For Gay Gamers, A Virtual Reality Check
They Can Create New Identities Online, But Prejudice Still Has a Role to Play

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 11, 2006

Only in an online role-playing game: a man playing as a woman, a husband and wife playing as a lesbian couple, a transsexual showgirl playing as a magical mage. In the swashbuckling fantasyland that is "World of Warcraft" -- with more than 6 million players, each forking up $14.95 a month -- you can take on a whole new identity. That's the beauty of it. Total escapism.

Or so Sara Andrews thought.

Lately, she's been the most talked about figure in that robust but little-known subculture within games: gay gamers. They're the players -- of all ages, many of them out, some closeted -- who serve as the antidote to the stereotypical image of the young heterosexual male video game player. They have built online communities like Gaymer.org and Gamers.experimentations.org, to name just two. They also foster gay groups within online role-playing games such as "City of Heroes," "Star Wars Galaxies" and "World of Warcraft," aka "WoW."

The question is -- why? What does being gay have to do with gaming? Isn't the whole point to leave behind one's identity in a realm of pure fantasy? Should the rules of conduct online mirror the rules of real life?

Andrews says yes. "To many gamers online, 'gay' or 'homo' . . . are used as general insults. And they feel like they can type them in over and over again because they're on their computers and I can't see them in person," she says. The 25-year-old Andrews is a transsexual showgirl at Play Dance Bar in Nashville at night and a spell-casting mage online on her days off. "Being gay, I can't help but get [ticked] off and react. I didn't leave the real closet to be forced back into the virtual closet."

The answer Andrews and others are learning is that their virtual worlds can simply be an extension of the world they're living in. Online worlds, in fact, are as complex as real ones.

Cited for Harassment

Within "World of Warcraft," there are numerous "guilds." They are not unlike high school clubs, and last year, Andrews started one akin to a Gay-Straight Alliance. She named it Oz.

In late January, Andrews was trying to recruit new members to her GLBT-friendly guild: gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender. ("Why do we have gay clubs? Because a lot of men dancing with other men would get ragged on in straight clubs, right? Same thing for online games," she explains.) Repeatedly, she wrote in general chats within the game: "We are not 'GLBT only,' but we are 'GLBT friendly!' " Then one of the game's moderators, interpreting the game's "terms of use," cited her for "Harassment-Sexual Orientation."

"Advertising sexual orientation" was inappropriate, said a spokesman for Blizzard, the California-based company that owns "WoW." Many people are offended at the mere sight of the word "homosexual," the company noted. Furthermore, "we do feel that the advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise," Blizzard wrote Andrews.

To many gay gamers, Blizzard's stance amounted to the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

"The idea that sexual orientation doesn't belong in games is absurd. It's in movies, it's in music, it's on TV," says Alexander Sliwinksi, a gaming columnist for In Newsweekly, the gay weekly paper in Boston.

Chris Viccini, a graphic designer in Atlanta who started Gaymer.org in May 2003 and plays "WoW," was confused. "What message was Blizzard trying to send?" asks the 35-year-old. "That gay people aren't welcome in the game?"

Kevin VanOrd, who works at a tech company in Chantilly and lives in Columbia, was incredulous. He plays "WoW," too -- and his live-in boyfriend of two years is practically cemented to the game. Upon entering their two-bedroom apartment, the first thing you see is a PC to your left and another PC to your right. On a recent Saturday afternoon, both were logged on to "WoW."

"It's interesting," says VanOrd, 33. "The gaming community is so accepting of elves and fairies, trolls and ogres. But you can't get them to be accepting of gay people right here in the gaming world."

Things exploded online. Lots of very heated chatter in gaming forums, gay and straight alike -- from Gaymer.org, the biggest of the online gay gaming sites, to Kotaku.com, the Wonkette for the hardcore gaming set, to Slashdot.org, the one-stop shop for geekdom, to Mmorpg.com, the go-to-site for millions of online role-playing gamers. An articulate bunch who haven't met a link they haven't sent in an e-mail, these gamers had lots to say. Word spread. Gays? In games? Gay guilds in games?

"It looks like the real world and the virtual one are growing closer together on a daily basis. Prepare to start paying your 'WoW' property taxes any day now," a gamer wisecracked on Mmorpg.com.

