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There isn't a trope for this. I don't think this is a stereotype that exists. I think gay men in fiction just happen to be depicted as sweet and wholesome, and people who are sweet and wholesome tend to love animals.
So your examples would just be one of the other Pet and Animal Companion Tropes but they happen to be gay.
Like, Mac from Always Sunny is not a nice person at all, and he doesn't really care about his dog. That isn't him defying this stereotype. It's just that bad people tend to not be nice to pets.
The closest thing to "pet as a surrogate child" is Replacement Goldfish.
Edited by Nepworks
Hmmm...yeah, that makes more sense. There is a tendency of gay men to generally be depicted as very nurturing towards both their pets and their actual children. I was misled because the punchline of the MAD joke was that a guy bought a dog to attract a woman, but attracted a Camp Gay man instead. It made me wonder if gay men being pet lovers was some sort of stereotype.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
Yeah for those examples it would just be Camp Gay and then also one of the animal lover tropes. There is no combination of the 2.
Maybe it's Crazy Cat Lady adjacent? You don't have a conventional spouse-and-kids setup so you turn to your pets?
A stereotype I see that pops up is that gay people (usually gay men but sometimes lesbians) tend to get really attached to their pets. I assume this stereotype emerges from the rules that prevented gay couples from having kids. I'm wondering if there's a trope covering this and if not, if the stereotype is tropeworthy. (I can think of examples from Futurama, South Park: The Fractured but Whole, and a Sergio Aragonés cartoon in MAD.)