As far as I am aware, it did not play a role in the sense that it wasn't an issue at all whatsoever. To my knowledge, the persecution of homosexuals was outside of probably some underground homosexual publications not reported on at all.
Even after liberation, it was Allied policy to further allow the criminalization of homosexuals and even re-imprison those who had been in camps but according to Allied and German records had not yet served the full extent of their sentences. The Handbook for Military Government in Germany Prior to Defeat or Surrender (published in 1944) specified that after liberation, one of the first duties of the Allied troops was to separate the victims of Nazi persecution into different and predominantly national categories, a huge and in practice incomplete feat that not only lead Jews to protest (for they wanted to be grouped in one category rather than their national category) and that lead the predominantly German category of victims of social persecution (asocials, homosexuals, criminals) to be grouped in the "criminal" category because their arrest and imprisonment was actually based upon laws. As Michele Weber writes:
For American troops serving under military policies that increasingly penalized homosexual active in military service and coming from states where homosexuality was classified as a crime, it was not surprising that homosexuals were categorized as criminal under the American system of classification.
The procedure as laid out in the Handbook for this group of victims was explicit: "Ordinary criminals with a prison sentence still to serve will be transferred to civil prisons." Meaning that if somebody convicted under §175 (the provision of the German criminal code that criminalized gay homosexuality) by the Nazis, which held a provision for imprisonment for up to 10 years, and imprisoned in a Concentration Camp could be imprisoned by the Allies if they believed that the person had not served their sentence in full. For those who had "served their sentence", freedom was guaranteed but fear of being arrested again under §175 remained.
This was not really in line with the guidelines of denazification set by the Allies themselves. Since §175 restricted citizenship, and it was the Allies explicit policy to remove all laws that restricted citizenship based on politics, religion or other categories, it should have been at least reverted to its pre-1935 version. Furthermore, Law number 11 of the Control Council concerning Nazi Law stated: “No German law, however or whenever enacted or enumerated, shall be applied judicially or administratively within the occupied territory in any instance where such application would cause injustice or inequality, …by discriminating against any person by reason of his race, nationality, religious beliefs or opposition to the National Socialist Party or its doctrines."
And yet, §175 remained in place. In practice this often lead to cases like that of Karl Gorath. Gorath, a homosexual survivor of the camps, was arrested by the American authorities in Germany in 1946 and sentenced again under §175 to a prison sentence by the same Nazi judge who had sentenced him in the 1930s.
As for numbers: Michele Weber states that under United States administration, an estimated 1,100 to 1,800 men were arrested yearly on charges of violating Paragraph 175, a number significantly higher than it had been in the Weimar Republic. A substantial study of how many of them were convicted and subsequently imprisoned does not exist yet.
In fact, rather than reporting on the persecution of male homosexuals, as Andrea Slane describes, US policy makers increasingly saw Fascism as a problem of lack of Christian morals and associated with homosexuality. In the decades preceding WWII, GB and the Us increasingly started to police homosexual behavior. When it came to the occupation of Germany, the problem was further confounded by the already above mentioned fact that a large swath of US policy makers who were involved in setting up the occupation of Germany were convinced of the sexual immorality of the Third Reich and of the need to return to Christian values and morality in order to combat the corruption and sexual licentiousness they believed was a core element of the Nazi version of fascism. So, in very general terms, the prosecution of homosexuals would have been perceived as normal and not something out of the ordinary.
This fact was further compounded by two factors: The group of persecuted homosexuals was rather small. The usual assumption is that between 5,000 to 10,000 were sent to concentration camps. And when the war ended, because of the still strong social stigma, a very small number of homosexual victims came forward at all. Of the 3.000 estimated survivors only 15 men had come forward to tell their story, 6 of them anonymously, and the last known homosexual survivor of a concentration camp had died in June 2012.
As I describe in this answer, it would take until the 1970s until the homosexual community in the West at large started to publicize the history of their persecution under the Nazis and until the 1980s and the HIV/AIDS crisis until this particular episode of the past of the homosexual community would really hit home in the general public.
Even today, the historical scholarship is fragmented and incomplete. So, to sum up your question, the public response to the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany during the war and preceding it was practically non-existant.
Sources:
Michele Weber: When does our liberation come? The policing of homosexuality in the American Zone of Occupation, Germany 1945-1949
Kai Hammermeister: Inventing History: Toward a Gay Holocaust Literature, German Quarterly 70.1 (Winter 1997).
Jennifer V. Evans: Bahnhof Boys: Policing Male Prostitution in Post-Nazi Berlin, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 605-636.
Gudrun Hauer: Weibliche Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit. In: Andreas Baumgartner/Ingrid Bauz/Jean-Marie Winkler (Hg.): Zwischen Mutterkreuz und Gaskammer. Täterinnen und Mitläuferinnen oder Widerstand und Verfolgte? Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposium „Frauen im KZ Mauthausen“ am 4. Mai 2006. Wien: edition Mauthausen 2008, S. 27-33, 167-171.
Günter Grau (ed.): Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung. 2. überarbeitete Auflage. Fischer-TB, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
Andrea Slane: A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy.
Edit: the question is about how the issue was viewed/covered by the media at the time that these revelations came to light to the public.