Let’s get something straight … and I did not mean for that to be a pun. The worst thing you can probably call me is a homophobe. I mean its THE worst thing you can call me. Call me a motherfucker if you wish. I did in fact have sex with a woman who had kids before. Call me a bastard if you wish. I know my dad but I think it would be cool and anime if he wasn’t my real dad … and would explain a whole lot too. Call me a dick (I do have one), an asshole (I do have one), a douchebag (I do have one?), but just don’t, don’t call me a homophobe!

Why? Well, bad memories. Without getting too sappy, I have nearly lost friends due to homophobic violence. I have fought for homosexual rights, getting beaten up for my points of view, and the queer natures of myself and my friends. Some of my best friends are gay, and in fact my co-panelists are gay as well. I cannot truthfully say “I am a homosexual” because I am not, and though I am queer in other ways, I cannot assume to know what it is like to actually be gay and to deal with all that discrimination. However, I have dedicated my life to fighting for equality, even if I tell a few dick jokes along the way.

Why am I saying this? Well, ever since we started Disorganization XIII, there have been people who don’t agree with what we do. We flat out decided that we wouldn’t do panels like other panelists do. We wouldn’t do lectures that drone on and one. We would make our panels highly interactive. We would punctuate every important point with a joke if we could. First and foremost we wanted to entertain, because honestly, that is what most people go to an anime or videogame convention for, to be entertained. If we could impart some wisdom on our fans along the way, then that is just bonus for us.

Aside from that, we also swore to never censor ourselves. This, combined with our admitted tendency to do panels that are edgy, has led us to frequently reference queer culture in our panels. We talk about the motivations behind slash pairings in Fanfiction: From Mary Sue to Shakespeare. We talk about the tendency to make “not quite gay” characters in our RPG panel, and how it is rare for anyone to write a wholly openly gay character. We talked about the duality of Sora’s relationship with Riku and Sora’s relationship with Kairi in our Kingdom Hearts panel, as well as Axel’s relationship with Roxas and how this was complicated with Xion, and how either of these can be considered “queer” depending on how far you wish to stretch it. … and of course we make gay jokes in Spoiler.

However, this has all naturally caused a bit of a problem… and believe it or not it’s not the gay jokes that are causing the problem. We are prepared for that … honestly we are! We are TRYING to insult you in Spoiler: The Panel and somehow that is the ONLY panel people haven’t complained about!

For two years now, two separate people have called our panels homophobic. The first was a Kingdom Hearts panel, and the second was our RPG discussion panel. Both of these individuals posted and re-posted their opinions about our homophobic behavior on the internet, quoting us as saying things that were, quite frankly not true and even more frankly not even said in the first place.

It seems as if these individuals didn’t actually listen to our panels to begin with. They certainly didn’t listen to Rob’s brave tendency to admit his own homosexuality in front of a crowd. They certainly didn’t listen to any of our own experiences in helping the gay community. They certainly also didn’t listen to our disclaimer that said if you were overly sensitive about discussing topics such as, oh I don’t know, gay stuff, to be fucking blunt, that you shouldn’t be in the panel in the first place.

Quite frankly, it seems as if both of these individuals stretched our words to serve their purposes, simply because they didn’t like us! One individual took our analysis of Kanji Tatsumi from Persona 4 and said we called him nothing but a “flaming homosexual.” I went over our panel from that NYAF! We said nothing of the sort! We talked about how brave it was to write a character that has to deal with queer issues, and how a large part of his character revolves around coming to terms with his own feelings. We were even accused of calling characters “faggots” and “homos” and get this, upon review, not once, NOT ONCE, did we ever use the words “faggot” or “homo” in the panel. In fact, we never used ANY slang word for homosexual in ANY derogatory fashion. Later, he criticized us for saying Final Fantasy 12 was a bad game and frankly, going back over the panel, we didn’t even say that. Kirk and Jay both said that they thought it was a great game! In fact, while we posited that there were several flaws with the game, all of us played it to completion, and many of us enjoyed doing so.

The other individual bashed us about being anti-gay in our KH panel, and while we do admit we had a lot of gay jokes in that panel, we also addressed the upcoming sequels, talked about Nomura interviews, and much much more. We have to respect this one particular critic, because quite frankly he ALSO does panels and anyone who has the balls to step up and do panels is OK in our book, but his blog almost appeared as if he was begging for us to get in a fight with him. When we did three panels in a row at last years NYAF, he was astounded we didn’t try to start something with him up on stage. Honestly, we didn’t even know who he was! He made a statement about people being disgusted that we were going to Otakon, but we filled house at Otakon! It later turned out that these “people” involved only his close friend that he went to Otakon with. So he too was exaggerating things to serve his own purposes, and we weren’t even sure we knew what those purposes are!

