I'm an openly and flamboyantly gay, black female. When I mentioned casually that Acheron and I were dating (this was like, 9 years ago, mind you) I had a male player flat out accuse me of lying and then go into some pseudo-academic rant about mixed race dating. I had female players 'jokingly' assert that I was being greedy by dating a guy when I'd previously only dated women as an adult.
Discussing baby names OOC on Firan, I was informed by some old whore (that's how I think of her in my mind, 'some old whore') that naming my kid the name I'd chosen would 'make her gay'. My kid is non-binary and gives talks about gender identity in elementary school. If it was the name, OH WELL. I only mention this one because deep down it still bothers me, a lot. Keep your judgments to yourself, even if the name is Mabel or Gertrude, you just say 'Oh, that's pretty!' or keep your trap shut.
I mostly play gay male characters. I usually play them on yaoi-based sites, and by tacit agreement, most people pretend to be male in real life. Openly female players are often shunned due to a lack of 'authenticity'. This leads to very weird shit, like dubiously-male players making assertions about masculinity that are often wildly off-base, and sometimes harmful or abusive.
When I play gay male characters on a MU, no matter how openly gay they are, they're still hit on by females with varying degrees of aggressiveness, in what feels like a double-standard in that if a guy was actively pursuing a character that identified herself as a lesbian, he'd be considered skeevy. I've only heard the jokes about not having met the right woman yet IC, so no abuse OOC that I can recall.
When I play straight male characters, life is great. Drowning in attention, can be as much of an asshole as I want free of most repercussions, and any IC or OOC blowback can be attributed to the other party being a hater. My OOC harem, unrecruited, will back my every utterance. Being 'male' and a decent writer will honestly get you wherever you want to go in this hobby because the dick-drought is real and it isn't going anywhere, any time soon.
There is a pejorative term 'mesbians' that relates to male players playing their fetishized female lesbian characters that are usually some sort of 'exotic' mixed race of white + whatever, average height, average build (but with big tiddies) shuns makeup because she's a natural beauty, wears thigh-high stockings with every single outfit, reads comics, disdains monogamy, and is an expert combatant. (This is an oversimplification for the sake of KISS, and I mean no overt offense to anyone male/female/otherwise that plays these types of characters) When I play lesbians, I feel fucking weird because the lesbian community in many games is often made up of female characters that don't feel relatable to me personally, so I wind up with fraudulent lesbian characters that aren't attracted to most women in their vicinity.
My straight female characters are almost universally spaghetti-sexual - they'd only be straight until they meet a hot female and things get steamy. That rarely happens, sadface. So if and when they wind up dating a guy, this introduces a whole new level of awkward. Will my natural tendency toward being the aggressor scare them off? (Not usually, but it's still a fear) Will they bring up the idea of threesomes way too soon because they're assuming it's what I'd want? (Far too often, but I feel like this is less to do with me, and more to do with people living out their best fantasy life) Step the awkward up a notch if the player knows I'm gay. Will they be gunshy about hitting on my character, thinking she's not interested? Will I be FRIENDZONED? These last two seem most common for me, mostly due to my habit of only really RPing with people I know.
Needless to say, my female characters almost never get laid. There is much weird going on in my head & I feel like most people are female-ing better than me.
