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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

"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.

Read the rest of this entry »

While the escapades of Zevran and Leliana in BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins have been featured positively in a lot of gay media, it was presumably only a matter of time before their inclusion would show up in negative depictions as well. WorldNetDaily, a popular conservative news site ran an article last week with the ridiculous headline of "Players have dirty 'gay' sex in hit game".

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week the body of 19 year old Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was found on the side of a road in central Puerto Rico. The body had been decapitated, dismembered and partially burned. Both of his arms and legs had been severed, an attempt had been made to do the same with his torso, and the entirety of his body had been dumped off of an isolated street. Jorge was openly gay, well liked and very popular.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven't heard by now, Infinity Ward, the developers behind upcoming FPS Modern Warfare 2, have released a YouTube public service announcement warning players against unsportsman-like "grenade spam." It's all well and fine, but the five seconds at the end of the video inform you that the PSA has been brought to you by "Fight Against Grenade Spam," or, FAGS.

Read the rest of this entry »