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.
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- atomiclegion
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Interesting perspective. I've never really noticed the absence of homosexual themes, but there honestly isn't a ton of sex in mainstream games anyway. What we do have is vague or just bad.
MOAR SEX!
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Birdo was pretty obvious.
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remember the slum scen in final fantasy 7 where you had to dress Cloud up as a girl and get the Don to take him to bed? that was pretty gay lol. Ne ways, not to sound sexist but gay guys, much like girls, are far less interested in videogames than hetero guys. Seems to me like someone is looking for discrimination where it doesnt really exist. Inversely, there are plenty of strong female characters in games, most of them forgettable due to same reasons I said above (lack of interest from girls), save Lara Croft (and I dont think girls' interest is what made her so popular anyways). Seems like someones trying to stir up some controversy just for the fun of it. If there was a demand from the homosexual demographic for homosexual characters, I really doubt that any developer would refuse. Besides, look at every character thats ever been in Final Fantasy.
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I'm gay myself and I am so sick and tired of keeping track of labels and subcategories I'm supposed to fit things into. Birdo is just a weird-ass looking lizard-bird thing with a warp pipe for a nose. The character wasn't created so we all could sit around and discuss it's gender and sexuality, it was created so we could jump on the eggs that popped out of its mouth and win the level. Why do we have to complicate EVERYTHING?
What I got out of this story is the drastic difference in sexual attitudes between Asian and American cultures. All of the sexually eccentric plot themes were censored for American gamers - I'm sure many of you read the post a few weeks ago about the fantasy-rape themed Japanese video game that is banned in the US.
Censorship of anything - gay-related, violence-related, sex-related, anything - is a problem, not whether or not your peer incorrectly referred to a Final Fantasy character as a male or female.
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Much like Street Fighter's Dan Habiki, Birdo is just one of those things in gaming that you shouldn't take seriously. I Thought this story was really interesting, and I never a million years would have realized the censorship involved in gaming.
But really, In what way can the gay community be involved in Gaming other than just playing?