On Slashdot.org, another gamer wrote: "Gay people have a tendency to bring their own persecution down upon themselves. 'LOOK AT ME!!!!! I'M GAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' Then they wonder why people think they are [jerks]."

Over at Kotaku.com, a gamer who calls himself "Webimpulse" got so frustrated reading all the postings: "The kind of bigotry I'm seeing on here has just killed any chances of me ever renewing my 'World of Warcraft' subscription. Blizzard used to be cool."

A lawyer at Lambda Legal, a gay rights group, got involved. Blizzard apologized to Andrews and promised to conduct "sensitivity training" for its more than 1,000 game moderators. The game's "terms of use," says Lisa Jensen, a spokeswoman for Blizzard, are currently in review.

"It was quite a wake-up call for us. It wasn't anticipated at all. It kind of spiraled out of control," Rob Pardo, the lead designer of "WoW," says of the continuing online imbroglio. "It erupted over us not having a stated policy dealing with sexual orientation within the game."

'Real Life, Game Life'

Questions abound from gays and straights. Identity in online role-playing games -- whether you're playing a rogue, a shaman, a warlock or a paladin -- is elastic, elusive, ever changing. But is it possible to avoid bringing a part of yourself to it?

"The reason that being gay is relevant to gaming is because gaming nowadays enables people to construct and reconstruct their identities," says Sherry Turkle, the author of "Life on the Screen." An MIT professor who studies the culture of online identities, she is sometimes referred to as a "cybershrink."

"We're at a transition point in how we view these online games. We're so used to the dichotomy: real life, game life. But these online games are at a place somewhere in between. It's not just a game . They spend hours there. They have friends there. They have a life there."

And that online life, says Turkle, is not entirely separated from real life.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," reads the caption to a famous New Yorker cartoon of two dogs sitting in front of a computer. You can be God, a man, a Martian, a woman, a wizard or a witch in online role-playing games. The story is largely being told to you, with characters already created by the programmers, and you exist in the framework of the story. "The Sims 2," which came out in 2004, is an exception to this prepackaged framework. Same-sex marriages are allowed in the game, and that's because the "general philosophy" of "The Sims" is to "prohibit as little as we have to," says Rod Humble, the game's executive producer.

This is not the era of "Space Invaders," "Frogger" and "Pong" ruling the gaming landscape with simplistic, almost abstract, nonhuman characters. The time is distant that "Pac" was a "Man" and that was that. Today is even a long way from the '80s and '90s, when characters and story lines were somewhat more specific but the state of the art was only Super Mario, ever the klutz, trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser, for example, while the curvy and alluring Lara Croft, Duchess of Saint Bridget, time and again saves the world.

In the past decade, as gaming technology has given way to more stunningly realistic games, gaming characters, too -- both in console and online games -- have become strikingly realistic. Up to a point. Bertram, a pirate in the PC game "The Temple of Elemental Evil," is the rare gay game character.

"By and large, game designers are not pushing the boundaries when it comes to gay characters or gay relationships," says Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison whose research focuses on online role-playing games. "They're largely not comfortable with it. Let's think of it this way: Does every girl character I play have to look like she's doing the Barbie thing? Does every guy have to look all macho?"

In contrast to the largely stereotypical depictions of male and female characters, Steinkuehler says there is a vast diversity in how people play with gender within online role-playing games. Most of her male friends play as female characters. She and her husband, Kurt, play "WoW" as a lesbian couple. ("Why do we do that?" she asks. "Why wouldn't we?") Social relationships, online and offline, will develop no matter the environment, she says.

'WoW' No More

Sara Andrews, the transsexual showgirl, grew up in foster homes in and around Cookeville, Tenn., 80 miles east of Nashville. Biologically a boy, she realized she was gay at 14, started dressing as a girl at 18, and, for years, has been living out her fantasy to be a girl in video games and comic books. She always played Storm -- the mutant goddess in "The X-Men" who controls the weather -- in the playground at school. She plays Storm in "X-Men: Age of Apocalypse" on her PlayStation 2 in the living room.

She's a fan of fantasy, but she stopped playing "WoW" a few weeks back.

"Maybe it's not a very good escape from the real world, playing a game online and dealing with a bunch of other people," says Andrews. "It's like escaping the real world and finding what you don't like about it -- the slurs, the homophobia -- in the online world."

These days, she's busy rereading "Through the Looking Glass," the follow-up to "Alice in Wonderland."