ChroMix has a post up right now highlighting what he perceives as a nasty bit of gay panic in an otherwise innocuous, if exceedingly nerdy, Topless Robot post.
TR is asking for its readers’ most shameful role playing game moments, and the paragraph ChroMix points out goes like this [emphasis mine]:
Have you ever got incredibly upset about something that happened in a game of Dungeons & Dragons and freaked out? Have you ever been caught LARPing by someone you knew who was not LARPing? Have you ever had a character who sex with another member of the party, even though both characters were played by guys? And felt horrified about it? Good, you should’ve, because that’s some freaky shit.
Here’s part of what ChroMix has to say about it:
It seems almost quaint to me, that a nerd’s biggest fear might be being perceived as, “Gay.” This sort of homophobia in geeks is a dissonance that I’ve never understood. I’ve always been of the belief that those marginalized by society (whether by race, orientation, or alignment) share a common persecutor and should naturally ally against intolerance.
I don’t know what to say about this, exactly. I’ve known there to be some gay panic in my encounters with the nerd community, but never anywhere near as much as in the sports fan community. Gay panic does seem to me to be on the rise in the last few months—I’m thinking particularly of Seth Rogen’s skit in the Oscars and a heightened use of the phrase on blogs I read. Is it Prop 8 backlash backlash? A rise in a particularly unfunny kind of comedy that hearkens back to 1980s movies, which were awash in gay panic? Or is it in my head? In any case, I’m glad ChroMix is willing to point at it and question whether it’s appropriate or whether it’s just a very bad joke.
Um, Paul, what about I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry? Or the constant “oh no, I’m not gay” jokes on Two and a Half Men (which sucks)?
I think this is a paranoid seeking out of victimization in the aftermath of Prop 8.
I’ve played D&D for years and at least in the Seattle area everyone I’ve met has been extremely tolerant and gay friendly. I’ve played with different races and even a MTF person and never had any problems. I think a lot of that may be attributed to adolescence in general where it’s the norm to call bad things “gay”, which is true anywhere (especially in online games like World of Warcraft). Older D&D players on the whole aren’t like that. I’m gay and heck, I’ve met dates via D&D groups. I think the homophobia is more a function of age than geek cliques. On the whole, the misfit nerds are more accepting of marginalized people. -Andrew /Seattle
The funniest part of this is the implication that EVER bothering to roleplay sex in one of those games isn’t a reason to panic about your normality. Good thing that got left out of World of Warcraft, huh?
Hey, anyone remember the D&D Panic of the 80s, that D&D was an evil satanic ritual, like a gateway drug to psychopathology?
give nerds an ounce of strength and theyll use it to brutalize anybody weaker. the worst bully of them all lurks inside every simpering pantywaist. also? israel? palestineans? know what im saying? same thing. or look at how unreliably liberal gays can be. soon as you give them equality gays are all going to become republicans
I’m in PA, and the gaming community here also seems to be very tolerant. True, I’m a straight 35+ woman, so the gamers I tend to have contact with aren’t the 13-yr-old boys screaming homophobic epithets on XBox Live, but in general geekdom (in my experience) tends to be a place where you come as you are, and are accepted.
Unless you start an argument about whether or not evil Paladins are allowed in 3rd edition, at which point all bets are off.
I grew up playing D&D (mostly 1st edition AD&D to be technical, with GURPS, Paranoia and even a bit of ShadowRun in the last years) in a rural area, and I have to say the people I played with were very tolerant for being isolated woodfolk. That said, we were pretty damn ignorant and scared of being seen as gay. Most of us moved to the big cities and got cosmopolitan, and even those who stayed in the woods would probably shit on prop 8.
And for the love of Gygax, take down that movie picture and put up this: http://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/T…
It’s much more uncomfortable when guys have their characters hit on the female players’ characters. By a huge margin.
One time, I LARPed roofies. We used Tic-Tacs.
But seriously, if that’s gay panic, it’s a very mild case. Of my straight gaming friends the vast majority are pretty chill, with maybe a lame joke here and there. It’s usually the nearly virginal ones who feel the need to express their sexuality in the negative. I can’t really fault them for it though: undersexed men develop a smorgasbord of hang-ups and comparison issues, regardless of their hobbies.
Yay Seattle gaymers.
I don’t really see anything wrong with the joke. Straight guys are not gay. They aren’t turned on by the idea of having sex with another guy — in fact, that’s usually a big turnoff. And it has nothing to do if they think it’s okay for two completely different guys get it on.
Any group that’s comprised almost exclusively of white boys or white men will be incredibly homophobic, sexist, and racist — baseball fans, football fans, video game nerds, comics nerds, wrestling fans, computer programmers, car mechanics, plumbers, etc. Without white men, Prop 8 would have failed with only about 40% of the vote.
I once teabagged Machkovech in a D&D game.
When I was growing up in Olympia in the mid-90s, I played a lot — a LOT — of D&D and other tabletop role playing games. One guy we played with a lot was Duane.
