D&D 5E D&D Promises to Make the Game More Queer

[Ovinomancer]

By "we" in the above, you really mean "you".


They shouldn't have to wait on you deciding it's okay for them to be able to live their lives. Black people didn't wait for white people to be okay with them before pushing for equality. Before challenging separate but equal.

This is the crux of the issue. People don't change until acted upon by an outside stimuli. You're *never* going to be okay with it unless you're exposed to it. You're not going to just wake up and be okay with same sex people people kissing.

It's taken decades to get this far. The first male homosexual kiss on television aired only seventeen years ago, while the first interracial kiss was back in '68. How much longer should they have to wait to be able to hold their partner's hand in public? Kiss them goodbye? Tell them they love them at a bus stop? Or any of the many, many things heterosexual couples can just do without a thought.


That's not cool.
First, because it's not about desire. That's reducing it to physical urges. It's about love and attraction. You can control your physical urges but you cannot change who you fall in love with. You cannot change who you find attractive. You can pretend. But that's living a lie.

It's totally fine for someone who has LGBTQ urges and leanings to decide to abstain from sexuality for religious reasons. Just like it's okay for heterosexual and cis people to do the same when they join the priesthood or a convent.

But it's NOT okay for them to adopt the pretence of a heterosexual lifestyle, because that's involving someone else in their lie. Being in a loveless marriage is not an ideal situation for any party, and it's denying the other partner the opportunity to find someone who loves them in return. (Unless they know and are wholly aware of the situation... and aren't fooling themselves into thinking their partner can change.) Especially when kids become involved.

Just a point, but if this is about doing what's right for you, why do you feel that you get to say how other people should be gay? If that's how they want to be, well, that's for them to say, isn't it? It might not be right for you, and I certainly think it's a bit daft, but let's not go defining the right way to be gay (or straight, or black, or white, or how to play D&D). You do you, and respect how they do them.

 

[FrogReaver]

My attitudes used to mirror FrogReaver's. My attitude to two women kiss was "ewww". I didn't want to see that. I was okay with them doing in private, but I didn't want to see it.
I was 14 at the time. I believe it was in response to a Melissa Etheridge video.
Then someone called me on my BS, questioning why it mattered to me in the slightest what other people did. And I grew up a little.

If that's what it is then give others time go grow up a little. It doesn't happen at the same rate for all of us.

 

[Jester David]

Exhibit A that gay's really do want to "force it down my throat".

Someone kissing as you walk past is not forcing it down your throat. That's them living life.

Get outside your house. Walk around a high school or mall or university campus. Look at couples. Count how many displays of affection you're seeing. Think about how many of them even notice you. Almost certainly none. No one is calling out "hey man, check this out!" before kissing. Heterosexual or otherwise.
It's not forcing it down your throat of they don't even know you exist.
You're irrelevant to their display of affection. The only people it affects is the two of them.

 

[Jester David]

Just a point, but if this is about doing what's right for you, why do you feel that you get to say how other people should be gay? If that's how they want to be, well, that's for them to say, isn't it? It might not be right for you, and I certainly think it's a bit daft, but let's not go defining the right way to be gay (or straight, or black, or white, or how to play D&D). You do you, and respect how they do them.

They get to be gay however they want.
They don't get to decide for another person. It's a form of consent.

 

[Sunseeker]

They shouldn't have to wait on you deciding it's okay for them to be able to live their lives. Black people didn't wait for white people to be okay with them before pushing for equality. Before challenging separate but equal.

This is the crux of the issue. People don't change until acted upon by an outside stimuli. You're *never* going to be okay with it unless you're exposed to it. You're not going to just wake up and be okay with same sex people people kissing.

It's taken decades to get this far. The first male homosexual kiss on television aired only seventeen years ago, while the first interracial kiss was back in '68. How much longer should they have to wait to be able to hold their partner's hand in public? Kiss them goodbye? Tell them they love them at a bus stop? Or any of the many, many things heterosexual couples can just do without a thought.

More to the point, they already have. They've waited long enough. Denying them now, telling them to go back to being "good quiet non-bothersome gays" is just outright offensive .

 

[Ovinomancer]

Exhibit A that gay's really do want to "force it down my throat".

You mean be able to do what you do without feeling shamed? Maybe you need to learn to swallow, if that's your problem.

 

[Ovinomancer]

They get to be gay however they want.
They don't get to decide for another person. It's a form of consent.

I must have missed where the people in the example were dictating their lifestyle choices (and those are lifestyle choices, not the being gay part) to others and not just themselves.

 

[Cognomen's Cassowary]

Except it's not. Because games like DnD don't focus on the sex. They focus on the slaying and the adventurering. At which point orientation is going to be nothing more than a footnote.

If there can be heterosexual characters without the game "focus[ing] on the sex," why can't there be LGBTQ characters without the game "focus[ing] on the sex"?

That gay people are ordinary people who do the same things that other people do is a point that FrogReaver and you, evidently, fail to understand; their lives "don't focus on the sex." If these characters' orientation is nothing more than a footnote, then, guess what, WotC has succeeded in creating characters who are not token characters, not identified exclusively by their "deviant" [Hemlock's hideous word] romantic interests. There have always been heterosexual characters in D&D, yet have you ever taken the time to complain, "That rake's love of a barmaid is only a footnote to his character"?

I'm guessing not, and, again, the reason it seems like a normal character trait that doesn't need to be emphasized and centralized is that heterosexuality and its expression are regularly treated--normalized--in culture and society. There is no reason that LGBTQ affections and romances should seem less normal, except that their general absence in culture has made them seem so. In reality, they are no less ordinary than heterosexuality, only less common.

Also good job being just as bigoted, brushing all of one orientation with the same colour (I'm pretty sure I just butchered that saying).

How? How did I do that? By addressing FrogReaver's generalization about heterosexuals being uncomfortable with open affection between gays? Explain what the hell you are talking about if you are going to spew this kind of diarrhea.

 

[FrogReaver]

Someone kissing as you walk past is not forcing it down your throat. That's them living life.

Get outside your house. Walk around a high school or mall or university campus. Look at couples. Count how many displays of affection you're seeing. Think about how many of them even notice you. Almost certainly none. No one is calling out "hey man, check this out!" before kissing. Heterosexual or otherwise.
It's not forcing it down your throat of they don't even know you exist.
You're irrelevant to their display of affection. The only people it affects is the two of them.

That's awful shallow. Individualism is big in America. I love it. But everything we do affects each other.

 

[MechaPilot]

That isn't marginalizing a person. Seriosuly? How is that marginalizing anyone?

"Your ability to show minimal levels of affection to your partner in a public place is subordinate to my comfort with seeing it" is absolutely marginalizing a person by making something truly fundamental, love and the expression of same, subject to your desire not to see it. You might as well say a person listening to music at a reasonable volume in public has to clear it by you first because you might not like their taste in music.