Kiel Chenier originally put this on his blog. If this was Tumblr I'd reblog it, but it's not so I'm just turning my blog over to Kiel for today. Considering this is by no means the first time Anna has been abusive to people in the RPG community or dismissive of LGBT gamers, a call to accountability is long overdue. Kiel has reported that people (other than Anna so far) have been reaching out through Tumblr to donate, so that's good:
First, some context for those who are new to this blog, and this conversation specifically: Anna Kreider (Wundergeek) writes gomakemeasandwich.wordpress.com.
I’ve been pretty shaken up since June 12th.
I’m currently visiting San Francisco, staying with my partner and enjoying one of the most out and proud cities in America as a Canadian. I’ve been out as openly bisexual for almost a year now, a feat that took me most of my adult life to finally be willing to do.
I’ve known I wasn’t straight since I was a teenager, but even as a staunch ally in my school’s GSA, and as someone who marched with out friends in Toronto’s pride parade, I still couldn’t bring myself to publicly reveal this part of me.
Since I’ve come out I’ve fallen out of contact with family members, gotten a bunch of internet hate for it, and received a lot more pushback from outside the DIY D&D community than I was expecting. But, I’d finally come out, and have been feeling more at peace with myself than I have in almost a decade.
I planned my trip to SF to coincide with SF Pride, hoping that I might be able to attend the parade. I’d been making a list of all the LGBT-friendly bars and clubs in the Bay Area, hoping we might be able to check them out.
Now I’m not sure I want to. I’m a little more wary, and a little more scared.
Because of the vicious murders committed at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando where at least 49 people were killed in one of the worst hate-crimes in recent US history, I feel a little less safe, even in what should be considered a safe space.
That’s where my head’s been at. I’ve been shaken up by this shooting, and reminded that as much progress as the LGBT community makes in America in securing their rights as citizens, and building safe and inclusive spaces for the community, there are still other Americans who will callously take those things away by murdering us.
So when you (Wundergeek) made a post to your blog about your stance on gaming culture and propped up the murder of 49 people (most of them LGBT-identifying) to justify that stance, and posted it LESS THAN TWO DAYS AFTER THE SHOOTING TOOK PLACE, I was bothered by it.
So I left a comment. Nothing mean, nothing angry, nothing hateful:
And here’s what you replied with:
Wow.
First off, I’m going to call your article what it is: opportunistic. While many of us were in grief, you took the tragedy and death of others and decided that now would be a good time to remind people that you think “toxic masculinity in games culture is related for this!”
“It’s not a game when the games we play reinforce the stereotypes that caused the Orlando shooter to think it was okay to end the lives of people who don’t meet his narrow definitions of acceptable performance of gender and sexuality.
It’s not a game when the games we play reinforce the culture that teaches men that their masculinity has to fit the narrowest confines possible, that they have to mutilate themselves emotionally in order to be acceptably masculine, that teaches them that empathy is a weakness not a strength.”
Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with that. Or, rather, I agree that toxic masculinity is a problem in many of our lives, for both women and men. I agree that it (possibly) influenced the shooter and his perception of the world, such that he would go to the lengths of killing a nightclub full of LGBT people.
This bothers me because the way your article and your follow up comment is worded makes it sound like you are drawing from your own experiences as a victim (a straight cis victim) to this, and not the experiences of LGBT victims of this same kind of hate and violence.
And I’m sorry, but being “queer-adjacent” does not mean that you speak for us. Certainly not a few days after this horrifying event. I get that you care, and I understand and value you standing out as an LGBT ally to the community, but this article is gauche, and the lengths which you go to to claim victimhood in light of this tragedy are equally gauche.
“But until you experience anywhere near the levels of homophobia, racism, ableism, and misogyny that get thrown at me on a REGULAR basis, that have resulted in my developing anxiety and a fear a large gatherings of gamers, don’t you DARE presume to get self-righteous and accuse me of “trivializing” experiences of hatred.”
I don’t doubt that you’ve experienced these things. And I’m sorry, that’s awful, and no one should have to go through that. But right here you, as a self-identified straight/cis person, are trying to claim that you’ve experienced more homophobia than actual members of the LGBT community.
Even if true, claiming to be more affected by homophobia than me, a besexual person, makes you sound awful, and is a shitty thing to bring up as a self-expressed ally.