Duane’s dad was a tough-ass drill instructor at Ft. Lewis. Consequently, Duane was a faux tough-ass dude.
For some reason, though, Duane would always play a female character in our role playing games. Every time. We all did occasionally just to help the story along (the only thing worse than a sausage fest is a virtual sausage fest), but he was always a female.
That being said, his character was never sexual with any of the male characters. We think Duane just wanted to be a woman. We still do.
Many nerds are extremely homophobic. Nerds and gay people are not two separate and distinct groups any more than sports enthusiasts and gay people are mutually exclusive. “Gay” is an extra adjective that gets tacked on to show you are not even “cool” inside of the group you are in. Nerds are persecuted for their perceived differences, and one of the “worst” ways to be different in America is to be gay. That is why it is used pejoratively so often. Xbox live, Steam, internet forums, comments sections of blogs, schools, locker rooms, everywhere. By asserting he is not gay, he protects himself. Most people who are true friends with gay people don’t participate in that, because it’s throwing your friend under the bus and saying that he is less than you, but in groups (especially on the internet) where the orientation, or feelings are not explicit, you’re only throwing an invisible class of people under a bus. There is a lack of empathy.
The Topless Robot post is typical of the more benign activities of people who don’t think they’re hurting anyone. It doesn’t hurt most people, because most people aren’t gay. Leaving the gay person to just sit there and condone it, or speak out and be ridiculed for not “getting the joke.”
Part of the reason “gay panic” is more resurgent is not Prop 8 backlash backlash, it’s because we’ve created virtual spaces where we can interact with other human beings –as long as we don’t reveal our sexuality. Xbox Live’s recent lesbian freak-out is a perfect example of this. These require you to be in the closet, reversing everything “outting” yourself is supposed to accomplish. How can someone empathize with a gay man if he doesn’t even know gay people, or openly-gay people?
That’s a little off-topic, but it just comes back to a source for nerd gay panic. They might be interacting with other people at a table, with some dice, but the culture they come from and share time in (a blog post about awkward D&D) is rooted in this closeted virtual world.
My closest brush with high weirdness in gaming was when the guy I was having gay cyber with found out I was female in real life. I thought he knew…. Poor thing was fine after a hot shower or two. We’re still friends and still play together.
Women who play male are pretty rare apparently.
@16- I’ve heard of a number of women who play male online to avoid the slobbering 13 year olds. I’ve also heard of males who play female because they can con the slobbering 13 year olds into giving them shitloads of virtual stuff. (not sexual stuff, just stuff.)
@17 That’s call Titgrifting. It’s much more convincing if you get your wife to talk to them over ventrillo every once in a while.
2 things.
1) simulating sex with other people, whether or not you’re actually fondling yourself at the time, is basically masturbating. combine that with the fact that you’re doing it with a small group of people, and it is, in fact, some freaky shit.
2) most nerds get called the same names anyone who doesn’t conform to the macho jock stereotype get called. In the eyes of the nerd, they are, effectively, being sabotaged by these people; not only are you not sexy to girls, they are also told you aren’t interested anyway. Most nerds feel the need to compensate, though usually in their own strange ways.
“I’ve known there to be some gay panic in my encounters with the nerd community, but never anywhere near as much as in the sports fan community.”
My experience may be anecdotal, but auto racing fans (or at least auto racing fans who aren’t NASCAR fans from the south) seem to be mostly OK with having a homo like me in their midst. I’ve participated on racing message boards for 9 years, and get to hang out with these folks once a year, at the Indy 500. In 2005, I came out to them on the message board, and it actually went really well. A lot of them said stuff like, “You’re still the same guy,” and “Hey, that took a lot of guts,” and the admins sent me PM’s saying, “if anyone gives you trouble, let us know.” Anyone who had a problem with it kept it to themselves. It was actually pretty fucking awesome, and some of these straight boys have become true friends.
I think it has to do with the fact that, in auto racing, sometimes (thankfully, very rarely) the participants, well, die. No turf toe, no pulled hamstring, no lower leg snapping like a toothpick, we’re talking dead. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that, when stacked up against that, who someone sleeps with doesn’t really amount to much.
@12 Send me the photos, please. I’d like to post them on the fridge for him to find as he goes for his morning bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
I’m a female nerd, and in our nerd neck of the woods I haven’t seen anybody giving the gay nerds any trouble … but then, as FangDoc stated, being 35+ probably has to do with that. Males playing females and vice versa, that happens, more often in online games than in p&p, for various reasons, not just titgrifting. My husband, with a harem of female chars in EQ2, simply put it as “if I stare at somebody’s ass for hours on end I’d much rather have that be a female one”.
Sex in general is a burning, scary issue for young people. I don’t think it’s fair to expect them as a group to be sex and homo-sex positive. In a culture that was totally rational about these things, it might be, but that’s a long way off.
Young men will always collectively be more homophobic than the culture they live in. Individuals will vary a lot, but I can’t see how the average could come out any other way.