SAN FRANCISCO: World's First LGBT Gamer Convention Makes Its Debut

GaymerX, the world's first convention for LGBT gaming geeks, was held this weekend in San Francisco, where over 2000 fans enjoyed gaming panels, booths, concerts, cosplay, and parties. Sponsors of the event included GLAAD, the Trevor Project, Electronic Arts, and XBox. Gaming site Kotaku tells us about one of the weekend's most memorable moments:

Ellen McLain, the voice of GlaDOS from Portal made an appearance at the GaymerX convention and sang ‘Still Alive’. That’s pretty cool in and of itself, but perhaps not newsworthy. But what happened next? Well, that’s the best part. This is truly one of the best video game related proposals I’ve ever seen. Prepare for tears! I don’t want to ruin it by summarising it in some way that totally doesn’t capture how cool this is, so just watch it and set your face to ‘blub.’

Fast forward to the 4:00 minute mark if (like me) you don't know what Portal is and therefore won't know its theme song.

Gaymers Honored By World Of Warcraft

The Stonewall Family, a community of LGBT players in the massively popular World Of Warcraft game, has been honored by the site's operators as their "Guild of the Month." Coming from the Pong era, I'm not going to pretend that I understand how it all works, but it seems like a sweet story at the end of a week of nonsense and hatred. The history of the Stonewall Family:

Our meta-guild, The Stonewall Family, originally started as a single guild – La Familia de Stonewall. It was founded in late 2007 by a handful of friends who had tried other gay/lesbian/bi/transgender and LGBT-friendly raiding guilds... but always felt they were somewhat lost in the shuffle, and never really felt a sense of "family". They wanted to start a guild where the social aspects of play and friendships were the most important factor, and where they would be able to avoid any anti-lgbt harassment. From that small group of friends, we have grown to a "meta-guild" of over 700 members across 5 sub-guilds today. [La Familia De Stonewall, The Family of Stonewall, Stonewall Rioters, Die Familie von Stonewall, La Banque de Stonewall]

I looked at the WoW site once, couldn't figure out where to insert the quarters.

Gay Pride Hits World Of Warcraft

Gaymers and geeks will be getting their pride on come June 20th inside the virtual space of World Of Warcraft.

The Spreading Taint, the world's largest LGBT online gaming guild, has announced plans for its fifth annual World of Warcraft Pride Celebration, to be held Saturday, June 20. Events will include the annual online virtual pride parade in which hundreds of players march through the world, a dance party at Booty Bay, the "Azeroth's Next Top Model" fashion show, a craft fair, and a nude dueling contest. Prizes will include gold, in-game pets, and a Mechano-Hog -- Warcraft's much-coveted version of a motorcycle.

The Spreading Taint is the largest and most well-known part of the Rough Trade Gaming Community, which grew out of previous LGBT guilds in earlier MMORPGs. This year's Pride events are modeled more than ever on real life Pride events. with women players heading up the parade with Taint's homage to Dykes on Bikes. While the Spreading Taint welcomes all, we are taking this year's Proudmoore Pride as an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the humor, patience, skills and undeniable sass that our female and female-identified players bring to the game and to our guild. To see videos of past pride celebrations, click here, or search YouTube for "pride," "Proudmoore," and "Taint."

Here's what last year's parade looked like.