DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[Bolty]

To contrast with LGBT acceptance, I've heard female gamers see a lot of misogyny from male gamers. I don't remember seeing those kinds of attitudes in gaming communities I was in (although I could have just been unobservant), so I don't know if this is a trend on the rise of it's just being talked about now.

This has always been around and I don't really see it declining. It continues to be socially unacceptable for girls to be hardcore gamers, so any of them who are go through a lot of crap both from the boys online and the girls they know. The gaming communities you participate in tend to be more mature, so you don't notice it as much.

In World of Warcraft hardcore raiding guilds, there is a general perception that any female raider:

1) Is bad at the game, and thus
2) Flirts with the male raiders to get a spot

If a female gamer turns out to violate those two assumptions, they are frequently attacked/ridiculed. Then those same males doing the attacking will wonder why there are "no good girl raiders." I mean, duh. A big part of that is that male gamers tend to feel threatened by any female gamer that is as good/better than them.

Many high-end WoW guilds simply ban females, ironically using the same excuses used by some in the military: "it breaks comraderie" or is "bad for the unit." Now, often those rules are a result of a female raider's actions leading to guild breakups/drama; perhaps you've heard of the horror stories of the Female Raider Who Sleeps with the Guild Master for Perks. Those stories, however, ALWAYS blame the female and never the male, as in "that wench seduced our GM and broke up the guild." Takes two to tango.

That said, the guild I'm in now has some strong female raiders who do quite well. It all depends on the environment of the guild, which is set by the leadership.

Humans are hardwired to label people, place them into groups, and respond to them according to that group. (Communist scum! Liberal dirtbag! Republican! Democrat!) It takes force of will, and lots of effort, to evaluate each person as an individual. Such is life, and I don't see how that can ever change.

As far as the Lounge goes, when I think of LemmingofGlory, I think "mature, well-written Diablo 1 fanatic with nicely thought-out posts" more than I think "gay gamer." As you said, with gamers, social backgrounds tend not to matter since it's the games that bring us here. Then we stay for all the political bickering anyway.