A couple theories have been kicked around. Some of us think that this is all sensationalism. That perhaps hating on popular panelists will get more publicity than liking them. One of our critics did a panel on best and worst games of all time, and while he named Tetris as the best game of all time (and many of us are with you on that one), he named the worst game of all time as Final Fantasy 7, which… is just ludicrously insane, and quite biased against RPGs. Fuck, we even think Final Fantasy 7 is over-hyped, but … the worst game ever? Has this guy ever played ET for the Atari 2600? Has he ever played Superman 64? Has he ever played Desert Truck!?!? We couldn’t fathom him saying that for any reason other than to get a rise out of the audience, and perhaps he was hating on us for the same reason.

Now, just like anyone else in the convention scene, we are prepared for our lumps. Not everyone has to like us, and quite frankly we know a LOT of people will dislike us. However, there is a big difference between saying we suck and saying that we are a bunch of raving homophobes. In fact, it was even claimed that we would be in support of the Matthew Shepard beatings. This is NOT cool.

You see, even though the internet loves to shield us all with anonymity, there are very real repercussions to publishing your words. We at Disorganization XIII have never been ashamed of what we do and so we do not hide our real names at conventions. However, once we were accused of being homophobes with our real names attached to the article, several of our members started run in to trouble at their jobs, being questioned by their bosses and superiors about the allegations. Now, this was cleared up by simply showing the actual footage from the events and question, and through support from the staff and executive boards of the conventions we perform at, but it’s still fucking frightening. If we weren’t as responsible as we are with our record keeping and disclaimers, a random blog post like that could have cost innocent hard-working people their job, and that is just not right.

What could we have possibly done about this? We weren’t even going to mention this on our site until we started having to deal with real world consequences once more. We could have started a flame war, but that never accomplishes anything. We could have openly called out our attackers, but that would have just given them more attention. Heck, after we sought out some legal counsel, it even turned out that we had a pretty good case for suing for libel, but getting the law involved would be massively dick of us, and a long trial is not only expensive, it is potentially life ruining for either party involved. If we won, the best we could do is ruin some poor schmuck’s life who probably thought he was posting something totally innocent to an internet blog, much as we thought our panels were totally innocent as well. That wouldn’t make us better, in fact it would make us bigger dicks than we could possibly imagine.

The fact of the matter is, we can’t keep people from making defamatory or malicious comments about us, and since we wear the badges of “professional geek” proudly on our chest, we won’t stop using our real names too. We have repeatedly offered to have a public debate about the topic with our critics at a convention but both have turned us down. I don’t blame them, having the debate probably would prove nothing other than who is better at working a crowd, and since we already have the full support of several anime conventions and plenty of fans, a debate is pretty much a losing proposition.

So our only recourse is to just not be intimidated. Rob said it best after the first allegation when he said this was incredibly insulting to him. As a gay man, he found the fact that the anime community allowed him to talk about homosexual topics to be an inspiration. He, like myself, felt that we were being labeled homophobes simply because we had a panel that had the word “gay” in it. He was not going to be silenced about his own sexuality because other people felt uncomfortable about it. That is more homophobic than anything we could ever say.

If you search for Disorganization XIII on the internet, you can still find these articles, and whenever we Google ourselves … yes we are that vain … it is always depressing to see the amount of websites these articles have wormed their way on to. They will always be a stain on our convention record and that stain won’t come out. Lest their authors have a change of heart, we will always have to deal with the consequences including whatever drama may happen at work, increased difficulty in finding new jobs if our prospective employer sees those articles, and general animosity toward us by people who do not understand us and who have never even seen our panels in the first place.

So in response, we will handle this in the Disorganization XIII way. So, Rob himself has decided to create a new panel for our lineup this year, entitled “This Panel Is Gay”. The panel will be a serious discussion about the queer community in anime, manga, videogames, and geek culture. If you want to talk gay, let’s talk gay. I really want to hear you guys call a whole panel of gay and queer individuals homophobic for a third time. I really do.

I will unfortunately not be joining this panel, because quite frankly, I admit, I am scared. I have been called a homophobe and have had to deal with the consequences one too many times for my liking. I have an immense amount of respect for Rob, for being strong where I cannot be.

So, if you really want to know what it’s like being queer in the geek community, then check out our panel. I assure you it will be more than just another bunch of dick jokes.

… and remember. Words always have consequences, so think before you go accusing people of being bigots. Honestly, calling someone a fucking asshole is way more cathartic and has less real world repercussions anyway.

Don’t be a fucking asshole.

Until next time. Stay way past cool loyal fans. We will see you on the con circuit.

Angelo M. D’Argenio
Proud President of Disorganization XIII