I was having this discussion on the retrogaming forums concerning gay characters in videogames and thought someone here may be able to add some insight. None of us could think of any significant game title (or even ANY game title) with a major gay character. Someone mentioned a lesbian character in one game, but as I mentioned on the forum, these tactics are usually less about including other sexualities than to promote the status quo.
I have recently written an article on this topic located here.
I found one article that mentions the issue here but not much else. Does anyone know of any material concerning this topic or any games where gays are prominent?
My comment doesn't count as a VIDEOgame...
Okay, this comment has sat here unattended for long enough that I feel I ought to contribute what little I can.
In the 1995 interactive fiction (text game) "Jigsaw," Graham Nelson uses the particular features of a text-adventure game to completely avoid specifying the gender of the protagonist and the romantic interest, so that it's entirely possible for the central romance to be interpreted as whatever kind of gender relationship you wish. Being a heterosexual male, I found it quite easy to imagine the character "Black" as female and the protagonist ("White") as male, but the medium of a text adventure game does require the player to use a lot of imagination to fill in the gaps. A 1999 interacive fiction work, "Exhibition" by Anatoly Domokov, features four characters remembering an artist who is presented as a latent homosexual. You can find reviews and downloads for both of these games in the IF archive... use Baf's Guide to the IF Archive:
http://wurb.com/if/
I do recall that the 1990s Sierra point-and-click adventure game "The Dagger of Amon Ra" featured a scene set in a bathroom where the female PC was supposed to change clothes... the PC steps behind a screen, out of the player's view, but a female NPC makes a "vavavoom" kind of comment. The scene was simply designed to emphasize the PC's vulnerability as a hick girl newly arrived in New York, but nothing came of it.
IF is a much more experiment-friendly genre than mainstream video games (because a single amateur can, with talent and maybe a few months, make a pretty decent text game, whereas it takes whole teams of professionals working for years to produce a full-blown graphics game).
There's a subgenre of "erotic interactive fiction," some of which appears to have gay themes, but I haven't bothered to investigate... it's not a topic that particularly interests me. But you might use Google Groups to check the archives of rec.arts.int-fiction -- I seem to remember posts from somebody who is fairly serious about cataloging the adult IF titles. But if you're seriously interested in homosexual themes, I doubt you'll find much of substance in the "adult" games.
Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog