A thread was recently started at the GayGamer.net forums around the following rant about modern gay rights, implicitly blaming the fact that we don't have gay marriage and full equality on things like the overt sexuality demonstrated at pride parades or the effeminacy of some gay men. The latter I have complained about here a few times already, but I added a wall of text to the discussion thread after the majority of comments amounted to "I think this guy is completely right." Sadly the guy isn't completely right and most of his perspective is incredibly nasty and self-hating, but as I've lamented before, it's a perspective shared by most gay people my age and younger. As the GayGamer.net forums require a registered account to read, I was asked if I could post my "essay" someplace else so it could be linked to.

I wanted to take a moment to post an update on the issue I wrote about earlier regarding Valve's swear-word filter on their forums. A short time after I posted the original article, the filter itself was edited and "gay" was removed; unfortunately this appears to be a Pyrrhic victory.

"With Rockstar Games releasing The Ballad of Gay Tony, will Valve ever include a gay character in any of their games?" That was the gist of a thread created on the official Steam forums several weeks ago. Innocuous question or not, however, the thread itself was quickly locked and hidden from public view by one of Valve's volunteer moderators, a fate that almost every other discussion of LGBT topics on the official Steam forums ends with, as well.

Again in keeping with my previous post, the entry below was a re-print of a letter-to-the-editor I sent Bruce Steele at The Advocate; coming off of the previous entry about this subject, I contacted him with my concerned over an image I felt that his magazine and much other popular gay media was perpetuating. This entry was dated May 13, 2006. Unfortunately I don't feel that the particular situation has gotten any better in the time since.

As per this earlier post, the entry below was originally dated February 26, 2006. Although the article mentioned in the first sentence is no longer available online, it pertained to a group advocating the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and I found some of their marketing to be a bit offensive and marginalizing towards gay people who happen to be effeminate, thus the inspiration for this entry. Yes, the title was a Kelly Clarkson song lyric.

Kotaku has an extremely thought-provoking op-ed piece up about the representation of minorities in video games. While they don't mention LGBT characters (disappointingly) as well, the parallels they draw can easily be applied to our community too. There's a lot to be made about the lack of LGBT characters in video games, and when they [...]

Shadow Complex, a new release to the Xbox Live Arcade, has generated a bit of controversy since its debut last week. The Super Metroid-inspired sidescroller is set in the universe of Orson Scott Card's Empire series and opposition to the game has been brewing by gamers unhappy with the controversial author's political views– specifically [...]