I’m starting to lose track of what states in the US allow what kind of partnerships. Obviously Wikipedia can be trusted 100% (…), so one can look there, and now’s a good time to point out all the federal rights and protections granted to married couples, in case you’re still wondering what the big deal is.

I’m connecting the dots in the most probable manner, and I’m just not lecherous enough for this gig. Forgive me if I don’t respond.

At first, it seems like it is; if Hood is any indication, liberal arts students support GLBT efforts to stake out a place for themselves in the straight world. This projects into a future where we can imagine more and more people being a-ok for us queer folk. That’s cool. It’s a sociological indicator of where the nation is headed, yeah? Right?

…Sort of? What I found more interesting was the stats they gave: Jones won 64 out of 169 votes for Homecoming King. That’s not terribly overwhelming as a win. And from Hood’s website, there were 2,121 students enrolled at Hood in the fall of 2005. 169 total votes out of a student body of 2,121; that’s about 8% voter turnout for the King ballot. The real news here is that liberal arts students don’t give a fuck about Homecoming. And when you crunch a couple other numbers, it says 3% of students actively wanted a lesbian Homecoming King. That’s not much of a reason to celebrate.

If we want news to make us feel good about the future of GLBTs in this country, how about something more concrete? I want to see headlines like Gay man totally beats the shit out of his would-be gay-basher, or Rad lesbian does her thing in rural Alabama, or She’s brilliant, she’s post-op, she’s the Senator.

Jones deserves a better headline. She’s the homecoming king isn’t cool. A better one would be Young lesbian figures out early on how to game the system, is prepared for a richer life because of it.

(Cross-posted since it fit in both places.)

No sexuality in a game with commands /kiss, /flirt, and /silly, the last one having some sexually-related jokes. I mean, “I heard if you cut off an extremity, it’ll regenerate a little bigger. Don’t believe it.” Hello? And that’s on the tame side.

If you follow the story of what happened from there, you’ll see an unsatisfactory round or two with Blizzard’s customer service team, some additional commentary about gay marriages in-game, a statement by a community manager, the involvement of and a letter from Lambda Legal, and finally an apology and statement of intent to rectify and improve the situation from Blizzard.

Wow, that was exciting. While all this was happening, I was trying to follow the deluge of weblog posts, forum threads, comments, and articles to piece together what was going on. My first instinct was that this was all a big mistake. Blizzard always came off as a gay-friendly company to me. In World of Warcraft, my male character could flirt with other men, kiss male revelers during the Winter’s Veil holiday event to get holly and mistletoe, and basically do everything the straight fictional characters could do. Even wear a dress (and to note, he owns two. That white summery thing and a slinky black number). If Blizzard didn’t want any of these things happening, it’d be pretty easy for them to code in gender-specific limitations to certain actions and items. I’ve seen it done in other games, so I know it’s possible. I just figured some poorly-trained GM probably saw Sara’s guild announcement, issued the warning, and made a bad call. It happens. It’s a low-paying job and they’re probably not given the resources to always do their job properly.

Still, if the Terms of Service was written to disallow mentions of queerness in public channels when there was so much straightness going on, then that’d be unfair, and I’m not down with the unfair. Some folks were talking about cancelling their accounts, and that seemed a viable option. But I know a bit about the economics of boycotts, and they’re only really effective if they last over longer periods of time. WoW players get billed by the month in the smallest chunks, and some players buy subscriptions in three- and six-month chunks for a discount. (I fell under the three-month chunk plan myself.) When you cancel your account, you get to keep playing until your month/three-month/whatever chunk of time is up. If this whole thing blew over in a week, most people cancelling would still be playing during that time, and assuming they reinstated their accounts once Blizzard cleared things up, there’d be no impact whatsoever.

So I posted to one mailing list I’m on that I wasn’t cancelling yet, that I was still reading opinion and gathering information and waiting to see what Blizzard would do before deciding to cancel or not cancel, and immediately got responses saying things like “If you have any pride in yourself, pull your money and call for a boycott.”

So did I mention I could /kiss the other guys. Fucking hell.

From there, list discussion devolved into boasting of activist histories, accusations that others had no pride in themselves, a couple tantrum-sign-offs, and while a lot of good points were raised, no one, or nearly so, was actually doing their research and actually looking into it. These were people who had never played the game and didn’t know that there were tons of gay groups which had existed for over a year with no problems from Blizzard staff. If they did do their research, it didn’t help that the story was getting over-inflated and people were falsely reporting that there could be no queerness and no safe spaces for queerness in the game whatsoever. (Although for the record and for fairness’ sake, both those webloggers have since revisited the issue or updated with better information once this whole thing got cleared up, dig it.)

Watching all of this happened, seeing people go off half-cocked while half-informed, made me feel years older. It reminded me a lot of myself, of what I, up until recently, would have done. And I hope won’t do anymore. It’s just not helpful.

