Xbox Live moderators really put their foot in it when they banned 26 year old Josh Moore on the basis that he had entered the town of Fort Gay as his location. Assuming he was being deliberately provocative, and that there was no such place, a Microsoft customer representative told Moore that the town’s name was offensive.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, Fort Gay is a real place, and Microsoft ended up apologising to Moore, as well as the entire town of Fort Gay, West Virginia.<\/p>\n
Context is important in this situation, and it is well known that the term “gay”, especially amongst online gamers, has come to mean far more than just “homosexual”. It is a derogatory term, which is used to insult other gamers, and Microsoft is trying to get a handle on the problem. Microsoft even tried to hammer out the problem by disallowing any terms pertaining to sexuality to be used in user profiles. Of coruse, this lead to further problems, and Microsoft amended the policy to allow gamers to use the terms gay, straight, bi, lesbian and transgender to describe themselves in their profiles.<\/p>\n