Holding Guns, Holding Hands: Sexuality In Videogames

Posted October 19, 2010 by Luke Stratford.

I’d like to begin with a quote from Ernest Gaines:

“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?”

It’s a relevant question, no more so than within today’s media where the goal is to shock, to gratify and to entertain. Violence tickles the dormant, savage parts of our consciousness – despite what critics may suggest, it isn’t a bad thing – it’s a part of human nature. And yet, while we can so readily lap up death and destruction, we are denied representation of other elements of our nature.

Although we can happily sit through two dirty, ravening hobos hacking away at each-other with broken bottles and pieces of rusty tin, the issue of sexual orientation is still one we choose to skirt around. Two men holding guns, all well and good, but holding hands? We start to feel uneasy.

If I sound bitter about this, well, it’s because I am. As an industry, as a culture, videogames are trying to push for recognition as a true art form, but thus far it’s hard to argue in its favour when we struggle to treat sexuality in an even light.

That isn’t to say that there’s some kind of full-on embargo on homosexual, bisexual, lesbian or even transgender characters in videogames. Since as far back as the NES, sexual ambiguity has been a rare, but noteworthy factor in videogames. Remember Birdo, from Super Mario Bros. 2? With the bow on his head? Yeah – in the original game manual, Birdo was described as a male pretending to be a female, before Nintendo America carefully edited it out in future prints.

Transgender egg-spitting pink dinosaurs. In 1988.

Either through direct action or by developers aiming to fit publisher guidelines (Nintendo offering the strictest guidelines at the time), sexually mature game content was altered, toned down or cut entirely. In particular, side-scrolling beat ‘em ups had to drop or edit various enemies that made clear links to LGBT culture, with Poison and Roxy from Final Fight being a noteworthy exception: Capcom declared them to be transvestites in order to avoid Nintendo’s non-violence policy against women. Pretty ballsy.

Despite a decent start, the handling of sexual preference slowly declined as games evolved. It established the broadest, crudest stereotypes: gay men would be preening, effeminate and cowardly, whilst lesbians would be sultry, voluptuous and sexually charged. It’s like stepping into a pubescent teenager’s brain and taking a snapshot at every cartoonish, ill-informed preconception in view.

Fear Effect 2 is a notorious example (despite otherwise being a pretty mature game) of exploiting a lesbian stereotype – playing the relationship between Hana and Rain for thrills rather than anything emotionally charged. It deviated from a fairly good, intense thriller into a pixellated cleavage delivery system, before suddenly jerking us back. The videogame equivalent of someone streaking through a library.

What’s not entirely clear, though, is whether it’s better to see a sexual preference exploited for titillation, or sidelined. Despite lesbian characters typically enjoying warm reception from the primarily young, male majority audience, the “one-handed gamers” as I like to call them, male homosexuality has become a running gag, not aggressively so, but still in a way that has ultimately belittled it. The early GTA games often laid the gay shtick on a bit too thick – the police in San Andreas taking the lead with lisping prison-rape dialogue and a dildo in the shower room. Funny, sure, but delicate it ain’t.

Over time, though, things have changed – perhaps not due to specific complaints from the LGBT community, but titles in recent years have made the effort to include more delicate, balanced depictions of same-sex relationships. However, the results have been middling, with only a handful of genuinely memorable results amongst them.

Honourable mention, of course, has to go to The Longest Journey, which made a good attempt of incorporating sexual preference into the storyline in the most casual, matter-of-fact way possible. Your landlady lives with her girlfriend, that cop you can flirt with politely informs you that he’s gay. No fuss, no horror, no gags – it’s earnest and sincere. A textbook example of even-handed treatment that doesn’t condescend, exploit or mock.

Returning to my GTA comments earlier, The Ballad Of Gay Tony was one of the best examples of a gay man in a videogame. Muddled, paranoid, a burnt-out by-product of Americanised gay culture: Tony Price encapsulated in one man what it meant to be gay in a city that knew about the “Pink Dollar”, that would suck you dry with glitz and glamour and leave you for dust when you were spent. It was painful to watch his spiralling mental state, you couldn’t look away – it was fascinating. A shame, really, that it copped out in making the protagonist so one-dimensional, a wandering disembodied penis with a gun taped to the end.

One franchise, despite coming from a pedigree of titles that enabled total freedom of choice, socially and sexually, fell apart at the seams in the most modern instalment. I’m referring, of course, to Fallout 3. Despite being able to do just about anything to anything, up to and including performing sexual acts on porn stars to buy ammunition so you can go and grease a notorious wiseguy, Bethesda’s effort copped out. The best you could do was flirt with various NPCs, and even then, the spectrum was distinctly heterosexual/lesbian.

Why hasn’t this been brought up? We are being given the illusion of choice, the illusion of equality, when in reality we’re just treading the same ground.

This happened in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Both boasted romantic sub-plots with certain crew members, with the latter essentially offering you a multi-species stable of potential mates – but sexual preference was completely biased in favour of heterosexual, or in the case of the Asari, “lesbian” relationships. As much as this was touted as innovation, it’s no more advanced than the Hana/Rain problem mentioned above, only with a longer preamble.

Even the Fable franchise, which actually allowed a relatively basic courtship system regardless of gender and orientation, can’t boast even treatment. You may be able to woo a man, take him home and dance the horizontal rumba, but for some reason, the divide between male and female representation is pretty stark.

The women of the Fable universe, as a rule, are curvaceous and attractive: the classic country maiden. The men are balding, impossibly-sideburned farmhands who only offer the occasional “Oh, I’ve never done it like that before” during the throes of lovemaking. The only convincing, sexually diverse, character is Reaver from Fable II, and he’s a breathtakingly egocentric, amoral bastard. I don’t know, maybe people go for that sort of guy.

Case and point, the image that sparked off this tirade – the rejected concept art for Fable III’s prostitutes:

The divide is immediately obvious – the women look normal, attractive, yet the men are dressed up like pornographic circus clowns, joke gigolos with overstated body language, ridiculous facial hair and lurid clothing – there’s nothing remotely balanced about any of it. I can only hope that this was why they were scrapped, but still, what happened to the rent boys? The “she-he’s”? What happened to the girls cross-dressing to lure men seeking illicit thrills from pretty young men? No, we almost get Baldric hunched over at the corner of a pub with a “Get It Here” sign staked into the mud, and there isn’t enough strong liquor in the world for that.

I think that’s what has me so vehemently pissed off. Developers are already aware of alternative sexual themes, but they either struggle to see past the clichés of stereotype, or lack the ambition to create a fully rounded protagonist, sexual orientation and all. Are we really so uncomfortable with the idea? We walk in the footsteps of space marines, some of the worst criminal scum imaginable, dragon slayers and rally drivers each time we sit down to play a game – yet we are rarely given the chance to walk in the footsteps of those we see every day.

Now that’s just unrealistic.