A History of Homosexuality in Gaming

In the past 30 years gays and lesbians have broken out of the closet in spectacular style. Before the 1980s it was hard to find any openly gay characters in popular entertainment, but in the last 10-15 years it has been hard to avoid homosexuals in films and on TV. From Academy Award winning films such as Brokeback Mountain and Milk - not forgetting one of Australia’s most popular films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert - to prime-time TV shows such as Will & Grace, gays are here, they’re happily queer and everyone else is getting used to it. However in gaming it seems the closet door is still closed.

No one is expecting games to suddenly start showing sodomy in a tent, Brokeback Mountain style – game publishers still have issues depicting heterosexual sex scenes (check out Are Gamers Scared of Sex? for more) – but where is the gay video game hero? Or strong supporting characters? They are very hard to find, just as they were in films and TV before the 1980s. Bisexuality is starting to be seen - or at least accessed if a player is looking for it - but unlike other entertainment forms, games have not joined the 21st century by displaying diversity in human sexuality.

Japanese games have long featured minor gay characters – almost always flamboyant cross-dressers and fitting the ‘girly’ gay cliché – but in the 1980s and 1990s these characters were censored or changed for a Western release. The original Street Fighter character Eagle, who also appears in Capcom vs. SNK 2, was gay but several of his quotes obviously displaying his orientation were taken out for the game’s release outside of Japan – and Eagle didn’t make the cut for the rest of the Street Fighter series.

In 1988, Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 2 featured a mini-boss named Birdo who was described in the Japanese instruction manual as thinking he was a girl and wanting to be called "Birdetta" – but this was changed for release outside Japan. In 1994 Sega’s Streets of Rage 3 was altered for Western release, removing a gay boss named Ash (distinguished by his Village People style fashion) and replacing him with a straight character named Shiva. Sega also removed minor gay and transgender characters from Final Fight and in RPG Phantasy Star II, a helpful town's musician's homosexuality was edited so that the only hint of his persuasion was that he charged less money for music lessons for male characters than female ones.