At any rate, at some point between Caydiem’s post to the WoW forums and Blizzard’s apology, I decided that it was still an unfair situation if the ToS could be interpreted in the ways it had been, so I checked to see just when I’d be rebilled for my subscription. I checked on a Sunday, and it turned out my subscription would renew for another three months on that Tuesday. So, just in the off chance that this thing was going to draw out for a ridiculous (by today’s standards) amount of time, and feeling like Caydiem’s statement did nothing to address the potential imbalance, I cancelled. That Monday, I logged onto Cenarius for one last game with my guildies before my account was frozen. We hit Zul’Farrak, caused a lot of damage, I dinged 52, good times. I told my guildies that I’d probably be back by the end of the week, because there was probably no way Blizzard would let this fly.

When I cancelled my account, Blizzard gives you a textarea where you can describe why you’re leaving them. It’s all very “Dear John” except there’s a character limit. Due to that, I had to be brief. I put down:

I’m cancelling due to the policy regarding “Harassment, Sexual Orientation.” I’m sure you’re aware of the press one Sara Andrews has been getting and the case she and her legal advisors are putting together. After reading through much public opinion and customer relations made public to try and get to the truth of the matter, I’ve come to the opinion that the policy is biased against GLBTs, even if not intentionally. As a gay man, my conscience leads me to cancel until a satisfactory resolution is reached.

By Tuesday, an apology and clarification had been issued, and by Thursday my account was back up and running. A two-day boycott. Wow, I’m glad I participated. The cost of two days of play time works out to be about a dollar. That’s sticking it to them where it hurts. But hey, it could have all happened differently.

And the latest turn of events—much to the chagrin of all the internet people wailing that sexuality has no place in online games, I’m sure—is the new in-game event, based off of St. Valentine’s Day, in which you can profess your love for NPCs and woo them. And the guys can mack on the guys, and the ladies can mack on the ladies, you bet.

In the meantime, and even since before any of this brouhaha surfaced, I’ve been working on a new resource for GLBT WoW guilds and players. So now I have to find the time to get it off the ground. A little scary since I’ve never run a community before, but someone had to do it.

Another make-me-think issue was yet another death in the family. I don’t really ever discuss things in terms of capital-g God unless I’m around them, as they’re Catholic, and it’s just easier to use their language than it is to go down my pantheistic road. And really, we believe a lot of the same things, anyway, so it works out. And from talking the talk comes thinking the think, which gets me all comparitive, and I start making some mental connections based on this chapter from the book Japan’s New Middle Class (courtesy of George), the chapter being about (or at least what I’ve got out of it so far) Japanese social order and the influence of family in finding work and as a result, your general well-being. If I’m reading it right, you’d look to the head of your family to make the needed introductions to find work, even in another town. Subsequently, if you’re the head of the family, your position is secure, but only as stable as the connections you can maintain yourself, with no outside help. Suddenly, worshipping and revering your ancestors makes so much more sense.

So my uncle died and I headed back to my mom’s home town where much of our extended family lives and my youngest cousin asked me how come I only come to visit when someone dies. This is not entirely true, since she’s too young to remember some of my previous visits during the holidays, but more recently it holds. Lately we seem to have one family member drop off every year as well, so it’s not like I’m missing out on whole phases of her childhood. It’s not the best way to plan family visits, of course, but I’ve never been good at keeping in touch. Partly because for some time now, I’ve felt really disconnected from my extended family; there was a stage where I hit my twenties and all my cousins (all younger, here) were still college-aged or in their teens, and suddenly I’m different and adult and even just trying to have a conversation seemed unnecessarily awkward. Meanwhile, I was shifting into a role of fellow adult with my aunts and uncles, and my expectations on how to interact with them were also being tested. On a smaller scale, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but at the time, when I saw my family, it would be because we’d leave Chicago to head back there, and then we’d see them all at once. That meant dealing with parsing my shifting relations with twenty to thirty people at a time. Gladly, this phase is ending. My twenties are over and I’ve mostly gotten the hang of being an adult (as much as anyone does), my cousins are similarly aging and setting out on their lives and we’ve got things in common again, my aunts and uncles have gotten the hang of me and I them. I came back from this latest trip feeling more a part of my own family than I have in a long time.

One other thing that helped there was getting to spend time with one of my mother’s cousins, and meeting another one of them briefly. Both are gay and how fucking cool is it to have queer relatives? Having someone else around with whom to be catty is not a thing to be underestimated. Anyway, cousin J. and I got to hang out both evenings I was in town, having such misadventures as taking the youngest cousins to Target, the dollar store, and wherever else just to get out of the house, and critiquing High School Musical after my youngest cousin claimed the tv from 7 o’clock on. I also got to meet his partner, which was neat, having a gay couple at a family function when for the longest time I wasn’t sure how my family would even react to my own gayness. Once again I was told I should be in radio, what with my voice. It also smoothed out my view of gay Republicans, meeting J.’s partner. Granted, I’m sure we could get into political arguments (and this guy would probably argue me off the island since he’s had more experience and involvement in politics) if I felt inclined, but it illuminated for me that I’m less and less prone to think of things in terms of us/them.

Of course, that was one of the themes underlying The Invisibles; the more hellish of two metaverses being driven by an illusion of I/YOU, as the way we view ourselves reveals only part of ourselves, being four-dimensional beings being cross-sectioned by time, similar to if you were on two-dimensional planes viewing a sphere’s cross-section as being a circle, and our universe being the larval stage of a 5th-dimensional being waiting to be born… therefore we’re all connected in more than just action. But that’s just one way of looking at it.