GLAAD Panel On Homophobia In Online Communities A Resounding Success

This weekend, I was very proud to be included in GLAAD's panel on homophobia in online communities hosted at the EA studios in Redwood City. The panel consisted of myself, Dan Hewitt - Senior Director of Communications & Industry Affairs for the ESA, Caryl Shaw - Senior Producer in the Maxis Studio (Electronic Arts, Inc.), Cyn Skyberg - VP of Customer Relations at Linden Lab, Stephen Toulouse - Program Manager for Policy and Enforcement on Microsoft's XBox LIVE and was moderated by Justin Cole, GLAAD's Director of Digital & Online Media. The panel was attended by about sixty or so people including gamers, EA employees and a few journalists from various outlets.

The event itself was a terrific success and it was wonderful to hear from the other panel members who were all on the same page. One of the big issues all of us seemed to acknowledge was the fact that unlike many words, "gay" functions as a pejorative as well as an identifier, which makes it extremely difficult to decide how to handle the word. This is something I believe is going to take more than one panel to tackle - but seeing how positive all the participants were, I think a resolution is in the not-too-distant future.

Stephen Toulouse spoke quite a bit about how Xbox is working to make a positive change to make LIVE a safer place for its LGBT players. Steps are being taken so that players will be able to identify themselves as LGBT within LIVE, although how exactly that will be done is yet to be seen. I was thrilled to receive an invite to Redmond, WA to see exactly what they are working on. Hopefully that will happen in a few weeks and I will be able to give you all a little bit more information. I am hoping that whatever the Xbox folks are working on will be strong enough that other outlets will be able to create something similar. Yes, I'm talking to YOU Sony. Your presence was missed on the panel.

I applaud GLAAD for putting this together, EA for hosting the event and the reps of the various companies for showing up and being willing to work together with us, the players, to start combating the ugly hate speech and ridicule we encounter on a regular basis in online play. I am also very encouraged by the actions of Microsoft/Xbox and I feel they are really on the ball with this.

EA was good enough to make a video recording of the entire event which should be available on GLAADs website as well as here on GayGamer early next week. A big thanks to all of you who were able to attend and for all the well wishes in emails, twitters and comments.