Okay so I'm going to explain this, because there's some curiosity here. :) Yes, in the late 90's, it was a common read that Utena was straight, and that Utena and Anthy were just THAT CLOSE, etc, etc. WHY? Well! Let's go on a journey!! https://twitter.com/ohtori_nu/status/1357178878872088576

Fans in the late 90's were working with a LOT less info about the series. There was little meta, no movie, and MUCH less artwork. All that gay gay gay Utena artwork you all know and love? Yeah that wasn't available until my website posted it, starting in 2002. You're welcome. :)

What production materials DID come to us at the time were gatekeeped by local distributors to focus heavily on heteronormative aspects of the show. The VHS box art, for example, plays up Utena and Touga, and features almost no Anthy:

At the time, distribution in the US still flirted a lot with possible broadcasting on TV. Escaflowne, another series from this period, was broadcast on US TV with heavy editing and new material and it flopped hard. Everyone knows the 'cousins' in Sailor Moon. Fans expected it.

Utena never got that, but what it did get instead was a work-up by Enoki Films (who had the license at the time) that is....legendary in the fandom for how bad it is. I even preserved it on my site. Welcome to Ursula's Kiss. http://ohtori.nu/ursulaskiss/ 

Furthermore, back then, anime was the genre. You had access to only a few shows, so Utena was consumed by a wide variety of viewers, most of them not actually looking for queer content. Famously, Touga's English VA, Crispin Freeman, was the only one aware that Juri was a lesbian.

The very early Utena fandom looked the same as ANY anime fandom did at the time, wild conjecture, weird clueless takes ignorant of any Japanese context, and TONS of girls that had arrived for the bishonen. The Touga/Saionji ship landed before the Utena/Anthy one, istg.

There was also hesitation to call it queer. Rightly so, I argue. At the time, saying something was gay explicitly was a death sentence. You had to dance (lol) around it. This was an era where Xena aired, made tons of lesbians happen, but couldn't be called queer media yet.

Chiho Saito is thought to be homophobic based on comments that are rational reactions to the climate Utena was born into. She worried a lesbian story would be an uphill battle with censors, and she was right. She went through multiple editors publishing the manga-tame as it is.

Danger in openly embracing queer content mixed with general western ignorance and crashed into that Utena hadn't yet selected for an audience beyond 'fans of anime.' In fact, the Utena fandom lost a LOT of fans when the movie, which was unavoidably queer, came out.

It was really at that point that the fandom narrowed down from 'anime fans that saw this show because it was anime' to 'fans of Revolutionary Girl Utena'...and that's where things started to get...well. You know. ;)