Malanath said:
Alright, before I begin I am going to ask that this be kept mature and civil.
Good luck with that... but here goes, anyway.
I'm not interested in opinions on the subject, I am interested in your personal experiences or how you would react or feel.
For most of us, thoughts and feelings are pretty securely moored to our opinions so I'm not getting the distinction you want to make here.
I am currently in the process of building a homebrew world, and one of the things I am striving for is a strong suspension of disbelief. I want to make my world seem as realistic as possible.
Okay. But remember that suspension of disbelief is very audience-based. Things that wreck my suspension of disbelief reinforce other people's.
To include or not to include gay and bi characters in my world.
Well, let's begin by coming up with a taxonomy of what today is called "sexual orientation." Sexual orientation is a very recent identity category, a category that did not exist in the vast majority of pre-modern societies. So, in order to discuss the question and look at how other societies have approached the issue, I would like to break it down what we today see as homosexuality into three parts.
1. Homosexuality as activity: This is when a person has sex with someone of the same sex. This may not necessarily entail the individual seeing the person with whom they are having sexual relations as a romantic partner.
2. Homosexuality as relationship: This is when a person's primary romantic relationship is with a person of the same sex.
3. Homosexuality as identity: This is when a person or group of people see the fact that they are having sex and/or romantic relationships with people of the same sex as constituting part of their identity, distinct from other aspects of identity like gender or class.
All societies, I would suggest, have categories 1 and 2 but our society is fairly unique in having category 3.
So, how might a society look at category #1 without the heuristic of sexual orientation? Well, many societies saw this through the filter of gender. So, the act of penetrating another person was viewed as masculine whereas being penetrated was viewed as feminine, regardless of the
sex, as opposed to gender, of those involved.
So, the fact that a man engaged in acts of penetration, regardless of the gender of the person being penetrated, simply reinforced his masculinity. The fact that some men liked penetrating other men better than they liked penetrating women was not really very significant. Naturally, the man in question would be expected to get married because his enjoyment of recreational sex acts would not be seen as an impediment to doing important things like having heirs, forming families, etc.
Naturally, if it came out that the man actually sought out same-sex relations in order to
be penetrated, he would be shamed. Fortunately, because sex was private, this was not that big a danger, although accusations of catching not pitching might be quite common insults.
In such societies, men who publicly identified as being objects of penetration were often viewed as having adopted the female gender. This was, in some societies, shameful and led to them operating in marginal occupations like the sex trade. And they couldn't really be taken on as wives because of their inability to reproduce and lack of physical and social supports for raising children. In other socieites, these men/women were viewed as special, part of a third gender that had particular ritual and social roles.
In terms of category #2, this sort of thing could get one in trouble in many societies. While it might be permissable to hang out with a close male friend a lot and have sex with him, society might frown on attempts to move him into a female gender role like that of wife. But in many societies, it might be routinely expected that one would have a closer social relationship with one's male friends than with one's wife; that the friendship might include sex would be less likely to be a big deal. Thus, one might have a close public sexual friendship with a person of the same sex without that being a big deal unless you decided to take him as your date to the ball. But hanging out at the gymnasium, having a few wrestling matches and then retiring to a private room for a 'sword fight' might not be problematic.
Because sex and gender were not as closely coupled in pre-modern societies, there existed less need for sexual orientation to arise as a separate identity category.
Now, my world is roughly 75-80% Human so it would seem rather odd to not include gay or bisexual NPC's.
If you mean NPCs who have sex and/or romantic relationships with people of the same sex, I'm inclined to agree. If you mean NPCs who publicly self-identify as "gay" or "bisexual," I don't agree, unless you are doing an Eberron-style fantasy world as opposed to a faux medieval or faux ancient one.
Certain organizations and groups would certainly lend themselves toward having a higher rate of gay / bisexual members.
Agreed. Single gender ascetic or military orders were the main gay dating scenes of the ancient world.
I am concerned about it being a distraction. I am not one who is interested in having PC's fall in love and have various romances, yet if one did choose to play a bi-sexual or gay character... would it be a distraction to others?
I don't see why.
I am interested in hearing about the experiences of others in the community. Have you DMed or played in any games in which there were gay / bi-sexual NPC's or PC's?
Frankly, in most of my games, questions of sexual identity never arise. However, I did play a "bisexual" character in a recent Traveller game. He was from a very primitive world and harboured various strange pre-modern views and tended to view his descent from a noble family and considered sodomizing people was a way of expressing an affectionate patron-client relationship with them (of course, people looked askance at him at his "offers" and universally turned them down). It was a good source of laughs because he fit the bill for being a hyper-virile straight man in most ways and saw this as just an extension of these views.
But that's about it. The sexuality of characters never really comes up in my games normally.
I believe including such characters would be interesting, and would love to give it a shot. I only play with mature gamers so I don't foresee any teenage or childlike response to the issue.
Then don't sweat it.[QUITE]Yet, my concern is having players focus in on such NPC characters, simply based on their sexual orientation.[/QUOTE]I see what you mean here. I think the key is to avoid an anachronistic or out of place feel by avoiding category #3 altogether and to express what we now think of as sexual orientation within the matrix of gender.
