and I can still remember particularly how weird it felt when I read Witch Baby as a kid and there was a same-sex couple who were reasonably well-adjusted people and had a good relationship and didn't die.

Tom and Carl from the Wizards books by Diane Duane--well, I know they're secondary mentor characters, but it would have been easy for Duane to kill one or both of them and send the protagonists out for revenge. Instead of which, they're still standing while many other secondary characters have bitten the dust.

I would have used the word "queer" for convenience in the above comments, except that I'm uncomfortable using reclaimed slurs. Mind you, I'm not saying this to shut you or anyone else down. But I feel weird about it when it comes to me using the term. On one hand, it's such a handy blanket term when "gay" would be too specific. On the other hand I don't want to sound like I'm using an insult/a slur/speech that I'm not entitled to; also, I've spent too much time around people who used it as a slur. So I'm conflicted. Do you ever feel this conflict?

I sent you Bridgers some time ago, did I not? It does not really count as a book, being unpublished.

I'm thinking particularly of Stealing Fire, but Jo Graham's Numinous World series is really good for that, overall: there's usually a couple of queer characters and at least one genderfluid character in the recurrent reincarnational melange, and no one ever dies just for their sexuality. If they die, they die because of the way their other characteristics interact with the time and situation.

Since I haven't seen them here Black Wine and A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey both feature queer characters who have various foibles and follies but live and die the same as other people (one of them is an accident heavy book, the other one has a serial killer tucked into its folds).

Gwyneth Jones has a series starting with Bold as Love that has a variety of characters with gender fluidity and features a trio of bisexual polyamorous heroes who go through a ton of bad shit, but don't die for being queer. Also, it's an Arthur pastiche set against the backdrop of British Green politics and folk festivals.

Hmm. There's Joel Lane's novel "The Blue Mask". Caveat: there's a queerbashing at the heart of it, but the central characters do make it to the end. There's a lot about Genet in there, odd story-games, and a play (I think Joel actually wanted to "adapt" a Genet story for that, but the estate wouldn't let him).