By this point, most of us are all too familiar with what happens to gay characters in a work of fiction from anything but the past few decades: They come to a sad end.

Maybe the gay character, like the Black character, is among the first to fall victim to a zombie or a serial killer in a piece of pop entertainment (this is among the regrettable patterns outlined by the wiki siteTVTropes.org).

Maybe he loves mournfully and from afar, without any hope of reciprocity, like the men in just about any play by Tennessee Williams.

无论故事情节或中等、成立与同性恋r — no matter how tenuously humanized — is too often depicted as weak or laughable or freakish.

This is one of the reasons I was so delighted by the new production of Benjamin Britten’s 1947 opera“阿尔伯特鲱鱼”mounted byPocket Opera. In a period when gay identity could only be treated as a source of heartache or worse, this piece shows us a young man finding his way, through luck and determination, to a proud gay identity that brings him nothing but joy.

“Albert Herring,” in other words, is a coming-out story from a period when “coming out” was scarcely a thing, and certainly when the “coming-out story” was unknown as a genre. It’s a wondrous historical anomaly whose comic sensibilities extend beyond the footlights to propose and celebrate possibilities for more than just the characters.

At this point, anyone familiar with the opera is probably signaling frantically at me to tone down the rhetoric a bit, and they’re not wrong. When I blithely assert that “Albert Herring”isa coming-out story, I’m putting my thumb on the scale in favor of an interpretation that needs to be supported.

That’s because the story in “Albert Herring” is coded. Of course it’s coded. There’s no explicit mention of homosexuality or same-sex desire anywhere in the opera. You have to know where to look.

But if there’s one thing we’ve gotten more adept at in the past several decades, it’s understanding when an artist is signaling something important about gay life, gay desire or gay sensibility — and understanding why that context might not be available to be spelled out in full.

Codes and concealment provide a certain plausible deniability, which in turn allows an observer to refute, ignore or at best minimize the importance of gay themes if they want to.

In a 1978 review in the New Yorker, for instance, music critic Andrew Porter grudgingly admitted the possibility of interpreting “Albert Herring” as a coming-out story. “Such interpretations,” he wrote, “are not necessarily untrue… but they are unnecessarily restrictive and specific.”

Well, maybe.

It’s rarely a good idea to reduce the meaning of a work of art to a single dimension. There’s a lot going on in “Albert Herring” that has to do with other matters — social class, death, family relations and simple satirical fun — and there’s nothing to be gained by shoving those concerns to the back.

Conversely, though, when we have the chance to celebrate a rare midcentury treatment of coming out in a positive light, how can we not embrace it?

That’s especially true given that Britten, a gay man himself, created so many pained and tragic portraits of gay characters. Homosexuality is a near-constant presence in his operas, whether more or less overtly, and in works such as“Peter Grimes,”“Billy Budd”and “Death in Venice,” it’s always tinged with sorrow.

“阿尔伯特鲱鱼”is the great exception. In this chamber piece, the elders and potentates of the fictional Edwardian village of Loxford face a problem in crowning a Queen of the May from among the town’s young ladies, namely that none of them can boast sufficiently spotless morals.

So Albert, a timorous namby-pamby tied to the apron strings of his imperious mother, is dragooned into being King of the May. Then, in the first burst of rebellion of his young life, he takes his prize money and goes out for a nighttime of dissipation. When he stumbles home the next morning, disheveled and hungover, he is demonstrably a new man — confident, fearless, at ease in his own skin.

What happened overnight? Britten and librettist Eric Crozier are cagey on the subject. Albert confesses to a lot of drinking, as well as a bar fight and a stolen bicycle.

Beyond that, though, he spares the sensitivities of his outraged listeners.

“Do you want some more?” he asks pugnaciously. “Or will that do as a general sample of a night that was a nightmare example of drunkenness, dirt and worse?”

The Loxforders don’t know, and don’t want to know, what that “and worse” signifies. But you and I understand perfectly well what kind of sinful behavior could leave a repressed young man suddenly feeling more courageous and self-assured than he’s ever been. We also understand that the efforts to cloak Albert’s activities in secrecy make it implausible that his sexual initiation took place with a woman.

Even if “coming out” as such is a more recent concept, Albert’s carefully unspecified debauch is part of a long artistic tradition. In particular, it’s a close descendant of “Bunburying” in Oscar Wilde’s great comedy“The Importance of Being Earnest,”in which the main character uses the excuse of visiting a sick friend (the fictitious and always ailing Bunbury) to scamper off to the country for anonymous naughtiness.

Because the nature of that naughtiness is never specified (and perhaps because of my own naivete), it was years before I realized that Bunburying is a coded reference to the world of top-secret gay trysts — a world with which both Wilde and Britten would have been intimately familiar. No need for either of them to spell it out; if you know, you know.

I suppose a production of “Albert Herring” in 2023 could make this subtext overt, but I’m not sure that would be a plus. The point of Albert’s emergence from his cocoon is that he does it on his own, in a world away from prurient judges and prying eyes.

And the results are unmistakable. To quote the final chorus, “Albert’s come back to stay/ Better for his holiday!” The residents of Loxford can see the difference in him, and so can we. Liberation is a powerful thing.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman