Gay and Lesbian ban on PS3 Home – Home-o-phobia on the PS3

First up, welcome to 2009 lovely readers! Hope you had a great holiday. Now to it… Remember back in May 2008 when we were a tad annoyed about Microsoft lumping gay and lesbian in with the “offensive” words filtered on the XBL service. Well now that PS3 Home is finally here, it seems they’ve taken that route also.

Sony has allegedly banned the words “gay” and “lesbian” from the service along with “jew” and “bi-sexual”. Michael Marsh wanted to set up a gay/straight alliance in Home, but couldn’t due to the filtering system.

We understand Sony wanting to quash possible hatred on the service, but using discrimination to do it seems kind of stupid. The discourse sociologist in me wants to scream at Sony and slap them with a wet flannel as I explain they should concentrate on the linking process of these terms with regards to hatred. So “Gay Straight Alliance” equals fine, whilst “Anti Gay Alliance” equals ban. It’s not difficult Sony. Banning gay and lesbian altogether just leads those words to once more be categorized as offensive and that – as we covered before – helps no one.

6 Responses to “Gay and Lesbian ban on PS3 Home – Home-o-phobia on the PS3”

1. Ashley-Yin says:

   January 5, 2009 at 5:39 pm

   Well im back to viewing the Lesbian Gamers & Gay Gaymer sites, (L.G. being my fave of course) after all the praise n devotion i have for PS3, PSP and Sony in general they go n distroy it all by doin this, i hostenly feel sick. And like i said about 360 if Sony dont change it and appologise i’ll bocott them and possibly go back to Nintedo but to be honest i dont like them either anymore so if no sorry is seen or heard ill not waste the functionality of PS3 as i do use it alot but sony will find themselves in more than just out of pocket they’ll be no word of mouth n i’ll trash talk them like i do microdud. I PAYED GOOD MONEY AND I WONT TOLLERATE BEING PUSHED AWAY FROM SOMETHING I’VE SPENT ‘GENERATIONS’ SUPPORTING!!! Im gonna send this to them xx
2. Thefremen says:

   January 5, 2009 at 5:39 pm

   This is a sure sign that Sony has no intention of moderating Home in any way shape or form. It’s odd because they’re going to have to mod the hell out of LBP to keep people from posting 9/11 and XXX themed levels.
   At any rate, they’ve also banned “Christ” and “Hell” so the term “Hello and welcome to the Christian alliance for Gay and Lesbian fellowship” would be super duper banned.
3. Iliana says:

   January 12, 2009 at 8:38 am

   Haha I can’t believe you can’t say “Hello” on PS3 Home this is getting ridiculous, they should just moderate the “hate stuff” there are after all zillions of ways of saying offensive stuff like “H3ll0″…
4. Rachel says:

   January 20, 2009 at 7:52 am

   Discrimination against gays and lesbians does exist in real life, and unfortunately it exists in some games too.
   But I still am going to boycott PS3 and X-box. I never played “X-box” and Playstation games, your excellent written articles have given me a reason not to support them. Thank you for informing me about X-Box and PS3 discriminating gays and lesbians, I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for your articles.
5. Michael says:

   January 24, 2009 at 6:56 am

   To me it mostly just seems like a quick fix to prevent people from throwing fighting words at each other. “That’s gay”, speaking about a unprefferable situation, person, or action.
   A quick fix that not much thought was put into.
6. chamullo82 says:

   January 26, 2009 at 11:58 pm

   This is terrible, first Microsoft and now Sony! this is terrible, when will they learn?
   Something has to be done, maybe we can write a letter to both Microsoft and Sony with signatures from gamers around the world insisting that this has to be changed.
   Maybe on Nintendo Wii someone with the programing skills could make a community channel for a Gay/Straight Alliance, well for everybody who is intelligent enough to understand that all love is good love, It could be called the All Love channel and we could set it up on the Homebrew channel that way Nintendo cant meddle with it. So anybody who has the programming skills and will to do it please help us. Oh and LesbianGamers.com you could make a website adapted for viewing in the Wii browser, like “wii like to podcast” has done with their site, that could also be a way to create a community lobby for people with love in their harts that want to access it from their console =)
   Well Im sorry things turned out this way with Sony and Microsoft, I hope they get to their senses and change their minds about this.
   peace out/chamullo82