The Gayer Gamer username banned from XBox Live

A videogamer on XBox Live wrote to Consumerist with the following complaint:

Consumerist,

I have had a bad morning. Last night when i tried to sign into my xbox live account "thegayergamer" I was told that it had to be changed. I figured that it was just from people reporting it as an offensive name being that the greater Xbox live community isn't exactly welcome to gay people, i spend a lot of time muting people on Halo3. I assumed that once i called Microsoft they would straighten things out.

I talked to a supervisor there, Roxy, who told me that she didn't personally find the fact that my gamer tag had gay in the name offensive, but that the greater Xbox community did, so i would have to change it. I hope I'm not the only person who finds this don't ask, don't tell policy disgusting... eek

From Grant, thegayergamer

In their terms of use, XBox Live states that "[a member may not] Create a Gamertag or use text in other profile fields that may offend other members. You know what, this comes down to the same old argument that the gays need to hide away just in case someone may be offended by them. They'll tolerate the gays, but God forbid that we ever talk about it or express ourselves.

In reply, Stephen Toulouse (the Xbox Live "banhammer wielder" apparently) explains the ban on his blog:

We recieved a complaint on the Gamertag and determined that it did indeed contain sexual innuendo. Now granted, there could be an argument that the text is not pejorative to homosexuality and should therefore be allowed. But there is no context to explain that. Gamertags are visible to everyone and it would be hard for me to defend to a parent of a young child who saw it that the name did not contain content of a sexual nature.

We view these situations objectively during our review under the terms of use. To answer the question another way, yes "TheStraighterGamer" or "TheHeterosexualgamer" would have gotten the same treatment and would have been found to be in violation and forced to be changed. We've actually done that to tags like that before.

Now, the thing is, there's no point bring the poor little innocent children into this. XBox Live isn't geared towards children at all and we're talking about someone playing an adult game Halo 3 which kids shouldn't have access to anyway. Way too many people ignore the ratings system on videogames and use it as a babysitter so this is a situation which should only involve adults. Besides, there are way more important issues for XBox Live to be dealing with rather than a username. You only have to watch the YouTube clip below to get an understanding of what it can be like on XBox Live:



Welcome to XBox Live folks - the place where you can call everyone else gay except yourself!

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