One of my fondest memories of video gaming is playing a game of Team Fortress 2 and discovering that by chance, over half the server was full of other gay players.

To be sure, there are some homophobic people who play video games. But they’re a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall group of serious gamers.

chuck: “Nigger” and “faggot”, for whatever reason, have become essentially inside-jokes among serious gamers and anime, due to anonymous discussion boards like the *chans and Something Awful.

Is it offensive? Yes. But this particular group of netizens doesn’t really care who gets offended as long as it’s funny to them and relatively harmless to the affected parties.

Actually, there was a major professional racist who did start trolling one of them (I think it was 4chan, but I could be wrong) as he thought that all these people calling each other “nigger” were his “white brothers” or something of that nature. Anonymous responded quite harshly to him, getting the tax status of his radio show changed unfairly and interrupting the broadcast on multiple occasions. If I remember right, Anonymous ultimately got him kicked off the air permanently.

The general rule in that community is that harmless joking about homophobia or racism is funny. Actual homophobia or racism is not, and will be dealt with harshly.

I don’t mean to justify it, because I think it’s homophobic and racist. But it’s not serious in the way you think it is.

Wow… was this really necessary? It’s no different from saying that one should expect no more from gay people than rampant sexual promiscuity.

The cause is not gamers. The cause is not Microsoft. The cause is not even the games that allow for online interactions. The cause is society.

So stop blaming specific groups for what society as a whole is dealing out. Have you ever been in an environment full of teenagers who use the word “gay” to mean “stupid” more than they use it to mean “homosexual”?

Sure, Microsoft should try to police its chatter, but do they really have the resources to look into every case? I don’t think so.

So let’s look at the real problem and start targeting the true sources of this kind of behavior. Because let’s face it, banning some kid from a game won’t make them change their attitude towards gay slurs. In fact, it will probably push their buttons even more.

My employer has a 7yr 100% HRC CEI ranking, but of course, they pick and choose when they will uphold their policies that provide the top ranking.

We have written numerous times over the last 7 years, and the HRC has responded by doing nothing.

Although we support the congressional efforts, we cannot support the hypocritical Corporate efforts, which tell the corporations that it is okay to disrespect and discriminate because they will get a 100% ranking even though they break their own policies. We follow what they do, but sadly the HRC lost this family membership years ago.

Same thing happen in the online game World of Warcraft, but here the company retracted and it had a positive outcome. There was a lesbian who wanted to start a gay friendly guild (groups of players are called guilds). So she had to advertise in one of the chatting channels and because draconian rules forbid speaking anything, ANYTHING sexual she got banned (kicked out) of the game. She complained about the dungeon master who did this to higher reps and they finally understood. She, like me, was tired of all the stupid kids who love to drop homophobic slurs. Since then Warcraft has a lot of gay guilds, one of the largest ones is called the Stonewall family. This is easier to do if you can choose who to play with.

Unlike xbox where is really random for most games because there are houndreds of games and even if they offer groups it would be really hard if not impossible to play only with gay or gay friendly people. I must admit that I don’t like censorship, I can tolerate a player cursing the enemy player but it gets annoying with they usually young players who are way obsessed to refer to everything it sucks as gay.

If you are like me, a gay or lesbian gamer I found this website.

http://www.gaymer.org/

No, you are the one we are most ashamed of, and it is we who have lost faith in your kind’s persistently apathetic, self-centeredness ways. When so many of us are fighting for equality, you trivialize it as if it wasn’t really important because it doesn’t affect you.

Discrimination is WRONG anywhere it rears its ugly head! I hope you don’t have to learn that lesson the hard way someday. But, having said that, maybe you do need to feel the humiliation of discrimination just once in order to learn a little empathy for others — if that is still possible.