“And as someone who feels queer-adjacent without actually owning the identity of being queer (at least at present – since I very much present as cishet and 100% benefit from that privilege), I’m conscious of not wanting to take up space that should be claimed by queer voices speaking out on their own behalf”
So you’re conscious of not wanting to take up space for queer and LGBT voices…but you did it anyway? No guest blog, no reaching out to the LGBT community online (You could have reached out to Tabletop Gaymer, a community I’m a part of, and you would have gotten a bunch of responses), no resharing or boosting of LGBT voices…just your own.
That’s not cool.
And I’m not the only person to point that out to you. There are comments in that article (Those that you haven’t deleted) from LGBT-identifying people who take umbrage with it, or disagree, or are trying to raise their concerns. And in response to each one you’ve flat out disagreed or dismissed them.
[See the article for the full comment above. Too big/long to screencap fully]
Again, putting your own abuse and victimhood as a straight/cis person ahead of these LGBT voices.
I’m not saying you haven’t suffered or that your abuse is invalid or shouldn’t be considered…but in light of the shooting in Orlando, a hate crime directed specifically at LGBT people, you going out of your way to say that you’re a victim of homophobia too is insulting. It feels like it’s a grab for attention.
True, but not everything that impacts culture should be treated with the same severity. “Everything is political” does not mean that “Everything is the same amount of political”. Again, I agree that toxic masculinity and the dismissal/erasure/attack of LGBT people in gaming is bad and wrong and should be recognized and called out…BUT NOT IN THIS INSTANCE. NOT A MERE TWO DAYS AFTER A MASS SHOOTING OF LGBT PEOPLE! To do so would be ghoulish: a callous bit of attention grabbing that justifies itself by being topical.
Here’s the really important bit: The call to action. If you, Anna Kreider, ignore everything up to this point, fine. I seriously doubt I can change your mind on this point, but I wanted to try. PLEASE read what’s below.
Does this include the post in question where you prop of the LGBT victims of a hate crime to talk about homophobia/sexism in “games”?
If so, that really bothers me. At best, I feel like you are encouraging the trend of straight/cis allies speaking on LGBT people’s behalf when we have our own voices and opinions. At worst, you are indirectly profiting off of the deaths and suffering of members of the LGBT community. If you did not earn money from this article and posted it for free, then good on you. Still, I’m asking if you would be willing to do the following:
Not long after the news of the shooting broke, people from all over the state of Florida have put together a variety of aid and relief funds for victims and family members of victims of the shooting.
So here is my ultimatum to you: If you earned over $200 USD for that article, please donate that amount to one or both of the linked funds below. If, for whatever reason, you cannot do that, at least match my own personal donation of $50.
Please, show me and your followers (and patrons) that you are more than just a reactionary person who claims to be an ally but puts her own victimhood ahead of actual LGBT victims, all while profiting by using their suffering/deaths to reiterate her opinions.
It is the City of Suffering, the City of Pain. No-one likes it, and it's universally (though never publicly) acknowledged to be a bad idea. Or a collection of them.
The streets are dark, the night an unheard-of yellow. A pinkly uncomforting light glows in the high windows. The wild festivals of other nations are unknown here--there are laws, but far more, there is decorum. Joy, or rather, exercises that point to joy, takes one form: display of expensive accessories for pets and children. Occasionally business connections or academic achievements are flaunted so long as they imply a responsibility to some institution or generation the citizen will not live to access but this behavior is more indulged than celebrated..
It is above all serious, but to no serious end: its jokes shoot for zany, flights of impotent, unrevolutionary fancy--like a man attempting to delight his daughter by pointing to a bicycle with preposterously large wheels and a bright yellow frame he would never himself dare to ride--or else they attempt to recruit laughter into a sort of stentorian combat on the side of a conventional wisdom embodying the nuclear hive of unapproached incompatibilities that power the city's dissatisfactions and enrages other citys' Distaffist Factions. They are traded in market tents of burgundy and dark gold.
Although the dissatisfactions are by no means unreasonable, the ultimate and secret source of the City of Suffering's greatest suffering is itself the agonizing closeness of its apathetically intertwined and competing anhedonias. The density of lonely but domiciled souls has inexorably resulted in a city, but they have no respect for what cities are for. They have no pleasures in common and are unified only by a devotion to pain, the performance of pain, the advertisement of pain, the creation of pain, all unacknowledged. An accosted citizen (and they hate to be accosted, they trust no-one clever enough to notice a stranger) would describe themselves as very happy and working for a better world: an aspirational one, obviously (but never admittedly) beyond the experiential reach of any mortal, given the rate of progress one has to admit is typical for sentient species. The only judgment Suffering citizens make is: How much of the distance between your reality and the ideal can you incarnate in the form of pain? How much of the misery of the world can you re-enact? Symbolism and art are permitted but not valued, as they generally turn pain into something that might be mistaken for something other than pain.
The representatives on the ruling Council of Elephantines seeks nothing--its function is to issue decrees implicating or at least juxtaposing anything interesting occurring elsewhere in- or with- (respectively) the worst atrocities they can describe. The Council is a living commentary on the Councils of all other cities. The very concept of interestingness is suspect--it implies axes of improvement other than from irresponsible to responsible, and canvases smaller than The Planet.
The City's shame is its lack of endgame: even if at some conceivable point all suffering might end, (practical discussions toward that end are considered vulgar and divisive luxuries of the underburdened) its citizens would be no less dreary--for in truth their citizenship is a lifestyle choice, an admission of a belief that lives worth living are more exhausting than living in constant exhibitionistic exhaustion, and risk is a vice of the overambitious. They have chosen a humble, snailing path across a plain presumed to be wholly flat, toward an undescribed and receding horizon, and despise inventions.
They hate adventurers, of course, and mock them from walled pavillions, and devise excuses to refuse water to their horses. "Poor horse" they say, while masturbating into soggy cheeses that they then name and raise as their own.
If party members should come to trial they will be placed before a tribunal who will hold forth on the difficulties faced by its own members. Then the trial will end and the party will be executed for having had fun. They will be fed to Misericordiam, the Jackal Queen.
The wind across the city hisses like a serpent god slowly scheming off-screen, yet the daytime clouds coming in white waves present a guileless sky. The city is just a natural consequence of the gravity the dutiful but uncreative exert on one another, and like a lesser planet on the rim of a solar system it can only hurt you if you come close.
There is no treasure here, and no magic to speak of.
Anna is wrong. I do not know anyone who knows her well enough to say whether she knows when she responds to this (source: here) (April 2012) with this that she is distorting information.
That is: I don't know if she is consciously lying or just unable to tell lie from fact.
Like in today's blog, she claims on the one hand she never attacked us and then immediately links to a page where she falsely accuses me of shit. "I have from time-to-time written about Zak in an anonymized fashion(i.e. "I have attacked Zak and his game group"), such as my original Gaming as Women post. But in each instance I attempted to file all of the serial numbers off of the incidents, and have always said when doing so that people SHOULD NOT name the person being discussed if they are aware of the circumstances being discussed." Like not using the words "Zak S" somehow makes it not an attack anymore? Like the people who harassed me and the women in my group didn't consistently link to her "Rebellious Artist" post as "evidence" we did something wrong? Anna supported their harassment. Straight up. Every second of her life she didn't erase that post and the false claims in it, she was supporting it more.
Another example:
She goes out of her way to point out that I used her real name. Of course I did--the person I was talking to introduced her into the conversation (out of nowhere) and only used her real name. Her real name was the only name in the conversation. He said he wanted to put a product he disliked to "The Anna Kreider test", I responded (basically, full text linked above) that was kind of like the Phyllis Schlafly test.
Check the link if you think I am lying.
She also denies spreading or supporting the Something Awful libel article in a post where she links to the libel article and two retweets that support the claims in it.
You can't really get more reality-blind than that.
the latest vileness
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So notorious reprobate Venger Satanis has a new kickstarter for the latest
installment in his Cha'alt setting.
*Pulp-Drenched Cities of Cha’alt* continues...
Splendid Isolation
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(My original Judges Guild Judge's Shield (1977), DM view.)
Almost always I have used a dungeon master shield.
- In 1978 I picked up the original firs...
James Raggi introduces the Nebulith
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James describes it as "Zak's best work". Also as something that you, the
audience, should buy as soon as possible.
And here's why.
RIP OFF YOUR SKIN AND KILL YOUR GOD.
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Out of game. Kind of.
I don't care about Fun. I'm not competing in the Funlympics because it's a
participation trophy and if your table isn't having Fun
...
I'm Zak, I live in Los Angeles. Most of the people I know here are women I know from being a porn "actor"--so they're porn stars and strippers. So that's who I play Dungeons & Dragons with.
