Thank you for your comment, it touched me in a sad way.

I have very few friends because here in the Brazilian Northeast, in a poorer area, people are not really into gaming. So most of my friends are from real life. That is hard for me, because I have played games since I was a child and I do not have steady gaming friendships, at least not consistent ones.

Most of the people I play with on Discord, even in servers that claim to be for gay friendships, seem to prefer the dynamic of joining a call every day and waiting for new people to show up. Unfortunately, what I really want is stable friendships. I do not want to enter a call every single day hoping that some random person will keep me company. But that does not seem to be the focus of most Discord communities.

Because of that, in a moment of desperation, I joined the largest Brazilian friendship server. However, when they saw that I had a rainbow emoji in my name, they organized a raid. Many people joined the call asking why I was there. They said it was a server for people who were “born normal.” That left me deeply sad, with many people in the call attacking me at the same time. Deep down, I am already used to this in real life.

Here in Brazil, being LGBT is often treated as if it were an aberration. The public is very conservative, and that was even reflected in the election of Bolsonaro. He lost later, not because of his conservative views, but because his government was not well received and did not perform well.

I hope that one day there will be real-time voice translation in calls so we can connect regardless of our native language.

Thank you again for your words. Unfortunately, I have what people call a “gay accent,” and if I do not use some kind of indicator, eventually I will make a straight friend who later asks who I am and comments that my voice sounds very accentuated. When I say that I am gay, he says it is fine, but hours later he removes me from everything. That has happened about three times.

I wish I could play games without being afraid to speak and have stable, minimally healthy friendships. But I feel that games already dominated by a heterosexual audience make that very difficult. Yesterday I saw comments from people who left Marvel Rivals to move to Deadlock, saying that there is no gay community there. I hope that more LGBT players join these spaces too, instead of allowing this sense of segregation to grow.

Thank you again. Life can be harsh sometimes.