gAyCP

EQUALITY TO ALL

Woton: I’ll take this opportunity to add my name to the list of members of this community to come out as gay. It’s something I don’t think I even realized about myself during my time here, but I’m so proud and happy to see the support and acceptance that this community has built over the years. For those struggling with their identity or with coming out, know that it does get better – much better. There are a million worlds that you can create for yourself right here, on this planet, and you will find the one that’s right for you. Thank you, everyone.

Full post, from Albaro on March the 13th, is below. 

KLONDIKE, CPAC HQ – The following post is not satire or anything comedic. It is purely a look into a small section of the CP Army community and how it has developed throughout the years.

Before we really begin this post, I would like to start off by giving you guys a brief lesson in Sociology. So sit back, and get ready to learn a bit.

CP Armies are a counterculture of a subculture of the gaming community. A counterculture, according to it’s dictionary definition is “a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm”. CP Armies are a counterculture of Club Penguin. To break this down in a way that you’ll easily understand; basically we are a part of Club Penguin, that the majority of Club Penguin doesn’t want, such as mods or people who get annoyed when we take up space in rooms on servers. We are not an accepted part of the norm.

Now this is a little easier to understand, but Club Penguin is a subculture of the gaming community. A subculture is “a cultural group within a larger culture, often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture”. Now Club Penguin is a game that is accepted by the gaming community even though it is not exactly like every other game.

Now that you have all this in your mind, let’s get to the point of this post.

CP Armies are not the largest community in the world, but we have had our share of LGBT members in the community, some which turned out to be very influential members. Now, for the majority of history, LGBT people have been a counterculture, mainly due to religious reasons, and now that is changing as our world changes.

According to a study done by Gary J. Gates in 2011, the US has approximately 9 million people that identify that they are either gay, lesbian, or bisexual, which is about 3.5% of the population. Those numbers may be different now, four years later, and of course there are still countries in the world where being LGBT can result in your death or complete shunning from society and such studies can’t be openly conducted.

So now, we need to get to the actual point behind all of this. How do armies view LGBT members? Do they approve? Do they just not care? Are they against them?

Obviously this will result in different reactions from person to person. CP Armies are a small, yet insanely diverse community and there are people from all around the world participating in it with different religious and personal beliefs mixing together.

Just so that you can see, I pulled up the stats for CPAC views by country from 2014.

As you can see, the top five countries are the countries dominated by the Christian religion, and even though many of these people are now beginning to accept LGBT people, many are still far from it. Then we see countries like India and Pakistan. These countries in general are absolutely against LGBT. You can be disowned from your family, thrown in jail, and even killed in these countries if you identify yourself as LGBT.

Now that we have broken down the geographical aspects of CP Armies, let’s get more personal.

To begin I would like to take a look at the Legends page of CPAC. At least three of the members on that page are openly LGBT. Who you ask?

If you did not know this at this point, one of ACP’s Godfathers, Shaboomboom eventually opened up to the fact that he is bisexual. Along with him, another ACP Legend, Mchappy, has opened up to the CP Army community and announced he was gay. The only legend outside of ACP to openly announce that he is gay, has been UMA Legend, Wgfv.

So, what does this mean? It is well known that Shaboomboom announced he was bisexual way after he got leader in ACP, but that could probably go back to the fact that he was still far too young to start distinguishing that back then. Mchappy and Wgfv were also leaders in their respective army before it was known that they were gay. Does this mean anything?

Maybe they did hide it for sometime, but the three of them are all Americans, and as America moved forward in acceptance of gays and their rights, they began opening up.

Now let’s be realistic, does it matter if you are gay in CP Armies? Probably not, we all have the same goal in the end. To help whichever army or organization we stand loyal to at the time we are in it. I cannot remember if Shaboomboom and Mchappy got legend status after or before they came out of the closet, but Wgfv was only recently inducted as legend and it was well known at that point that he openly gay.

Is that a step forward for CP Armies? We inducted an openly gay person into the highest rank that we can give.

Now before I close up this post and leave you all to think about this matter, I would like to post a few pictures of some extra research I conducted as I made this post. I asked a few army chats this question: If an openly gay, lesbian or bisexual person came on this chat, would you treat them with the same respect as any regular recruit?

ACP resounded with four unanimous yeses, including one from the leader.

Ice Warriors resounded with three yeses, one from an owner and one from a leader.

Light Troops resounded with a no from their leader, and a yes from one of their 4ics.

UPDATE 4:40 PM EST: Dr. Matt, LT Leader comments:

Doritos resounded with three straightforward yeses and one of the owners openly telling us that he’s gay.

UPDATE 5:45 EST: Silverburg, the Leader of the newly reborn RPF released a comment.

So overall, we see lots of yeses and two nos out of all these.

Now, I would like to ask everyone who is reading this, what is your opinion on openly LGBT members in armies? Do you think some armies offer more restriction to them? Do you support coming out of the closet? Just comment whatever your opinion on this subject matter is an thank you for reading!

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