Queerness =/= Obscenity

There was a product posted to the DMsGuild fairly recently that was a rather cheeky adventure featuring a house full of gay vampires. Like, really gay. Blatantly gay. You can’t even pretend that they might be straight. Some of the artwork from this product got flagged by the moderators as “obscene” and it got pushed back to the creator to fix.

You can follow the twitter thread below to see the art, and also to see a wonderful compilation of artwork provided to creators by WotC/DMsGuild to use as approved art for creations to be published on the DMsGuild. You might notice that some of the provided artwork features sexy images. Or has the same traits as the images that were flagged as obscene.

Now, I want to be clear that this is my opinion, but I honestly do not think we’d be sitting here having this conversation if the artwork flagged featured female figures or if the product in question was maybe a little less queer…

Moral of the story: WotC rules it's only appropriate to overtly objectify women for the purpose of straight men being sexually satisfied. If anybody else is in the picture or being titillated by it, it's not family friendly.

Objectifying women = ok. Anything else = bad? https://t.co/RsvhHUiIka
— Laura Hirsbrunner #BLM #FireMikeMearls (@laura_hirsb) June 30, 2020

Oh, and did I mention that this debacle has gotten so much traction that it’s been picked up by several sources and there are articles on the topic?

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/dungeons-dragons-dms-guild-oliver-clegg-curse-of-hearts/

Or that the DMsGuild has issued not one but TWO statements in the wake of this? Which is odd considering how they normally remain fairly silent.

A follow-up: https://t.co/dlBfY7XDQo pic.twitter.com/nT50EuCxsk
— Dungeon Masters Guild (@dms_guild) June 30, 2020

There’s already precious little representation in media of queerness. Only recently has it become socially acceptable to air overtly queer scenes.

Even when we put in queer representation though, there’s a tendency to shy away from sexuality. Only cis-het sexuality is good. That’s the standard. Sexy women drawn to provoke lust from the male gaze. It’s certainly been the standard in gaming and fantasy artwork since….well, ever.

Heaven forbid we include artwork that alludes to gay male sexuality. These fine fellows below aren’t any worse than a lot of the art we see of women, but these would probably be deemed obscene by many. What’s the difference? Below these handsome men, I’m posting a few examples of “acceptable” artwork of female figures.