You know it’s news when the BBC have it on the Real People News Website:
BBC News: Gay Rights Win in Warcraft World
This had been bubbling along on the more esoteric gaming sites for a while, the chiefest of which had culminated in an open letter to Blizzard at the Terranova site, but many community sources seem to have kicked up a fuss over it all. The basics seem to be that a member of a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual (GLBT) Friendly guild used the General Chat to air some recruiting spam, and then found herself being warned by GMs for Sexual Orientation Harassment, and facing a ban if she did it again.
Go figure... my own speculation is that some insecure middle-classed white male teenager saw this on Ironforge and got all paranoid and scared that ‘They’ we going to ‘queer him up’ on his next raid, and so decided to go on a bit of a mini crusade via the petition system in an attempt to ‘send Them back to where They came from’, or some such gibberish.
Frankly, where you’ve been online as long as I have, and have seen the word ‘gay’ so absolutely and totally subverted from being a description of a lifestyle, to one of the most venomous and unpleasant insults known to online, it makes me despair of any kind of technological enlightenment. We’re all still savages – the internet has just made it possible to upset people on the other side of the world, without fear of a good kicking in return, that’s all.
But as a result of all this, I do tend to think that anyone who has the guts to step up to the web and say, ‘Yes…I am gay’, is worthy of a great deal of respect, and indeed, the fact that they have any kind of sexuality at all, and by implication, a sex life, probably puts them far above the usual stereotypical asexual basement-dwelling power-gaming misanthropic troglodyte that makes up the bulk of the Ironforge channel spamming elite. So yes, I'd imagine a guild full of like-minded and non-judgemental people who all also like gaming is probably something of a godsend, and essentially no different to the numerous Italian or Dutch guilds on my server - Blizzard only explicitly provide English, French and German EU servers - anyone else has to just make do, and stick together in guilds. Why is being gay, or being a Christian, any different? Neither is going to get their own server, so need to improvise.
And anyway, opportunities for expressing such sexuality in WoW are rather limited, consisting of arranging your characters in titillating ‘/sleep’ positions in inn rooms, and playing ‘Flowery Sex Emote Tennis’, so it’s not as if catching ‘the ghey’ is something that’s likely to affect the majority of WoW players in any case. If sex is important to your gaming, I really would suggest that Second Life is a better venue – you wouldn’t believe some of the things they get up to in there, and I suspect most of those people are chuckling with bemused interest at this whole WoW GLBT fiasco, and going ‘Is that all?’
However, in a fantastic streak of irony, the recent Valentines Day WoW event entails putting on either perfume or cologne and running around declaring your love for dozens of town NPCs, in exchange for stuff. Now depending on which you used, you can only declare for the appropriate gender – wear perfume to get Male NPCs, cologne for Female.
Now as befits any late Middle Ages inspired society, most of the guards, and shopkeepers are men, making the run-around much easier and quicker if you wear the perfume, particularly since there is a time on how often each NPC can be declared to - more male NPCs are around, and are being declared to less often. You wouldn’t believe how many homosexual Orcs, Trolls, Tauren and Undead I saw ‘come out’ of the woodwork this weekend. Bloody tourists.
Anyway – a win for a rational and tolerant society all round I think, and if having a GLBT guild on your server upsets you, I would suggest that it’s your problem, not Blizzard’s. Step away from the petition button, and deal with it…