| From: | Thom Watson <thom@******.DIGEX.NET> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Gender Benders and successful players... |
| Date: | Wed, 27 Oct 1993 09:40:12 -0400 |
[about playing a female character]
= out nicely. Anyway, I thought it was fun. Luckly, never any romantic
= entaglements...
OK. I really don't want to start a flame war, but this comment sets me
on edge. Why "luckily"? We're talking about a game here; a game of
role-playing and acting. A romantic entanglement between a male
character and a female character (or between female and female, or
male and male) is just that, a relationship between characters; it
implies nothing about the players, except possibly that they're
exceptional or mediocre actors, depending on how they handle
it. Forgive me if I've misread you, but there seems to be some
implicit homophobia in your comment.
Gay men and lesbians who game most often are expected to roleplay
characters with romantic entanglements with characters of the opposite
gender, and rarely have a problem with doing it well or believably, or
call it "unlucky." In fact, in RPGA-sanctioned games, the merest hint
of a gay orientation is dreadfully taboo, while opposite-gender
characters have crushes and explicit romantic desires written into
their descriptions; a terrible double-standard that T$R rapidly
embraces. So if I want to play in an RPGA tournament, I have to play a
straight character. Oddly, I've won about three out of four
tournaments I've played in anyway. I don't like it one bit, but it
doesn't make me incapable of making people believe I am the role I'm
given. (T$R says it doesn't allow any "sex" or "perversion" in its
RPGA-sanctioned games... I've played characters whose descriptions
indicated they wanted to bear another character's children, or who
were priests of a love god who were supposed to seduce other
characters *in RPGA games* and this was not considered sex. I've seen
a number of games re-written by the RPGA to edit out the mention that
another character was gay or lesbian, even though there was no
specific attraction or actions mentioned! Obviously just referring to
a character as gay is either sexual or perverse, while encouraging
straight characters to have babies with each other somehow avoids sex.
Gee, they must have some interesting spells for that, but not a lot of
fun, in those fantasy worlds. :/ )
Oh, and Robert, you said you'd never met a male who could play a woman
without reducing her to an effeminate wimp or a slut. Well, say hello.
My GM allows only me to play opposite-gender characters, because he
says he honestly can't tell them from real, 3-dimensional
women. Modesty aside, I also play the best non-human characters,
because I play them as psychologically alien, not as humans with
pointy ears. After all, if even the people closest to me for years
thought I was a straight man (not a role I put my best efforts into),
it's not much of a stretch to play another role as alien to me as that
one is.
And Deb Decker, IMO, gay men *do* play more believable female
characters, *in general* and *in my personal experience* (YMMV). I
don't suggest it's anything genetic or inherent, but perhaps just a
willingness to look past what many straight men want women to be and
see them as they really are. There are exceptions, of course.
--
Thom Watson thom@******.digex.net
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
--Ursula K. LeGuin
