On being a queer gamer

There's this, via Towleroad (and a thousand other places):




Watch it. Watch allllll of it, count the number of "faggots" and "fags" and uhm, get back to me.

Allow me to get nerdy (again). As I've said before, I'm a slightly reformed World of Warcraft (WoW) player. I played WoW for an embarrassingly long time. I started playing because a good friend introduced me to the game, and we played kind of happily for while with his friends from college, his girlfriend (my housemate) and a bunch of others. All of that ended when I stopped enjoying the whole getting killed by other players (PvP) thing and started to want to just play the game without that added threat (PvE).

I searched around and found a PvE server that had a gay and lesbian group of folks who played together on the regular (that'd be a "guild" in the WoW vernacular). Unfortunately, the GLBT guild wouldn't admit me because of the hours that I was keeping. Still, I kept on playing on that server, met a bunch of late-night folks (mostly Aussies), and ended up forming some nerdy in-game friendships with a bunch of them.

Here's where the fun begins: they all thought I was a dude. My in-game avatar was a dude, and I didn't stop them from thinking that I was a dude. It was ... easier? I mean, this is a game that, at one point, banned GLBT guilds from advertising that they were looking for GLBT members.

So, it was easier up until the point when my guild started doing stuff in-game that required voice chat. I stalled for about a month, and then I started in with saying that I couldn't talk, but I could listen. And then I got to hear all of the stuff that wasn't typed: mmm, homophobia & mmm, racism!

While I feel slightly (read: I feel really, truly awful about it) guilty that I never revealed my gender to people who told me about their families, their jobs, their kids ... I kind of don't. On one hand, revealing my gender would have gotten the, "Oh, you're good for a girl!" thing, which: fuck off. On the other, it's, "You're a queer, but the lady kind, which is open to all sorts of fantasy ... mmm, ladies with ladies!"

I mean, I didn't stop playing WoW because of gender identity bullshit, but the Halo vid really underlines how hard it is to be yourself in a world where everything is collaborative gaming with voice chat. Hard, huh? Damned if you're a straight woman with a lady voice that's gonna get gamer boners, damned if you're a queer person with a lady voice that's gonna draw the same, damned if you're a gay dude gamer who wants to be out, damned if you're anything but some straightwhiteguywithbigguns.

I can't be arsed to find a solution to it, but I'd love to hear from other queer gamers. I'm stuck right now in feeling okay with playing games where I'm gonna get gay-bashed on the regs.

Help me out, queer gamers?